No. Proper positional audio is as important for an FPS on-line gamer as anti-aliasing. Scratch that, it's more important unless the goal is to die fast and pretty. 400 frames per second in UT doesn't inform that someone's behind you.
Uh... hear a monster, see nothing in front of you, where do you think it is? Stereo can reproduce side sounds fine, so it's pretty easy for most people to figure out where something is in a game just with stereo (if you don't see it, it's either on the side from which you hear it or it's behind you).
I'm sure positional audio is nice and everything, but as a stereo audio user I've never missed it. I say that as someone who's got the full Dolby Digital/DTS setup for my home theater and would never do with any less. But my PC is already so saddled with wires and so expensive to maintain and upgrade that more than two speakers would require a real compelling case for me to upgrade. And hearing monsters behind me in an fps is not a compelling case for spending hundreds of dollars and making a complete mess of my living room (where my main PC is).
You know, I firmly believe that eventually we will all be using our computers hooked up to our home theater systems on our 1920x1280-native 60" plasma (or whatever current tech) screens through the included DVI input. And that'll be great for gaming, for entertainment, and whatever else. But for now, to me and apparently a lot of other people, having two separate 5.1 or 7.1 speaker setups in your house seems a little excessive. Especially when gaming is not even the primary thing most people do with their PC's (and neither is watching DVD's).
I think Apple always goes the extra step when designing their products. I think that one of the most interesting parts of this new iMac is the fact that it has air holes in the top of it so that the hot air can rise out. Now why hasn't anyone else thought of that?
Umm, lots of people have. Probably 50% of all PC towers on the market have top-mounted fans and/or air holes.
What I don't get about the new iMac is this: Ok, so it's basically a screen and keyboard. And you can carry it around the house. And it's not expandable (like other iMacs). Now, how is this different and/or better than a laptop? So the computer itself is in the screen rather than the keyboard - that's not really a major difference in form factor. What advantages does the iMac have over a PowerBook, or an iBook? Is Apple going to delay the G5 iBook now because it'd cannibalize iMac sales?
I would think a laptop would have obvious advantages over the new iMac, while not giving up much of anything. A laptop is truly portable, a true all-in-one unit. The iMac isn't.
Who would buy an iMac over a comparable laptop, and why?
128kbps AAC is at least as good as 192 kbps mp3's. That's not just what I think.
Apparently, it is. You can see that LAME MP3 actually does better than iTunes AAC on about half the tests - and at approximately the same bit rate. The overall results are extremely close.
I actually took part in that listening test. This was a double-blind test (like all of Roberto's listening tests) so I had no idea what codec I was listening to, and I could barely tell any difference between any of them. It was only a little better than random chance that I could pick out any compressed format vs. the original. I almost gave up. And I consider myself a pretty picky listener.
The fact that so many of these results are up near 5 - including for MP3 - shows that all codecs sound very good at ~128k. You could argue that MP3 had a 6k advantage (the MP3 files were VBR and averaged out to 134kbps), but that's not going to make much difference. And anyway, your statement about 128kbps AAC vs. 192kbps MP3 is clearly moot. 128k AAC and ~128k MP3 both sound very good, and so close are their overall results that any difference is probably not statistically significant. I doubt you'd hear much improvement in a 192kbps VBR MP3, but you'd probably hear some, so I doubt your statement is true even in an absolute sense.
Apple likes to perpetuate this myth that the codec they use sounds better than MP3. The fact is you'd almost never be able to tell the difference even at the same bit rate. The difference between AAC and WMA is a little greater, but I still doubt you'd be able to notice it with most types of music. If you'd taken this test too you'd probably agree.
Not that it matters to me; I rip all of my own music to 256 or 320kbps VBR MP3's using LAME. That way I'm ensured of compatibility with any music player and I have great sound.
Although - and you wouldn't know this, since you get your entire GTA info from crappy, one-paragraph/. articles - the GTA games have all used heavily fictionalized cities, so I'm not sure how you would specifically identify a European location, aside from using local accents and a tourist area of 1000-year-old buildings.
Well, you're technically right about them being fictionalized cities, but come on. Vice City is Miami, Liberty City is New York, San Andreas is a cross between San Francisco and Los Angeles. That's not really a big secret. The only reason real city names were/are not used is that Rockstar/Rockstar North feel it limits what you can do - people expect you to be faithful as much as possible to the real city. So you spend all this time trying to mimic reality even when reality doesn't really lend itself to quality gameplay - it just wastes a lot of time. Having fictional cities lets you have a little more fun with the design of the cities, and lets you customize them for the best gameplay. But it's obvious what cities the GTA cities are based on, and it's intended to be.
Not to mention, there wasGTA London, you know. This was the only GTA featuring a real city. It didn't do too well in the marketplace so it was never tried again; the thinking afterwards was people don't seem to much care about real cities in their games.
One side note - it may seem a bit of a contradiction what Rockstar San Diego does with the Midnight Club series, which does feature real cities and they're not entirely faithful to reality. But a) Rockstar really had nothing to do with the original Midnight Club (whereas many people who worked on the original GTA still work at Rockstar and Rockstar North), and b) the cities do not have to feature as much variety in Midnight Club as they do in a GTA game, since all you need to do in MC is race. There need to be a whole bunch of different types of areas and things to do in a GTA game, all spaced fairly close together (so you're not wasting too much time just driving around, and to fit in the system's memory and storage constraints). So it's really a different type of game.
This is actually readily apparent if you pay attention. GTA as it is perhaps could not even have been made by only Americans; it is the result of how Europeans experienced American crime through US film, TV and music.
Well, you're oversimplifying, as many people out there do when it comes to Rockstar and Rockstar North. I was part of the "New York production team" (that's how we're credited) on various Rockstar games and since I'm not currently working on SA (no longer with the company, by choice), I have enough time on my hands that I feel like saying something about this, and finally have the freedom to do it.
I don't want to name names (check the game credits if you like) but the big names working on the GTA series are about evenly split between born and bred New Yorkers and born and bred British (not necessarily Scottish - a lot of English people work on the GTA series as well, both in New York and in the UK). The scripts are not written through the eyes of someone experiencing the US through crime movies - they're written through the eyes of someone who's lived in New York in some cases for many years, in other cases for their entire lives.
The programming is done in Scotland. The production (which includes screenwriting, character design, art direction, sound recording, soundtracks, package design, etc.) is split between NYC and Scotland depending on the job but is mostly done in NYC. The series is very much collaborative between nationalities and I do not want to take anything away from what's done in Scotland at all. I'm just saying there's this misconception out there that this series is actually coming from a European perspective and that's not really true - it's a collaboration between the Scots, British-born long-time New Yorkers, and born-and-bred New Yorkers.
Another little piece of trivia for you: Rockstar and Rockstar North are the same company. It's not just an ownership thing; Rockstar and DMA were inextricably linked for a long time, but the purchase many years ago now (prior to GTA2, if I remember right) made the two companies one. It's not a case of "Rockstar North makes the game, Rockstar is just the publisher"... Rockstar and Rockstar North are the same company, and both offices work on different aspects of the game. Some things traditionally in the developer's court are done in New York, some things traditionally in the publisher's court are done in the UK. There's no clear split between them.
Similarly for the stereotypes, these don't mean as much to Europeans as they would to Americans.
I can tell you this is not the reason why the stereotypes are in there. The stereotypes are in there because they mean so much to Americans. To a large extent, Rockstar likes to thumb its nose at political correctness; the GTA games are satires, occasional parodies. A lot of people (including you, apparently) have missed this fact and take the stereotypes at face value. They're there with the intent that they should be questioned. They're there self-consciously.
Contrary to your statement, many Olympic events do require expensive locales. See, there are rules here, and rules are what make sports what they are - without them, a sport is just a couple of guys hitting a ball back and forth. You can't just swim in any swimming pool, you can't play soccer in a baseball stadium, you can't have a rowing competition in the middle of the ocean. These things all have to be regulation size and with regulated conditions, not to mention enough seats to ensure that people who want to can actually watch.
You couldn't build an Olympic-regulation swimming pool for less than $1 million. Even if you only held the Olympics in cities that had held them before (which sort of defeats the purpose of having them), the cost of refurbishing and modernizing old Olympic facilities alone would easily top $1 million. And that's just the first thing you'd have to do.
Hell, it cost more than $1 million just to put a track around the football field at my old high school. And that was in the 1980's!
Billions are being spent this time on security. And don't tell me it's not needed or that it's all paranoia, because you know, it's not like terrorism at the Olympics has never happened before, right? If you can't protect the athletes, then it's not even worth having an Olympics. It's just sports - it's not worth risking your life over. So this is a required expense if you ask me, and it's not really the reason for the high cost of the games anyway - Sydney 2000 cost $5.9 billion.
So your cost analysis is a little off. The Olympics could be done for less than the Athens games depending on the city, sure, but not much less in this day and age. The logistics, the facilities required, the security, hell the simple cost of salaried staff would be in the multiple millions of dollars at least. I don't see how you could do an Olympics in this day and age for less than several billion dollars.
Anyway, I don't have any problem at all with Olympic officials forcing athletes to hide corporate logos. How many sports have we seen where athletes have basically turned into walking advertisements? In some sports they seem to be actively hawking their sponsors during games (cough NBA basketball cough). And I have seen some seriously questionable "viral" marketing at these games... for example, just yesterday at the diving competition, the American divers were repeatedly shown listening to music during rest periods, with the NBC analysts commenting on their playlists. So today, I hit the NBC Olympics web site, and sure enough, there's a link asking "What music does Laura Wilkinson train to?" on the right side of the page, which goes to a page of huge Real Rhapsody ads. That kind of sneaky stuff really pisses me off.
The setup page on the network displays the mac addresses of the computers accessing the network and provides for a simple click to allow or disallow. I am sure this could be circumvented but I cannot see anyone going to that much trouble just for a free ride onto something that you can get for pennies.
Somebody mod this insightful. My situation is different than yours - I live in NYC, in a large apartment building - but I use the same sort of risk assessment methodology as you do. I do not use WPA (I don't have it on my router, but it's not as if a new router'd be that expensive), I use only 128 bit WEP (not all my cards support 256 - again, I could replace the one that doesn't if I thought I needed to), and I use MAC filtering. I also have my radio strength turned down to 12.5%, which is a real easy and quick kludge that most people don't do but that can really cut down on the number of people who even have physical access to your network. To me, I have as much protection as I need. I don't have my computers on 24/7, I am generally at them when they are on (and monitoring fairly closely), and given the plethora of completely unsecure networks in close proximity, I strongly doubt anybody would bother trying to break my network. I mean, there's a totally unsecured network within range of me, and dozens more on the same block.
In a rural situation, the security requirements for a home network would just be that much less. I don't think the "80% unsecured" stat is really that alarming because everybody's situation is different; if I was in a suburban house with 50 feet or so between my house and the next, probably just dialing down the radio strength would be enough.
This is not a real overall network security issue, if you ask me. Spammers and trojan writers aren't going around wardriving to find unsecured networks to deliver their payloads; they can much more easily hack into unsecured PC's over the internet to do that. Hackers aren't doing it either because the contents of most peoples' home networks are not really all that compelling. The worst anyone would realistically do is steal your bandwidth, and unless you're in a dense area like I am even that is probably a minimal concern.
I'm all for network security in general, but this seems like an issue born more out of paranoia than anything. Obviously, common sense should apply, and in cases like mine I think it's good to at least do some basic things to lock your network down, but no need to go nuts with it, and no need to do much at all in a less urban setting unless you know you've got some cheap neighbors who also happen to be computer geeks. (In other words, the typical Slashdot user.)
For a company that puts so much emphasis on portable devices, Apple certainly has a lot of problems with batteries.
And you didn't even link the most dramatic case, that of actual exploding batteries. And no, this isn't some Nokia-like third party battery situation, these were the real Apple-supplied batteries (though that article does go out of the way to point out they were "Sony-made").
Apple's got some real quality control issues, despite their reputation. They seem to have at least one or two recalls per year for various reasons ranging from defective batteries to defective power supplies to defective screens, as well as other problems that are common complaints but that they do nothing about (such as the iPod battery service life issue). The recall I noted above was actually a safety issue, and I would guess the overheating batteries in the G4 PB's might be a safety issue as well.
I'd still buy an Apple for other reasons, but quality control is not one of them, public perception notwithstanding. They're certainly no better than any other manufacturer and may actually be somewhat worse (IBM, for example, has had fewer recalls over the same period).
Realone is trying to break apple fans from apple loyality... and it just isn't going to work. Of course I am stereotyping but Apple's success is based in their loyal, vocal, energetic community.
It's hard to root for either side in this if you're not already an Apple zealot. Looking at it objectively, both Real and Apple offer proprietary formats, and Real is hiding behind a sort of pseudo-open source defense without actually acting in any way consistent with their message. They've also done plenty of questionable things in the past (adware, spyware, etc.).
On the other hand, one of the quotes in the C-Net article from an Apple fan says something like "Just because you don't like iTunes doesn't give you the right to reverse engineer the iPod". Well, yes it does. In fact, reverse engineering is the only thing Real has a right to do in this case, and it's why most legal experts think Apple has no real case against Real if this goes to court (search related articles on C-Net). If Real did reverse engineer the iPod, then more power to them. They're acting within copyright law.
I hate Real but I hate blind Apple evangelists just as much. I guess I'm just gonna go ahead and stick with mp3 like I always have; I've got no reason to worry about format wars or DRM with that strategy.
(Of course, I know MP3 is technically proprietary too, but it suffers from none of the problems Apple AAC or Real files do.)
Certainly makes one wonder what happened to three-color retinas...
Well, this brings us back to this:
The promised result of this multi-primary color (MPC) technology is a television picture that, with its truer, more vibrant color and brighter image, looks more like cinema than video.
If they want it to look "more like cinema", they'll stick with three colors, because all film processes use only red, green and blue. Early Hollywood films (and some of the best-looking color you'll ever see) used three separate strips of film that contained celluloid crystals that would only expose a single color (RGB); modern processes have one strip comprised of three layers that do the same thing.
Seems to me a case where the marketing department got themselves a little bit out front of the R&D department.
btw, the early three-strip process used by Hollywood was still in use a few years ago in China (they bought much of our old equipment); see films like Raise the Red Lantern or Red Sorghum for a couple modern examples of how amazing color film can look. (Those filmmakers have since moved to the United States and now use the single-strip process.)
Basically, it's another tax... instead of using the existing tax money to pay for these services, they're grabbing at a new revenue stream, and keeping the old tax revenue stream too.
Sure, it's more direct this way, but we're already paying for this.
At the risk of burning through huge amounts of karma (depending on who the current mods are), no, we are not.
People who say this cost should come out of our taxes need to quit bitching about how high taxes are and then whining about extra stuff like this when their taxes get cut. The fact is we are running a huge deficit in this country, we have a mind-boggling public debt and we're getting deeper and deeper into it every day. Stuff like this, if it's undertaken (VoIP wiretapping, I mean) needs to be paid for, and you can't just say "well, use the money I already paid for regular phone service" any more than you can say the military should fund itself with the lottery tickets you bought last week. The fact is this money all goes to different places and it doesn't even cover what it's supposed to be paying for anyway, let alone any new programs.
The alternative is you just don't do anything new and you cut things that already exist and aren't being paid for, which is a solution a lot of people support, but the fact is there's a limit to that. What exactly are you going to cut? Cutting law enforcement (as Bush has been doing) seems a bit stupid in this day and age. Cutting the military seems foolhardy right now, as over-extended as we already are. The other biggest government expenditures are social security and interest on the national debt (which, as mentioned, is growing quickly). There's very little actual discretionary spending in the budget, and most of that has been cut to the bone already.
So you can't really cut anymore, and stuff's gotta be paid for. Right now, we're not paying for it, and people still complain that we're paying too much?
If you want all your "tax" payments in one place, then fine - but don't then bitch about those payments being too high when we're already not even paying our bills.
Ya know, I try to be nice on these forums, but could you RTFA before asking questions? 'Cause this is answered there. 'Blast Processing' refered to 1) the fact that the CPU in the Genesis ran more than twice as fast as in the SNES (7.6MHz vs. 3.58MHz) and 2) that the Genesis could draw one screen while rendering another.
Well, all I can say is don't believe everything you read.
Your point #1 is accurate. Point #2 is dubious at best - I suppose you could probably figure out a way to argue this on semantics but it'd be a stretch. Every system has to "draw one screen while rendering another"; otherwise you'd get massive flicker and screen blanking, which is something we haven't seen since the days of the Atari 2600.
"Blast Processing" was just a buzzword. I've never heard the rendering angle to it; the main thing was just the CPU speed. Sega wanted to point out the difference in CPU speed and "blast processing" was a new "feature" they dreamed up to sound like the Genesis was not only faster, but also had extra stuff that the SNES didn't. Of course, this really wasn't true - Genesis was faster, but the SNES was able to display more colors, had higher resolution, and could display more sprites on-screen.
Anybody who knew anything at the time just laughed whenever these "blast processing" commercials came on, but you have to admit they worked... for a while, anyway.
And this also happens to be my (and my wife's) favorite movie of all time.
Most of the movies people are listing here are major Hollywood movies that a lot of other people really like (Shrek, Moulin Rouge, etc.). You're just taking a contrarian viewpoint; I doubt you've even seen some of the truly bad movies from the IMDB list. Do yourself a favor and rent some Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes if you don't want to sit through a bad movie "straight". It's worth it.
In the Windows world, none of these competitors MAKE anything. They cobble together parts. Dell is not designing anything but the case. Apple is designing the mainboard.
Apple doesn't build their own hardware any more than PC makers do. Apple is not building their own DVD-ROM or hard drives, they're buying them from companies like Toshiba and Maxtor/Seagate/whoever. They buy their PowerPC chips from Motorola and IBM. They buy their graphics cards from ATI and NVidia. I don't know whose memory they're using but it ain't Apple's own, I'll tell you that.
All Apple does is design their motherboards and cases, just like PC makers. In fact the architecture itself these days is basically the same with the exception of the CPU.
The PC world competes solely on mindshare.
So what you're saying is there's no difference between PC's other than the case? That a Dell Dimension is the same as my scratch-built machine is the same as a Falcon Northwest is the same as a Sony Vaio? I don't think anybody could seriously argue that. It's like saying all cars are exactly the same just because they all burn the same kind of gas. Only their exterior shells are different.
PC makers do compete in a lot of different areas, and many PC makers have totally different target markets. So you'll get PC's all up and down the pricing spectrum, at varying levels of true quality (build, materials, etc.) and with varying levels of features, performance, and yes, aesthetics. You can even significantly deviate from "standard" PC architecture, with RAID arrays, dual graphics cards, 64-bit AMD processors, etc. and you can still claim to own a "PC" (in the colloquial parlance of our times, that is - Macs are technically PC's too, of course).
With a Mac, you're stuck with the configurations Apple wants to give you - they'd be like a single PC maker in a sea of hundreds on the other side of the fence. Now, obviously this is working for them in some ways, as they're generally profitable of late, though mostly due to iPod. But I'm not sure that I buy this idea that they'd be less profitable if they'd continued licensing their OS. I understand the whole argument about diluting the brand name, yadda yadda yadda, so what? There's a tendency for people to believe that because of the way things turned out in the world, that that's the only way they could have turned out, and I don't believe it.
If Apple's OS and the Apple user experience is so superior to the Windows experience, why does Apple have 3% market share? There has to be a reason, and it's not all because MS is a monopoly. MS was not always a monopoly. When I owned my Apple II, Apple had more than 50% of the PC market. The supposedly superior Mac line eventually dropped them to the 3% they have today. The market was Apple's to lose and they lost it. At some point, you have to stop blaming the rest of the world and look inward for the reasons why.
Someone apparently doesn't know that 900mhz cordless phones exist, and all of them are wi-fi friendly. I myself have a Panasonic 900mhz digital spread spectrum phone and have no problems at all with my wi-fi when using it.
This is slashdot. \. is Liberal, it leans to the left.
Slashdot is anything but liberal, as you'd know if you ever read any of the gun control arguments that seem to break out in completely unrelated threads.
Slashdot users are generally libertarian. Which is a completely different thing from "liberal". Libertarians believe government has no place whatsoever in their lives, which is why you get stories like Google's mismanagement of their IPO listed under the "your rights online" tag. This is pretty much the exact opposite of what liberals believe. If anything, libertarians lean a lot more towards the conserative side, since both supposedly believe in smaller government (though in practice, most so-called "conservatives" only believe in smaller government in areas where it suits them - not, for example, in a smaller military or in cuts to social security).
Now, I am not a libertarian, I am a liberal (and btw, we liberals have nothing against big business, just big business that breaks the law, ie. Microsoft or Enron). Obviously, not all Slashdot users are the same. But the general gist of things here is usually that all government meddling in technology is bad, which explains the calls of "censorship" in this thread (even though government is not even involved) or the complaints about "rights" being infringed (as if watching TV is a "right", which implies that it's either something you're born with [as in an "inalienable" right] or it's something written into law, or both). As a liberal, I often feel extremely out of place here in actually not always arguing against government regulation of various things if it makes sense - I evaluate everything on a case by case basis. But what business does, as long as they're not breaking any laws, is business.
I personally think this whole Olympics thing is pretty damn stupid from a business standpoint, and not at all helpful to the Olympics as a whole (interest in the Olympics in the US has been dropping since the 1980's, partly because of the shoddy live TV coverage). But my "rights" are not being trampled on here; just the long-term viability of the Olympics themselves. Once these games are over, I expect to once again see a lot of bitching about the poor TV coverage, a lot of bitching by NBC about the low ratings and a lot of bitching by the Olympic committee about the lack of interest. If you ask me, none of them have anybody to blame but themselves.
I also forgot to say that the standard touch-typing posture can easily lead to carpal tunnel or repetitive stress disorder because of the angle of your hands on a standard keyboard. This is one reason so-called "ergonomic" keyboards exist. But the way I've taught myself to type, my hands are naturally angled even on a straight keyboard, so I can type for extremely long periods without any fatigue and I've been typing hours per day for 20 years now with no problems at all. Something I think is really important to think about given how much some of us have to type - you can always buy an ergonomic keyboard for yourself if you're a touch-typist but you may not have that luxury at work, or in internet cafes, or wherever else you use a PC. So I think in some ways it's actually better to learn alternate ways of typing; whatever's most comfortable for you.
I also type right at 80wpm and I do not touch-type. I never think much about it but just looking at my hands now, I'm using four fingers on my right hand (middle, index and thumb for the space bar, with pinky thrown in only for shift and enter) and one finger on my left (index).
Interesting that the original article post seems to almost brag about 60wpm touch-typing that he learned on an IBM Selectric. I think that's proof right there that touch-typing doesn't matter.
To me, it's like asking "is learning classical guitar necessary to be in a rock band?" Well, no, because technique isn't really what matters - results are what matters.
I agree with the concept that technique is usually what brings results and am not against the overall idea of learning fundamentals - in fact I think in most things fundamentals are extremely important. I just don't think touch-typing is a fundamental to typing quickly or accurately, and I consider myself proof of it (80wpm or 130wpm vs. 60wpm is no joke, and that's including penalties for errors, at least in the tests I've taken). Typing is one of those skills that's pretty easy to pick up and do well as you go along.
Exactly. I still prefer the original Soul Calibur on Dreamcast to any of the versions of Soul Calibur 2 on Xbox/PS2/GameCube. It just ran smoother and better than any of those other ports. This is due to the fact that the Dreamcast was essentially the same hardware as the Sega Naomi board that powered Soul Calibur arcade machines.
Neither Soul Calibur nor Soul Calibur 2 were Naomi games. Soul Calibur was a System 12 game, whereas Soul Calibur 2 ran on System 246. System 12 was similar hardware to the original PlayStation; System 246 is nearly identical to the PlayStation 2.
I also prefer the original Soul Calibur to SC2, but not because it "runs smoother" - they all run at 60fps, and the PS2 port of SC2 is the closest to its arcade namesake of any Soul Calibur or Soul Calibur 2 release (because it actually is the same hardware, the only difference being a lot of RAM in the arcade machine instead of a DVD drive). The art direction changed a bit from SC1 to SC2, for one (with none of the ridiculous Todd McFarlane characters in the original), but the main thing was the original Soul Calibur port on Dreamcast was so much more advanced vs. its original arcade machine than any of the home ports of SC2. People were blown away by the original Soul Calibur partly because nobody expected it; there was no indication that the Dreamcast version would be anything more than a straight port, but it was far more than that. Years later and technology has progressed, but Soul Calibur 2 on the latest home machines looks basically the same, technology-wise, as Dreamcast Soul Calibur. This just makes the Dreamcast release seem even that much more amazing.
Anyway, so I personally think there's still a lot of good gameplay left on the Dreamcast... and these homebrew emulators are actually degrading to the system. Why do you need to emulate the Saturn when you've still got stuff like Soul Calibur to play on the Dreamcast itself? When a system's main use is to emulate other systems, that's when you know it really has died and gone to heaven. I don't even see the value in this anyway; is it really easier to play N64 demos on the Dreamcast (very slowly) than to actually hook up a real N64 and play actual games on it? What's the purpose of playing Saturn games on the Dreamcast when the real Saturn is so easily attainable?
The usual answer to questions like these when asked on this site is "because you can". I think that's a bullshit answer; I personally see projects like these as a complete waste of time, and wonder what all those programming man-hours could have gone to instead. Something far more useful than this, I'm sure.
However, a receipt that was an encoding of the vote record encrypted with the voting machine's secret key and protected by the voter's PIN, and that by law could only be decrypted in a special booth where only the voter was allowed entrance, might not be so unreasonable. Who said that the receipts needed to be human-readable?
And who programs the machines that read these receipts? Diebold? The Republican Party? Some virus writer who's hacked the codes?
Hopefully you see the problem in your solution.
Anyway, one thing I'd like to point out is that there's nothing in this linked article that says anything (that I could find) about votes being lost in this case. That would really be a major story. It only says "information" was erased. Which is still bad, but just as I feel it's very important to get the voting system itself right, it's also very important to get any media coverage of the problems with these touch-screen systems right too. If claims are made about these machines that are not accurate and are obviously sensationalized, it will make it easier for the manufacturers of these machines to simply pass off concerns about them as luddite paranoia.
No way would I ship in a laptop to have it repaired. If the warranty does not include either onsite service or some local authorized repair place I can take it to, then the warranty is worthless in my opinion. If I need the machine for business, I am not going to ship it, most likely at my expense both ways, risk damage in transit, and then wait a month or so to get it back and be without one in the mean time. If it is a critical device, I will gladly pay more for decent warranty support. I'm not sure exactly how Apple's warranties work, but I've seen this disturbing trend in electronics warranties over the last few years.
I'm not sure what makes it "disturbing" to have various levels of warranty service available...
I'm currently dealing with getting my wife's Dell machine repaired (it developed a hinge stress crack - I can't believe this company isn't lower in the reliability ratings, her notebook is built out of the thinnest, most brittle plastic I've ever seen). Our service contract has at least 12 possible levels of support, depending on what you purchase at the time - we have the lowest level, which is actually fine for a home machine. Express shipping both ways, and AbEx delivered us an empty box today complete with packaging designed to fit the particular notebook. We're supposed to call them when we want them to pick it up, then they send it back the same way when it's fixed.
If we'd wanted, we could have bought the on-site service plan. It's not worth it for a home machine, though. And even for a business machine, this is probably not really something that could be fixed on-site - some problems have to be fixed at the factory. I mean the repair guy is probably not going to be walking around with replacement lids. In my experience, on-site service means the guy comes out, looks at what's wrong with your machine and if it's an easily replaceable part (like a drive or a memory chip) he will order the part and come back to fix it, but otherwise he'll take the machine in to the service center where he's got all his tools and whatever else he needs to completely disassemble the machine.
Back in the mid 90's I used to sell laptops (and desktops, and a lot of other electronic items) for a living, and I'd often have people ask if a laptop warranty was on-site. It never was, not in a consumer laptop anyway, and not sold at retail. So this is not a "disturbing trend" in warranties "over the last few years" - it's just the way it's always been. You either need to bring your laptop in to an authorized service center or you need to ship it. The good thing is if you order direct from a manufacturer that does a lot of corporate business, you often can purchase an on-site warranty as an option, but it's never something that's been included as part of the base price of a laptop.
Who cares about the warranty anyways? The data on that drive is a whole lot more important. Losing $100K of data through a hole in your backup strategy is a injury that will not be healed by the replacement of a $175 disk drive.
I think the point is a company doesn't provide a 5 year warranty if they're not confident in the quality of their drives. Over the years, IDE drive makers have gone from 5 years, to 3 years, to 1 year, and over that time I think it's pretty much conventional wisdom that the quality of the drives themselves has gone down as well. After all, why else change your warranty from 3 years to 1? You do that because you're getting more returns within the 2-3 year period than you would like, and you no longer want to pay for those as a manufacturer.
It was a cost-cutting measure, obviously, and it's one reason why we now have 120GB drives that cost under $100. If Seagate is now saying they can maintain that pricing with a 5 year warranty, that can only be a positive thing for consumers, because a) if you do need to replace the drive, saving $100 on a new drive is still saving $100, and b) it shows that Seagate believes their level of construction quality is so high that their costs under this five year warranty will not be significantly higher than under their one year warranty. This is a big statement to make, and it will definitely put pressure on WD, Hitachi and Maxtor at the very least.
Look at it this way: Seagate is telling you their drives should last for five years, Maxtor, Hitachi and WD are telling you their drives should last for one year. Which would you feel more confident buying?
(I'll add to this that all of the major drive makers have particular models and lines with longer warranties; I'm talking about the "basic" consumer models, since Seagate's new warranty applies to those as well.)
The piece muses on reasons for the decline: "Complex, lengthy, story-driven [Japanese] games demand an awful lot of care and feeding these days, and often offer paradoxically little replay value... [whereas Western developer] DMA Design hit on a formula with Grand Theft Auto III that... offers activities suited to both long stretches of gameplay and short sittings of cruising or random action."
Let me guess - this guy's new around here.
Seriously, the guy is going to compare a series that has sold somewhere around 22 million copies in Japan with a series that has sold somewhere around 300,000 copies in Japan and conclude that the latter formula works better? This makes no sense.
The Final Fantasy series is one of the most successful of all time. It has always been successful, and it continues to be successful. FFX sold 1.4 million copies in Japan, FFX-2 sold 1.2 million. FFXI is an online game - doesn't count. But let me tell you, a lot of people are nervous about the changes being made to FFXII - it's one thing to tweak the formula (nobody wants a series to get stale), it's another to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The fact is the FF series is one of the few bright spots in the Japanese game market and it's the absolute wrong series to hold up as a poster child for what's wrong with the industry there.
Thinking Japanese tastes are the same as ours is a rookie mistake. Rockstar is an American company (Rockstar North is based in Scotland, but their ownership was American prior to GTA3) making games for western tastes. GTA3 was #1 in Japan for a week or two, as was Vice City, but neither was a phenomenon and neither sold nearly as well as even the worst-selling Final Fantasy title. This is just a really dumb comparison.
Now, that out of the way, I'll at least concur with the obvious; Japanese game developers have got some problems. If you ask me, though, it's exactly the opposite of what's said in the quote above that's at issue - many Japanese publishers are shunning their home audience in favor of the larger western market, creating games specifically tailored to Europe and the United States that end up not selling well at all in Japan. Metroid Prime, the DOA series, Ninja Gaiden, Dead to Rights, Kill.Switch, SOCOM, etc.... all games from Japanese publishers and/or developers made specifically for a western audience that did not/do not sell well in Japan.
This is a new phenomenon - remember that the Japanese did not even sell consoles in the US until 1985, and it wasn't until the mid-90's that they really even consciously began developing games designed to appeal to both western and Japanese audiences. The primary audience has been slowly shifting from East to West ever since and it's now gone beyond the tipping point.
This has become a vicious cycle that's in danger of reaching the point of no return. Publishers in Japan commission games for a western audience because the overseas markets are larger, which leads to disinterested Japanese at home, which leads to further shrinking of the market and in turn more development specifically for the west.
The danger, of course, is that there are plenty of western publishers out there that know western tastes better than Japanese publishers do. So if you look at a company like Namco, their games have really not been selling well at all lately in either market, despite their focus on the west. If you ask me, the best thing to do would be for publishers like Namco to refocus on what got them where they are in the first place - plenty of Japanese games have sold well in this country without pandering to a western sense of style (practically the entire NES/SNES catalog, for example, along with most of the PSX and early PS2 catalogs), and they obviously sold well in their home country too. Japanese publishers have simply lost their focus over the years, and lost their way.
Actually, I doubt that the typical American has any problem with cameras in public places. It's mostly just the Slashbots that care.
No doubt. I'm an American (a New Yorker, actually) and my reaction when I saw this headline was "please!" I mean, this is real tinfoil hat stuff here, if you ask me.
There are something like 5,000 cameras running in New York City at any given time. I have not heard of any case where one of these cameras has been abused, but I do know they've cut red-light running down by 50% and have also led to a big drop in graffiti, not to mention helping get the drug dealers out of Washington Square Park. I'd call that a net gain in my quality of life.
I really wonder what people are worried about here. When you ask somebody, they'll always say something like "there's the potential that the government could use these images in some undefined, nefarious fashion. 1984! 1984!"
If you're going to talk about things in terms of the potential for abuse, well then, I have a real feeling you're playing both sides of the fence. How do you feel, for example, about P2P programs? Plenty of potential for abuse there too, but we here on Slashdot do nothing but whine about prior restraint whenever anybody tries to regulate these apps (and we do so for good reason). Plenty of potential for cops to abuse their firearms too, or their summons pads, or for judges to abuse their warrant-writing authority, or whatever. The point being we don't restrain anybody from doing something because of the potential for abuse in this country - it's unAmerican to do so if you ask me.
I mean you have to accept that the government exists and that it has things in its power that could be used in an inappropriate manner, but that hopefully aren't generally used that way in practice, and that hopefully will result in a net gain for society. That's why government exists, after all.
Around 90% of the cameras in use in NYC are actually privately owned and are protecting private property. So it's not even really about "big brother", because big brother by its very nature is one controlling entity (re-read 1984 if you've forgotten this important fact). It's mostly about landlords trying to keep their property and their tenants safe. I'm sure there are more than just these 75 (or whatever number) cameras already in Boston too and that most of them are used for the same reason... but I sure wouldn't worry about law enforcement having this small number of cameras to protect the city either.
But pretty damn big for a MMORPG. FFXI has overtaken Everquest in subscriptions, becoming the most popular MMORPG currently in existence.
This is like saying chocolate covered ants are the most popular sweet insect confection currently in existence. It's practically meaningless because the entire genre is so damn small.
If MMORPG's are ever going to be considered successful, the bar is going to need to be set a lot higher than a couple hundred thousand subscribers worldwide.
This is all comes back to the fact that my understanding of surveys != flawed. Single player console games being vastly more popular than MMORPGs is an obvious fact. It has nothing to do with whether or not the Japanese like them more or less than multiplayer, it's a worldwide trend. Similar statistics can be taken in America. There are simply less people playing MMORPGs. That doesn't mean that "Japanese [are] not that interested in online videogaming."
You say the lack of popularity of MMORPG's is an obvious fact worldwide. So what you're saying is that because it's a worldwide trend, it doesn't apply to the Japanese? This doesn't make any sense at all. (You may have meant that "online gaming" means more than just MMORPG's, but then you've never mentioned any successful Japanese online game that isn't an MMORPG - probably because none exist.)
I agree that it's an obvious fact that MMORPG's aren't that popular. It's also obvious from sales of such things as Xbox Live in Japan that other online games aren't very popular either. Yet it doesn't seem so obvious to those in the industry who keep making these things, and then wonder afterwards why they're not making any money. If you're doing your job properly as an executive at one of these companies, you're not going to base your decisions simply on what seems "obvious", but you may look at a study like this and take something from it.
I also agree that this is not just a Japanese trend. It's true in the US as well, where for the top online games you're still talking a couple hundred thousand users. I remember six months or so ago MS and Sony released dueling numbers for their top online games showing simultaneous users in the tens of thousands. They seemed proud of this. There are 300 million people in this country alone, 175 million in Japan, 6 billion worldwide and they were proud of tens of thousands of simultaneous users. This is not a success, if you ask me, and it's only proof that online gaming is as niche of a product as it ever was. This study says to me that it's likely to remain so for quite some time.
Not enough study has gone into the problems inherent in online gaming; problems which are getting worse if anything. Until that happens, online gaming will never be a mainstream activity.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Proper positional audio is as important for an FPS on-line gamer as anti-aliasing. Scratch that, it's more important unless the goal is to die fast and pretty. 400 frames per second in UT doesn't inform that someone's behind you.
Uh... hear a monster, see nothing in front of you, where do you think it is? Stereo can reproduce side sounds fine, so it's pretty easy for most people to figure out where something is in a game just with stereo (if you don't see it, it's either on the side from which you hear it or it's behind you).
I'm sure positional audio is nice and everything, but as a stereo audio user I've never missed it. I say that as someone who's got the full Dolby Digital/DTS setup for my home theater and would never do with any less. But my PC is already so saddled with wires and so expensive to maintain and upgrade that more than two speakers would require a real compelling case for me to upgrade. And hearing monsters behind me in an fps is not a compelling case for spending hundreds of dollars and making a complete mess of my living room (where my main PC is).
You know, I firmly believe that eventually we will all be using our computers hooked up to our home theater systems on our 1920x1280-native 60" plasma (or whatever current tech) screens through the included DVI input. And that'll be great for gaming, for entertainment, and whatever else. But for now, to me and apparently a lot of other people, having two separate 5.1 or 7.1 speaker setups in your house seems a little excessive. Especially when gaming is not even the primary thing most people do with their PC's (and neither is watching DVD's).
I think Apple always goes the extra step when designing their products. I think that one of the most interesting parts of this new iMac is the fact that it has air holes in the top of it so that the hot air can rise out. Now why hasn't anyone else thought of that?
Umm, lots of people have. Probably 50% of all PC towers on the market have top-mounted fans and/or air holes.
What I don't get about the new iMac is this: Ok, so it's basically a screen and keyboard. And you can carry it around the house. And it's not expandable (like other iMacs). Now, how is this different and/or better than a laptop? So the computer itself is in the screen rather than the keyboard - that's not really a major difference in form factor. What advantages does the iMac have over a PowerBook, or an iBook? Is Apple going to delay the G5 iBook now because it'd cannibalize iMac sales?
I would think a laptop would have obvious advantages over the new iMac, while not giving up much of anything. A laptop is truly portable, a true all-in-one unit. The iMac isn't.
Who would buy an iMac over a comparable laptop, and why?
128kbps AAC is at least as good as 192 kbps mp3's. That's not just what I think.
Apparently, it is. You can see that LAME MP3 actually does better than iTunes AAC on about half the tests - and at approximately the same bit rate. The overall results are extremely close.
I actually took part in that listening test. This was a double-blind test (like all of Roberto's listening tests) so I had no idea what codec I was listening to, and I could barely tell any difference between any of them. It was only a little better than random chance that I could pick out any compressed format vs. the original. I almost gave up. And I consider myself a pretty picky listener.
The fact that so many of these results are up near 5 - including for MP3 - shows that all codecs sound very good at ~128k. You could argue that MP3 had a 6k advantage (the MP3 files were VBR and averaged out to 134kbps), but that's not going to make much difference. And anyway, your statement about 128kbps AAC vs. 192kbps MP3 is clearly moot. 128k AAC and ~128k MP3 both sound very good, and so close are their overall results that any difference is probably not statistically significant. I doubt you'd hear much improvement in a 192kbps VBR MP3, but you'd probably hear some, so I doubt your statement is true even in an absolute sense.
Apple likes to perpetuate this myth that the codec they use sounds better than MP3. The fact is you'd almost never be able to tell the difference even at the same bit rate. The difference between AAC and WMA is a little greater, but I still doubt you'd be able to notice it with most types of music. If you'd taken this test too you'd probably agree.
Not that it matters to me; I rip all of my own music to 256 or 320kbps VBR MP3's using LAME. That way I'm ensured of compatibility with any music player and I have great sound.
Although - and you wouldn't know this, since you get your entire GTA info from crappy, one-paragraph /. articles - the GTA games have all used heavily fictionalized cities, so I'm not sure how you would specifically identify a European location, aside from using local accents and a tourist area of 1000-year-old buildings.
Well, you're technically right about them being fictionalized cities, but come on. Vice City is Miami, Liberty City is New York, San Andreas is a cross between San Francisco and Los Angeles. That's not really a big secret. The only reason real city names were/are not used is that Rockstar/Rockstar North feel it limits what you can do - people expect you to be faithful as much as possible to the real city. So you spend all this time trying to mimic reality even when reality doesn't really lend itself to quality gameplay - it just wastes a lot of time. Having fictional cities lets you have a little more fun with the design of the cities, and lets you customize them for the best gameplay. But it's obvious what cities the GTA cities are based on, and it's intended to be.
Not to mention, there was GTA London, you know. This was the only GTA featuring a real city. It didn't do too well in the marketplace so it was never tried again; the thinking afterwards was people don't seem to much care about real cities in their games.
One side note - it may seem a bit of a contradiction what Rockstar San Diego does with the Midnight Club series, which does feature real cities and they're not entirely faithful to reality. But a) Rockstar really had nothing to do with the original Midnight Club (whereas many people who worked on the original GTA still work at Rockstar and Rockstar North), and b) the cities do not have to feature as much variety in Midnight Club as they do in a GTA game, since all you need to do in MC is race. There need to be a whole bunch of different types of areas and things to do in a GTA game, all spaced fairly close together (so you're not wasting too much time just driving around, and to fit in the system's memory and storage constraints). So it's really a different type of game.
This is actually readily apparent if you pay attention. GTA as it is perhaps could not even have been made by only Americans; it is the result of how Europeans experienced American crime through US film, TV and music.
Well, you're oversimplifying, as many people out there do when it comes to Rockstar and Rockstar North. I was part of the "New York production team" (that's how we're credited) on various Rockstar games and since I'm not currently working on SA (no longer with the company, by choice), I have enough time on my hands that I feel like saying something about this, and finally have the freedom to do it.
I don't want to name names (check the game credits if you like) but the big names working on the GTA series are about evenly split between born and bred New Yorkers and born and bred British (not necessarily Scottish - a lot of English people work on the GTA series as well, both in New York and in the UK). The scripts are not written through the eyes of someone experiencing the US through crime movies - they're written through the eyes of someone who's lived in New York in some cases for many years, in other cases for their entire lives.
The programming is done in Scotland. The production (which includes screenwriting, character design, art direction, sound recording, soundtracks, package design, etc.) is split between NYC and Scotland depending on the job but is mostly done in NYC. The series is very much collaborative between nationalities and I do not want to take anything away from what's done in Scotland at all. I'm just saying there's this misconception out there that this series is actually coming from a European perspective and that's not really true - it's a collaboration between the Scots, British-born long-time New Yorkers, and born-and-bred New Yorkers.
Another little piece of trivia for you: Rockstar and Rockstar North are the same company. It's not just an ownership thing; Rockstar and DMA were inextricably linked for a long time, but the purchase many years ago now (prior to GTA2, if I remember right) made the two companies one. It's not a case of "Rockstar North makes the game, Rockstar is just the publisher"... Rockstar and Rockstar North are the same company, and both offices work on different aspects of the game. Some things traditionally in the developer's court are done in New York, some things traditionally in the publisher's court are done in the UK. There's no clear split between them.
Similarly for the stereotypes, these don't mean as much to Europeans as they would to Americans.
I can tell you this is not the reason why the stereotypes are in there. The stereotypes are in there because they mean so much to Americans. To a large extent, Rockstar likes to thumb its nose at political correctness; the GTA games are satires, occasional parodies. A lot of people (including you, apparently) have missed this fact and take the stereotypes at face value. They're there with the intent that they should be questioned. They're there self-consciously.
None of that adds to the real spectacle, IMHO, and none of the games requires expensive equipment or locales.
The article said Coke spent $60M, VISA another $30M, something like $120M from just the major sponsors.
You could have a perfectly excellent Olympics for a tenth or less of that. An acceptable Olympics (to most) for under a million.
Are you kidding?
Contrary to your statement, many Olympic events do require expensive locales. See, there are rules here, and rules are what make sports what they are - without them, a sport is just a couple of guys hitting a ball back and forth. You can't just swim in any swimming pool, you can't play soccer in a baseball stadium, you can't have a rowing competition in the middle of the ocean. These things all have to be regulation size and with regulated conditions, not to mention enough seats to ensure that people who want to can actually watch.
You couldn't build an Olympic-regulation swimming pool for less than $1 million. Even if you only held the Olympics in cities that had held them before (which sort of defeats the purpose of having them), the cost of refurbishing and modernizing old Olympic facilities alone would easily top $1 million. And that's just the first thing you'd have to do.
Hell, it cost more than $1 million just to put a track around the football field at my old high school. And that was in the 1980's!
Billions are being spent this time on security. And don't tell me it's not needed or that it's all paranoia, because you know, it's not like terrorism at the Olympics has never happened before, right? If you can't protect the athletes, then it's not even worth having an Olympics. It's just sports - it's not worth risking your life over. So this is a required expense if you ask me, and it's not really the reason for the high cost of the games anyway - Sydney 2000 cost $5.9 billion.
So your cost analysis is a little off. The Olympics could be done for less than the Athens games depending on the city, sure, but not much less in this day and age. The logistics, the facilities required, the security, hell the simple cost of salaried staff would be in the multiple millions of dollars at least. I don't see how you could do an Olympics in this day and age for less than several billion dollars.
Anyway, I don't have any problem at all with Olympic officials forcing athletes to hide corporate logos. How many sports have we seen where athletes have basically turned into walking advertisements? In some sports they seem to be actively hawking their sponsors during games (cough NBA basketball cough). And I have seen some seriously questionable "viral" marketing at these games... for example, just yesterday at the diving competition, the American divers were repeatedly shown listening to music during rest periods, with the NBC analysts commenting on their playlists. So today, I hit the NBC Olympics web site, and sure enough, there's a link asking "What music does Laura Wilkinson train to?" on the right side of the page, which goes to a page of huge Real Rhapsody ads. That kind of sneaky stuff really pisses me off.
The setup page on the network displays the mac addresses of the computers accessing the network and provides for a simple click to allow or disallow. I am sure this could be circumvented but I cannot see anyone going to that much trouble just for a free ride onto something that you can get for pennies.
Somebody mod this insightful. My situation is different than yours - I live in NYC, in a large apartment building - but I use the same sort of risk assessment methodology as you do. I do not use WPA (I don't have it on my router, but it's not as if a new router'd be that expensive), I use only 128 bit WEP (not all my cards support 256 - again, I could replace the one that doesn't if I thought I needed to), and I use MAC filtering. I also have my radio strength turned down to 12.5%, which is a real easy and quick kludge that most people don't do but that can really cut down on the number of people who even have physical access to your network. To me, I have as much protection as I need. I don't have my computers on 24/7, I am generally at them when they are on (and monitoring fairly closely), and given the plethora of completely unsecure networks in close proximity, I strongly doubt anybody would bother trying to break my network. I mean, there's a totally unsecured network within range of me, and dozens more on the same block.
In a rural situation, the security requirements for a home network would just be that much less. I don't think the "80% unsecured" stat is really that alarming because everybody's situation is different; if I was in a suburban house with 50 feet or so between my house and the next, probably just dialing down the radio strength would be enough.
This is not a real overall network security issue, if you ask me. Spammers and trojan writers aren't going around wardriving to find unsecured networks to deliver their payloads; they can much more easily hack into unsecured PC's over the internet to do that. Hackers aren't doing it either because the contents of most peoples' home networks are not really all that compelling. The worst anyone would realistically do is steal your bandwidth, and unless you're in a dense area like I am even that is probably a minimal concern.
I'm all for network security in general, but this seems like an issue born more out of paranoia than anything. Obviously, common sense should apply, and in cases like mine I think it's good to at least do some basic things to lock your network down, but no need to go nuts with it, and no need to do much at all in a less urban setting unless you know you've got some cheap neighbors who also happen to be computer geeks. (In other words, the typical Slashdot user.)
For a company that puts so much emphasis on portable devices, Apple certainly has a lot of problems with batteries.
And you didn't even link the most dramatic case, that of actual exploding batteries. And no, this isn't some Nokia-like third party battery situation, these were the real Apple-supplied batteries (though that article does go out of the way to point out they were "Sony-made").
Apple's got some real quality control issues, despite their reputation. They seem to have at least one or two recalls per year for various reasons ranging from defective batteries to defective power supplies to defective screens, as well as other problems that are common complaints but that they do nothing about (such as the iPod battery service life issue). The recall I noted above was actually a safety issue, and I would guess the overheating batteries in the G4 PB's might be a safety issue as well.
I'd still buy an Apple for other reasons, but quality control is not one of them, public perception notwithstanding. They're certainly no better than any other manufacturer and may actually be somewhat worse (IBM, for example, has had fewer recalls over the same period).
Realone is trying to break apple fans from apple loyality... and it just isn't going to work. Of course I am stereotyping but Apple's success is based in their loyal, vocal, energetic community.
It's hard to root for either side in this if you're not already an Apple zealot. Looking at it objectively, both Real and Apple offer proprietary formats, and Real is hiding behind a sort of pseudo-open source defense without actually acting in any way consistent with their message. They've also done plenty of questionable things in the past (adware, spyware, etc.).
On the other hand, one of the quotes in the C-Net article from an Apple fan says something like "Just because you don't like iTunes doesn't give you the right to reverse engineer the iPod". Well, yes it does. In fact, reverse engineering is the only thing Real has a right to do in this case, and it's why most legal experts think Apple has no real case against Real if this goes to court (search related articles on C-Net). If Real did reverse engineer the iPod, then more power to them. They're acting within copyright law.
I hate Real but I hate blind Apple evangelists just as much. I guess I'm just gonna go ahead and stick with mp3 like I always have; I've got no reason to worry about format wars or DRM with that strategy.
(Of course, I know MP3 is technically proprietary too, but it suffers from none of the problems Apple AAC or Real files do.)
Certainly makes one wonder what happened to three-color retinas...
Well, this brings us back to this:
The promised result of this multi-primary color (MPC) technology is a television picture that, with its truer, more vibrant color and brighter image, looks more like cinema than video.
If they want it to look "more like cinema", they'll stick with three colors, because all film processes use only red, green and blue. Early Hollywood films (and some of the best-looking color you'll ever see) used three separate strips of film that contained celluloid crystals that would only expose a single color (RGB); modern processes have one strip comprised of three layers that do the same thing.
Seems to me a case where the marketing department got themselves a little bit out front of the R&D department.
btw, the early three-strip process used by Hollywood was still in use a few years ago in China (they bought much of our old equipment); see films like Raise the Red Lantern or Red Sorghum for a couple modern examples of how amazing color film can look. (Those filmmakers have since moved to the United States and now use the single-strip process.)
Basically, it's another tax... instead of using the existing tax money to pay for these services, they're grabbing at a new revenue stream, and keeping the old tax revenue stream too.
Sure, it's more direct this way, but we're already paying for this.
At the risk of burning through huge amounts of karma (depending on who the current mods are), no, we are not.
People who say this cost should come out of our taxes need to quit bitching about how high taxes are and then whining about extra stuff like this when their taxes get cut. The fact is we are running a huge deficit in this country, we have a mind-boggling public debt and we're getting deeper and deeper into it every day. Stuff like this, if it's undertaken (VoIP wiretapping, I mean) needs to be paid for, and you can't just say "well, use the money I already paid for regular phone service" any more than you can say the military should fund itself with the lottery tickets you bought last week. The fact is this money all goes to different places and it doesn't even cover what it's supposed to be paying for anyway, let alone any new programs.
The alternative is you just don't do anything new and you cut things that already exist and aren't being paid for, which is a solution a lot of people support, but the fact is there's a limit to that. What exactly are you going to cut? Cutting law enforcement (as Bush has been doing) seems a bit stupid in this day and age. Cutting the military seems foolhardy right now, as over-extended as we already are. The other biggest government expenditures are social security and interest on the national debt (which, as mentioned, is growing quickly). There's very little actual discretionary spending in the budget, and most of that has been cut to the bone already.
So you can't really cut anymore, and stuff's gotta be paid for. Right now, we're not paying for it, and people still complain that we're paying too much?
If you want all your "tax" payments in one place, then fine - but don't then bitch about those payments being too high when we're already not even paying our bills.
Ya know, I try to be nice on these forums, but could you RTFA before asking questions? 'Cause this is answered there. 'Blast Processing' refered to
1) the fact that the CPU in the Genesis ran more than twice as fast as in the SNES (7.6MHz vs. 3.58MHz) and
2) that the Genesis could draw one screen while rendering another.
Well, all I can say is don't believe everything you read.
Your point #1 is accurate. Point #2 is dubious at best - I suppose you could probably figure out a way to argue this on semantics but it'd be a stretch. Every system has to "draw one screen while rendering another"; otherwise you'd get massive flicker and screen blanking, which is something we haven't seen since the days of the Atari 2600.
"Blast Processing" was just a buzzword. I've never heard the rendering angle to it; the main thing was just the CPU speed. Sega wanted to point out the difference in CPU speed and "blast processing" was a new "feature" they dreamed up to sound like the Genesis was not only faster, but also had extra stuff that the SNES didn't. Of course, this really wasn't true - Genesis was faster, but the SNES was able to display more colors, had higher resolution, and could display more sprites on-screen.
Anybody who knew anything at the time just laughed whenever these "blast processing" commercials came on, but you have to admit they worked... for a while, anyway.
And this also happens to be my (and my wife's) favorite movie of all time.
Most of the movies people are listing here are major Hollywood movies that a lot of other people really like (Shrek, Moulin Rouge, etc.). You're just taking a contrarian viewpoint; I doubt you've even seen some of the truly bad movies from the IMDB list. Do yourself a favor and rent some Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes if you don't want to sit through a bad movie "straight". It's worth it.
In the Windows world, none of these competitors MAKE anything. They cobble together parts. Dell is not designing anything but the case. Apple is designing the mainboard.
And so is Dell, unfortunately for many users.
Apple doesn't build their own hardware any more than PC makers do. Apple is not building their own DVD-ROM or hard drives, they're buying them from companies like Toshiba and Maxtor/Seagate/whoever. They buy their PowerPC chips from Motorola and IBM. They buy their graphics cards from ATI and NVidia. I don't know whose memory they're using but it ain't Apple's own, I'll tell you that.
All Apple does is design their motherboards and cases, just like PC makers. In fact the architecture itself these days is basically the same with the exception of the CPU.
The PC world competes solely on mindshare.
So what you're saying is there's no difference between PC's other than the case? That a Dell Dimension is the same as my scratch-built machine is the same as a Falcon Northwest is the same as a Sony Vaio? I don't think anybody could seriously argue that. It's like saying all cars are exactly the same just because they all burn the same kind of gas. Only their exterior shells are different.
PC makers do compete in a lot of different areas, and many PC makers have totally different target markets. So you'll get PC's all up and down the pricing spectrum, at varying levels of true quality (build, materials, etc.) and with varying levels of features, performance, and yes, aesthetics. You can even significantly deviate from "standard" PC architecture, with RAID arrays, dual graphics cards, 64-bit AMD processors, etc. and you can still claim to own a "PC" (in the colloquial parlance of our times, that is - Macs are technically PC's too, of course).
With a Mac, you're stuck with the configurations Apple wants to give you - they'd be like a single PC maker in a sea of hundreds on the other side of the fence. Now, obviously this is working for them in some ways, as they're generally profitable of late, though mostly due to iPod. But I'm not sure that I buy this idea that they'd be less profitable if they'd continued licensing their OS. I understand the whole argument about diluting the brand name, yadda yadda yadda, so what? There's a tendency for people to believe that because of the way things turned out in the world, that that's the only way they could have turned out, and I don't believe it.
If Apple's OS and the Apple user experience is so superior to the Windows experience, why does Apple have 3% market share? There has to be a reason, and it's not all because MS is a monopoly. MS was not always a monopoly. When I owned my Apple II, Apple had more than 50% of the PC market. The supposedly superior Mac line eventually dropped them to the 3% they have today. The market was Apple's to lose and they lost it. At some point, you have to stop blaming the rest of the world and look inward for the reasons why.
We're talking about cordless, not cellular. You furriners need to read for comprehension.
Pot kettle black.
Someone apparently doesn't know that 900mhz cordless phones exist, and all of them are wi-fi friendly. I myself have a Panasonic 900mhz digital spread spectrum phone and have no problems at all with my wi-fi when using it.
This is slashdot. \. is Liberal, it leans to the left.
Slashdot is anything but liberal, as you'd know if you ever read any of the gun control arguments that seem to break out in completely unrelated threads.
Slashdot users are generally libertarian. Which is a completely different thing from "liberal". Libertarians believe government has no place whatsoever in their lives, which is why you get stories like Google's mismanagement of their IPO listed under the "your rights online" tag. This is pretty much the exact opposite of what liberals believe. If anything, libertarians lean a lot more towards the conserative side, since both supposedly believe in smaller government (though in practice, most so-called "conservatives" only believe in smaller government in areas where it suits them - not, for example, in a smaller military or in cuts to social security).
Now, I am not a libertarian, I am a liberal (and btw, we liberals have nothing against big business, just big business that breaks the law, ie. Microsoft or Enron). Obviously, not all Slashdot users are the same. But the general gist of things here is usually that all government meddling in technology is bad, which explains the calls of "censorship" in this thread (even though government is not even involved) or the complaints about "rights" being infringed (as if watching TV is a "right", which implies that it's either something you're born with [as in an "inalienable" right] or it's something written into law, or both). As a liberal, I often feel extremely out of place here in actually not always arguing against government regulation of various things if it makes sense - I evaluate everything on a case by case basis. But what business does, as long as they're not breaking any laws, is business.
I personally think this whole Olympics thing is pretty damn stupid from a business standpoint, and not at all helpful to the Olympics as a whole (interest in the Olympics in the US has been dropping since the 1980's, partly because of the shoddy live TV coverage). But my "rights" are not being trampled on here; just the long-term viability of the Olympics themselves. Once these games are over, I expect to once again see a lot of bitching about the poor TV coverage, a lot of bitching by NBC about the low ratings and a lot of bitching by the Olympic committee about the lack of interest. If you ask me, none of them have anybody to blame but themselves.
I also forgot to say that the standard touch-typing posture can easily lead to carpal tunnel or repetitive stress disorder because of the angle of your hands on a standard keyboard. This is one reason so-called "ergonomic" keyboards exist. But the way I've taught myself to type, my hands are naturally angled even on a straight keyboard, so I can type for extremely long periods without any fatigue and I've been typing hours per day for 20 years now with no problems at all. Something I think is really important to think about given how much some of us have to type - you can always buy an ergonomic keyboard for yourself if you're a touch-typist but you may not have that luxury at work, or in internet cafes, or wherever else you use a PC. So I think in some ways it's actually better to learn alternate ways of typing; whatever's most comfortable for you.
I also type right at 80wpm and I do not touch-type. I never think much about it but just looking at my hands now, I'm using four fingers on my right hand (middle, index and thumb for the space bar, with pinky thrown in only for shift and enter) and one finger on my left (index).
Interesting that the original article post seems to almost brag about 60wpm touch-typing that he learned on an IBM Selectric. I think that's proof right there that touch-typing doesn't matter.
To me, it's like asking "is learning classical guitar necessary to be in a rock band?" Well, no, because technique isn't really what matters - results are what matters.
I agree with the concept that technique is usually what brings results and am not against the overall idea of learning fundamentals - in fact I think in most things fundamentals are extremely important. I just don't think touch-typing is a fundamental to typing quickly or accurately, and I consider myself proof of it (80wpm or 130wpm vs. 60wpm is no joke, and that's including penalties for errors, at least in the tests I've taken). Typing is one of those skills that's pretty easy to pick up and do well as you go along.
Exactly. I still prefer the original Soul Calibur on Dreamcast to any of the versions of Soul Calibur 2 on Xbox/PS2/GameCube. It just ran smoother and better than any of those other ports. This is due to the fact that the Dreamcast was essentially the same hardware as the Sega Naomi board that powered Soul Calibur arcade machines.
Neither Soul Calibur nor Soul Calibur 2 were Naomi games. Soul Calibur was a System 12 game, whereas Soul Calibur 2 ran on System 246. System 12 was similar hardware to the original PlayStation; System 246 is nearly identical to the PlayStation 2.
I also prefer the original Soul Calibur to SC2, but not because it "runs smoother" - they all run at 60fps, and the PS2 port of SC2 is the closest to its arcade namesake of any Soul Calibur or Soul Calibur 2 release (because it actually is the same hardware, the only difference being a lot of RAM in the arcade machine instead of a DVD drive). The art direction changed a bit from SC1 to SC2, for one (with none of the ridiculous Todd McFarlane characters in the original), but the main thing was the original Soul Calibur port on Dreamcast was so much more advanced vs. its original arcade machine than any of the home ports of SC2. People were blown away by the original Soul Calibur partly because nobody expected it; there was no indication that the Dreamcast version would be anything more than a straight port, but it was far more than that. Years later and technology has progressed, but Soul Calibur 2 on the latest home machines looks basically the same, technology-wise, as Dreamcast Soul Calibur. This just makes the Dreamcast release seem even that much more amazing.
Anyway, so I personally think there's still a lot of good gameplay left on the Dreamcast... and these homebrew emulators are actually degrading to the system. Why do you need to emulate the Saturn when you've still got stuff like Soul Calibur to play on the Dreamcast itself? When a system's main use is to emulate other systems, that's when you know it really has died and gone to heaven. I don't even see the value in this anyway; is it really easier to play N64 demos on the Dreamcast (very slowly) than to actually hook up a real N64 and play actual games on it? What's the purpose of playing Saturn games on the Dreamcast when the real Saturn is so easily attainable?
The usual answer to questions like these when asked on this site is "because you can". I think that's a bullshit answer; I personally see projects like these as a complete waste of time, and wonder what all those programming man-hours could have gone to instead. Something far more useful than this, I'm sure.
However, a receipt that was an encoding of the vote record encrypted with the voting machine's secret key and protected by the voter's PIN, and that by law could only be decrypted in a special booth where only the voter was allowed entrance, might not be so unreasonable. Who said that the receipts needed to be human-readable?
And who programs the machines that read these receipts? Diebold? The Republican Party? Some virus writer who's hacked the codes?
Hopefully you see the problem in your solution.
Anyway, one thing I'd like to point out is that there's nothing in this linked article that says anything (that I could find) about votes being lost in this case. That would really be a major story. It only says "information" was erased. Which is still bad, but just as I feel it's very important to get the voting system itself right, it's also very important to get any media coverage of the problems with these touch-screen systems right too. If claims are made about these machines that are not accurate and are obviously sensationalized, it will make it easier for the manufacturers of these machines to simply pass off concerns about them as luddite paranoia.
No way would I ship in a laptop to have it repaired. If the warranty does not include either onsite service or some local authorized repair place I can take it to, then the warranty is worthless in my opinion. If I need the machine for business, I am not going to ship it, most likely at my expense both ways, risk damage in transit, and then wait a month or so to get it back and be without one in the mean time. If it is a critical device, I will gladly pay more for decent warranty support. I'm not sure exactly how Apple's warranties work, but I've seen this disturbing trend in electronics warranties over the last few years.
I'm not sure what makes it "disturbing" to have various levels of warranty service available...
I'm currently dealing with getting my wife's Dell machine repaired (it developed a hinge stress crack - I can't believe this company isn't lower in the reliability ratings, her notebook is built out of the thinnest, most brittle plastic I've ever seen). Our service contract has at least 12 possible levels of support, depending on what you purchase at the time - we have the lowest level, which is actually fine for a home machine. Express shipping both ways, and AbEx delivered us an empty box today complete with packaging designed to fit the particular notebook. We're supposed to call them when we want them to pick it up, then they send it back the same way when it's fixed.
If we'd wanted, we could have bought the on-site service plan. It's not worth it for a home machine, though. And even for a business machine, this is probably not really something that could be fixed on-site - some problems have to be fixed at the factory. I mean the repair guy is probably not going to be walking around with replacement lids. In my experience, on-site service means the guy comes out, looks at what's wrong with your machine and if it's an easily replaceable part (like a drive or a memory chip) he will order the part and come back to fix it, but otherwise he'll take the machine in to the service center where he's got all his tools and whatever else he needs to completely disassemble the machine.
Back in the mid 90's I used to sell laptops (and desktops, and a lot of other electronic items) for a living, and I'd often have people ask if a laptop warranty was on-site. It never was, not in a consumer laptop anyway, and not sold at retail. So this is not a "disturbing trend" in warranties "over the last few years" - it's just the way it's always been. You either need to bring your laptop in to an authorized service center or you need to ship it. The good thing is if you order direct from a manufacturer that does a lot of corporate business, you often can purchase an on-site warranty as an option, but it's never something that's been included as part of the base price of a laptop.
Who cares about the warranty anyways? The data on that drive is a whole lot more important. Losing $100K of data through a hole in your backup strategy is a injury that will not be healed by the replacement of a $175 disk drive.
I think the point is a company doesn't provide a 5 year warranty if they're not confident in the quality of their drives. Over the years, IDE drive makers have gone from 5 years, to 3 years, to 1 year, and over that time I think it's pretty much conventional wisdom that the quality of the drives themselves has gone down as well. After all, why else change your warranty from 3 years to 1? You do that because you're getting more returns within the 2-3 year period than you would like, and you no longer want to pay for those as a manufacturer.
It was a cost-cutting measure, obviously, and it's one reason why we now have 120GB drives that cost under $100. If Seagate is now saying they can maintain that pricing with a 5 year warranty, that can only be a positive thing for consumers, because a) if you do need to replace the drive, saving $100 on a new drive is still saving $100, and b) it shows that Seagate believes their level of construction quality is so high that their costs under this five year warranty will not be significantly higher than under their one year warranty. This is a big statement to make, and it will definitely put pressure on WD, Hitachi and Maxtor at the very least.
Look at it this way: Seagate is telling you their drives should last for five years, Maxtor, Hitachi and WD are telling you their drives should last for one year. Which would you feel more confident buying?
(I'll add to this that all of the major drive makers have particular models and lines with longer warranties; I'm talking about the "basic" consumer models, since Seagate's new warranty applies to those as well.)
The piece muses on reasons for the decline: "Complex, lengthy, story-driven [Japanese] games demand an awful lot of care and feeding these days, and often offer paradoxically little replay value... [whereas Western developer] DMA Design hit on a formula with Grand Theft Auto III that... offers activities suited to both long stretches of gameplay and short sittings of cruising or random action."
Let me guess - this guy's new around here.
Seriously, the guy is going to compare a series that has sold somewhere around 22 million copies in Japan with a series that has sold somewhere around 300,000 copies in Japan and conclude that the latter formula works better? This makes no sense.
The Final Fantasy series is one of the most successful of all time. It has always been successful, and it continues to be successful. FFX sold 1.4 million copies in Japan, FFX-2 sold 1.2 million. FFXI is an online game - doesn't count. But let me tell you, a lot of people are nervous about the changes being made to FFXII - it's one thing to tweak the formula (nobody wants a series to get stale), it's another to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The fact is the FF series is one of the few bright spots in the Japanese game market and it's the absolute wrong series to hold up as a poster child for what's wrong with the industry there.
Thinking Japanese tastes are the same as ours is a rookie mistake. Rockstar is an American company (Rockstar North is based in Scotland, but their ownership was American prior to GTA3) making games for western tastes. GTA3 was #1 in Japan for a week or two, as was Vice City, but neither was a phenomenon and neither sold nearly as well as even the worst-selling Final Fantasy title. This is just a really dumb comparison.
Now, that out of the way, I'll at least concur with the obvious; Japanese game developers have got some problems. If you ask me, though, it's exactly the opposite of what's said in the quote above that's at issue - many Japanese publishers are shunning their home audience in favor of the larger western market, creating games specifically tailored to Europe and the United States that end up not selling well at all in Japan. Metroid Prime, the DOA series, Ninja Gaiden, Dead to Rights, Kill.Switch, SOCOM, etc.... all games from Japanese publishers and/or developers made specifically for a western audience that did not/do not sell well in Japan.
This is a new phenomenon - remember that the Japanese did not even sell consoles in the US until 1985, and it wasn't until the mid-90's that they really even consciously began developing games designed to appeal to both western and Japanese audiences. The primary audience has been slowly shifting from East to West ever since and it's now gone beyond the tipping point.
This has become a vicious cycle that's in danger of reaching the point of no return. Publishers in Japan commission games for a western audience because the overseas markets are larger, which leads to disinterested Japanese at home, which leads to further shrinking of the market and in turn more development specifically for the west.
The danger, of course, is that there are plenty of western publishers out there that know western tastes better than Japanese publishers do. So if you look at a company like Namco, their games have really not been selling well at all lately in either market, despite their focus on the west. If you ask me, the best thing to do would be for publishers like Namco to refocus on what got them where they are in the first place - plenty of Japanese games have sold well in this country without pandering to a western sense of style (practically the entire NES/SNES catalog, for example, along with most of the PSX and early PS2 catalogs), and they obviously sold well in their home country too. Japanese publishers have simply lost their focus over the years, and lost their way.
Actually, I doubt that the typical American has any problem with cameras in public places. It's mostly just the Slashbots that care.
No doubt. I'm an American (a New Yorker, actually) and my reaction when I saw this headline was "please!" I mean, this is real tinfoil hat stuff here, if you ask me.
There are something like 5,000 cameras running in New York City at any given time. I have not heard of any case where one of these cameras has been abused, but I do know they've cut red-light running down by 50% and have also led to a big drop in graffiti, not to mention helping get the drug dealers out of Washington Square Park. I'd call that a net gain in my quality of life.
I really wonder what people are worried about here. When you ask somebody, they'll always say something like "there's the potential that the government could use these images in some undefined, nefarious fashion. 1984! 1984!"
If you're going to talk about things in terms of the potential for abuse, well then, I have a real feeling you're playing both sides of the fence. How do you feel, for example, about P2P programs? Plenty of potential for abuse there too, but we here on Slashdot do nothing but whine about prior restraint whenever anybody tries to regulate these apps (and we do so for good reason). Plenty of potential for cops to abuse their firearms too, or their summons pads, or for judges to abuse their warrant-writing authority, or whatever. The point being we don't restrain anybody from doing something because of the potential for abuse in this country - it's unAmerican to do so if you ask me.
I mean you have to accept that the government exists and that it has things in its power that could be used in an inappropriate manner, but that hopefully aren't generally used that way in practice, and that hopefully will result in a net gain for society. That's why government exists, after all.
Around 90% of the cameras in use in NYC are actually privately owned and are protecting private property. So it's not even really about "big brother", because big brother by its very nature is one controlling entity (re-read 1984 if you've forgotten this important fact). It's mostly about landlords trying to keep their property and their tenants safe. I'm sure there are more than just these 75 (or whatever number) cameras already in Boston too and that most of them are used for the same reason... but I sure wouldn't worry about law enforcement having this small number of cameras to protect the city either.
But pretty damn big for a MMORPG. FFXI has overtaken Everquest in subscriptions, becoming the most popular MMORPG currently in existence.
This is like saying chocolate covered ants are the most popular sweet insect confection currently in existence. It's practically meaningless because the entire genre is so damn small.
If MMORPG's are ever going to be considered successful, the bar is going to need to be set a lot higher than a couple hundred thousand subscribers worldwide.
This is all comes back to the fact that my understanding of surveys != flawed. Single player console games being vastly more popular than MMORPGs is an obvious fact. It has nothing to do with whether or not the Japanese like them more or less than multiplayer, it's a worldwide trend. Similar statistics can be taken in America. There are simply less people playing MMORPGs. That doesn't mean that "Japanese [are] not that interested in online videogaming."
You say the lack of popularity of MMORPG's is an obvious fact worldwide. So what you're saying is that because it's a worldwide trend, it doesn't apply to the Japanese? This doesn't make any sense at all. (You may have meant that "online gaming" means more than just MMORPG's, but then you've never mentioned any successful Japanese online game that isn't an MMORPG - probably because none exist.)
I agree that it's an obvious fact that MMORPG's aren't that popular. It's also obvious from sales of such things as Xbox Live in Japan that other online games aren't very popular either. Yet it doesn't seem so obvious to those in the industry who keep making these things, and then wonder afterwards why they're not making any money. If you're doing your job properly as an executive at one of these companies, you're not going to base your decisions simply on what seems "obvious", but you may look at a study like this and take something from it.
I also agree that this is not just a Japanese trend. It's true in the US as well, where for the top online games you're still talking a couple hundred thousand users. I remember six months or so ago MS and Sony released dueling numbers for their top online games showing simultaneous users in the tens of thousands. They seemed proud of this. There are 300 million people in this country alone, 175 million in Japan, 6 billion worldwide and they were proud of tens of thousands of simultaneous users. This is not a success, if you ask me, and it's only proof that online gaming is as niche of a product as it ever was. This study says to me that it's likely to remain so for quite some time.
Not enough study has gone into the problems inherent in online gaming; problems which are getting worse if anything. Until that happens, online gaming will never be a mainstream activity.