Atari Jaguar - Why wasn't this on the list? I rented this thing too, and it sucked. First of all, if you think that the X-Box's origional controller was big (which it wasn't that bad) try this thing.
Well I have both sitting right in front of me and the Xbox's is bigger and significantly heavier. If anything that tells you how big the Xbox's original controller is - the fact that a controller with a keypad on it could actually be smaller than the XB controller is pretty amazing (though pretty much all the keypad controllers I can think of - Intellivision, Colecovision, 5200, Jaguar to name a few - are smaller than the XB controller). It also tells you how we don't always remember things as they really were. Hindsight is not always 20/20 (though it's usually closer to that than foresight is).
CDI - To tell you the truth, I remember hearing of this, and seeing games in magazines. But I never saw a single one for sale, that I can remember. That's a great recipe for success. I also remember hearing it was expensive.
The CD-i was not specifically intended as a game system. I don't actually recall if the CD-i came before or after the 3DO, but it's possible Philips was trying to learn the lessons of 3DO. CD-i was marketed as a full entertainment set-top box capable of playing CD's, movies and of course games. The gaming capability of the system was not very good, though - not up to the standards of the systems it was "competing" with (though again, they were trying to go for the more casual gaming/home entertainment market). The CD-i is probably the main reason why gamers these days cringe whenever anyone uses the word "set-top box" or starts talking about doing things like adding movie playing or other functionality to game consoles.
Saturn - Two games I wanted to play. I wanted to play Nights (still waiting for a rerelease of that) and Panzer Dragoon (that game looked so amazing at the time.) Plus, the Saturn had all those cool "Theater of the Eye" commercials. Very cool. But of course, it was expensive as hell, the analog controller (when it finally came out for Nights) was weird (and fixed (somewhat) in the Dreamcast). Part of it's problem what that it was supposed to be terrible to develop for because of it's dual CPU nature.
Yes, the Saturn has a complicated architecture, but then so does the PS2 and it doesn't seem to have mattered in its case. Developers will develop for a system no matter how hard it is if they believe it's viable. In fact, the Saturn was viable for a while, and was actually quite successful in Japan (like the TG-16) - which is why it doesn't belong on this list. Sega and other developers continued supporting the Saturn in Japan until after the Dreamcast's release.
There are so many misconceptions about the Saturn it's hard to even count. One of the biggest is that it was designed as a 2D system, with 3D added at the last minute in response to Sony's PSX announcement. This is refuted in section 15.2 of the Saturn hardware FAQ (which you can find at GameFAQs - sorry, they don't allow direct linking). The Saturn was always a 3D system, designed as a sort of home version of the Model 2 arcade board, but had its texture capabilities enhanced in response to Sony's PSX.
The Saturn does remain one of the best 2D systems ever, though (perhaps only the Neo Geo - with its processing power and unlimited, cartridge-based RAM beats it) and in fact had more VRAM and greater raw 3D polygon-pushing power than the PSX (>500,000 vs. ~360,000, by the published specs in the respective manuals). But as MS is trying to do this generation to Sony, Sony basically bought the market out from under Sega last generation. Only Sega ended up thinking it really worthwhile to learn how to program their own system, and games like Virtua Fighter 2 still look better than most anything ever released on the PSX. The Saturn really did have some great games - though most of them were first-party Sega titles.
Lynx - I never played one (it was supposed to be quite good) but I had a friend who thought it was amazing. I don't remember anything about it. I don't know why it failed.
Several reasons - though it was a great system for its time. Big, backlit screen, excellent sound, great graphics for the day. But it was too big, ate batteries like nobody's business (the original version would get you 2 hours on 4 AA's if you were lucky), and was poorly marketed by Atari - who couldn't really do anything right by that point. It also didn't have a killer app like the competing GameBoy did (Tetris). In fact, there aren't that many good games for the Lynx in general, though the few that there are really make you wish the system would have stuck around for a while. Plus, for adult hands, the Lynx II (the version most people have) is really comfortable - even if it is still pretty big.
Re:The Atari 5200 needs to be mentioned....
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Dismal Console Failures
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· Score: 3, Interesting
" first of all 'cause it sucked major ass, and secondly because Atari **COULD** have had sales rights to the Nintendo Entertainment System instead."
Except that those potential rights would have come in 1985, not 1983 (when the 5200 was released).
In fact, the 5200 was not a failure in really any way. It was selling better than the Colecovision when the plug was pulled. It had some great games (mostly ports of Atari franchises from the arcade and 2600, enhanced for the 5200). It was a victim of the same crash of 1984 as everybody else.
The 7800 is the system you're thinking of, though it was clearly even a better system than the 5200. It was just mis-timed and badly marketed. But it had just as reasonable a chance of success as any console - who would have predicted at that time that Nintendo would be this unstoppable juggernaut in the late 1980's? The smart money would all have bet on Atari to win in the end. They just didn't. Predicting these things is often a lot easier with hindsight.
The most interesting thing about this article is what was left out and why. As someone who's been around consoles since the 1970's and owns more than 40(!) of them to this day (including the modern ones), I have to say I actually agree with his methodology. The Jaguar and Saturn both had a good chance at success, the TG-16 was actually a huge success in Japan, and in fact most of the systems considered "failures" here really weren't, in most ways other than the financial. The systems spotlighted in this article were just dismal and atrocious in pretty much every way - I don't even give the same props for the conception of some of these as the author does. How could a $700 console like the 3DO ever sound plausible to anyone? SNK tried the same thing with the Neo Geo AES, though at least they realized their system would never be mass-market despite having a built-in library of great arcade games - 3DO thought they could crack that $700 niche in a huge way from the ground up with all-new games. Stupid business decision, as all of these consoles were.
I stopped reading this "review" as soon as I read this right at the top of the first page:
"Audio CDs and DVDs with Dolby DTS coding can be played back in just the same way with the KiSS Player, as long as an appropriate decoder is connected to the digital output."
There are so many things wrong with that one sentence I don't even know where to begin. For one thing, there is no such thing as "Dolby DTS" - in fact, it says "Dolby Digital" right in the screenshot above this caption. Dolby Digital and DTS are two separate, competing encoding formats. For another, the way this is written seems like he's talking about both DVD's and Audio CD's with "Dolby DTS", which seems too dumb to even contemplate but given the previous mistake you never know. He could be talking about DVD Audio, which doesn't use either standard DTS or Dolby Digital, but which is full surround.
Tom's has been going downhill for a while now, and it's obvious from this one sentence that whoever wrote this review has absolutely no idea what he's talking about and probably very little idea how to write either. It's pointless reading a review of a piece of electronics gear when the reviewer is not even familiar with the underlying technology.
You know, for all Apple likes to talk about the speed of their PC's, or their ease of use or whatever, they really are way more style than substance. Their Powerbook keyboards are a perfect example of this.
Have any of you actually used one of these keyboards? Or more to the point, have any of you used one of these keyboards who have also used a real keyboard? I'm talking one of IBM's Thinkpad keyboards or even better, one of their old Model M keyboards with the tactile feel. Obviously it's a bit difficult to get that same feel into a laptop keyboard but Powerbook keyboards have a cheap, chiclet-style feel that I have a hard time dealing with as someone who's used to using "real keyboards".
And why is it so small? With all that space, you'd think they could do one of the following: a) make the keys bigger, or b) make the layout a bit less constricting. These keyboards are not ergonomic at all (and I'm not talking split - there's a lot more to keyboard ergonomics than just wrist position). They are intended to be nice to look at over anything else - a perfectly rectangular layout rather than true usefulness. They're probably also intended to save money; rather than creating a custom keyboard to take advantage of the notebooks extra size, simply slap in the same keyboard as the 14" Powerbooks have. I expect more in a top-of-the-line system, frankly.
I'll stick with my Thinkpads, thank you. I love the Mac OS but quite honestly, in day to day use the keyboard and screen are the two most important parts of any PC as they are the two components you will be interacting with the most. And the Powerbook keyboard really leaves a lot to be desired.
Ok, just a few opinions/perspectives from someone who is an actual member of the "MAME community" referenced in the Hanaho post.
First off, $300 is not too high for this sort of thing. This is not intended to compete with PS2 or GameCube, this is not going to be a mass market thing. The fact is Hanaho makes money selling $200 joysticks and $1,000 cabinets, and X-Gaming does also. Enough people will pay for this sort of thing for it to be profitable if it's truly as easy and quick as Hanaho says it will be, and truly as customizable. Lots of us have built PC's specifically for use with MAME and spent more than $300 to do it - *and* we have to deal with booting Windows and using the Windows (or Linux, or whatever) interface whenever we want to play. Something that would boot *in seconds* into MAME, and would load all ROMs and play them without a hitch, that's worth $300 to me and I'm sure a lot of other people. It would be a far more elegant solution to making your own MAME-based arcade cabinet than sticking a PC in there like we pretty much all do now, or you could just hook it up to your TV.
It would *have to* be upgradable though, at least as far as CPU and memory. That shouldn't be a major problem, though, as 99% of the games MAME supports will run on a slow CPU, and they'll all run on a faster CPU, so only those of us interested in playing KOF99 or Metal Slug X would really need to worry about it. Basically, build it with PC architecture but make the OS completely dedicated to MAME, and make it small and cheap (for a PC) and boot lightning quick. This thing would be easily profitable. There's far more value to running about 80% of all old arcade games (some of which are actually not that old - only a year or so in some cases) than to running 100% of all NES games (as someone else brought up, regarding those cheap Chinese NES emulators you can buy). We're talking thousands and thousands of games here, arcade-perfect; games you had to pay between a quarter and a buck to play when they were new, and still would if you managed to find them in a real arcade today. The relevant term here is "arcade-perfection" - nobody ever talks about "NES-perfection".
As for the ROMs, few developers are interested in licensing these things because many of them still make money from their older games. Look at Namco with their Namco Museum series, or Midway with their Midway Greatest Hits (not to mention their updates) - they still consider these IP that are worth protecting. It is technically piracy to run these on a MAME box without owning the original game, though nobody really cares that much to do anything about it and many of these publishers I've talked to actually find MAME a very impressive piece of software despite their legal misgivings. Capcom has been more flexible and actually does license their games to Hanaho. It's possible some other companies may follow suit if an actual MAME box were to come out but I doubt it would be worth it - I'd rather keep the costs of the box down than have a few extra licensed games.
Anyway, get to work, Hanaho! If it does all you've said it will and is at least CPU and memory-upgradable, I'm sold.
I think the biggest issue here is in using that trash as *evidence* in an investigation, who's to say it's actually *your* trash??
Your address on a mailing label probably helps. If I'm a cop looking for evidence of child porn possession, and I find an envelope with a known child pornographer's prints with your mailing address on it in the garbage, and I find fibers from photo paper in that envelope, I then have a pretty good case to search your house. And there's no point arguing it's not your garbage.
Scary? Only if you're the guy with the child porn. I'll take my chances with the cops vs. taking my chance with some dumb reporter posting my credit card bill in a newspaper.
It seems to me there is a difference between the police, who are guided by local, state and federal laws regarding use of evidence, and reporters, who have pretty much free reign under the US constitution in what they report. Quite honestly, despite the anti-government, anti-authority slant by both the article and the comments in the posting here, I would be far less comfortable with reporters stealing my garbage than with police collecting it. And I can entirely see the city's point about why reporters going around rummaging through peoples' garbage is a bad idea. Reporters are not answerable to anybody - government is.
That said, why would anyone expect that something they've acknowledged they no longer want and have therefore basically thrown up for grabs on the curb to be secure? As someone who lives in NYC, where it's routine for people to pick up junk they find lying on the side of the street, this just strikes me as idiotic. Not just dumb, not just stupid, but completely moronic. You threw it away; it's on the curb, it's no longer yours. End of story. Whether it's the police or the press taking it, if you're at all worried about it you should have either kept it or destroyed it.
There's a reason why shredders exist. And if you don't want to use one, that's your choice. But then don't complain when people go rummaging through your garbage looking for credit card statements and pay stubs. You put that stuff out on the curb of your own free will.
A 42" screen that I can watch TV on at 640x480. That's only nineteen DPI.
And? The CRT you're probably watching TV on right now is almost certainly equivalent to less than that - and because of the way phosphors work (vs. pixels), it appears even blurrier. Whatever your manufacturer says, nearly all NTSC TV sets struggle to display more than 350 or so lines of resolution across, and all are locked into the same vertical resolution.
I will agree that we're still at something less than the ideal with these plasma displays, and I won't be truly impressed until I see one that does the full 1080i HDTV spec (that's 1920x1080 resolution) and does it for less than $2,000 or so. But that's a ways off, and until it comes, a display that'll do full 480p is still quite a bit sharper than any NTSC CRT.
Of course, for the best picture quality you can always just buy a projection or CRT HDTV that already does do 1080i - there are plenty of them around that are cheaper than this plasma set and are beautiful to look at. But people like these plasma things because they're thin. And one day, thin will be the norm - that day is just not here yet.
Most of the responses I've seen here are simply proving Dvorak's point that most (not all) Linux coders and users simply do not have the ability to think outside the box. Linux is not like Windows because it has a customizable kernel? PLEASE. Do you think this is actually a selling point to all but three people on the planet? Yeah, I can just see my mom going out and buying a Linux-based computer for this reason - "umm, excuse me Mr. computer salesman, can you tell me which of these computers features an OS with a customizable kernel?"
A lot of you have missed the point of the article entirely. Dvorak wants Linux to succeed. He's no fan of Windows, and in fact bashed the hell out of Windows XP when it nearly fried several of his machines on install shortly after its release. The fact that many of you are failing to embrace his fundamental point that Linux needs to be more (or different) than a poor-man's Windows clone to succeed is basically what's ensuring the OS's defeat in all but the server marketplace. He's not bashing Linux, he's telling you all what needs to be done to fix it.
And he's absolutely right that Linux's main problem is that the geeks are in charge. Apple's OSX works because Apple's primary focus has always been interface design, not the underlying code. It took them 12-13 years to finally catch up to the rest of the world in the underlying technology of their OS but you know what? Nobody much cared because the end-user experience on an Apple computer has always been great, even when the system was stuck on a 16-bit unprotected OS. It's the end-user experience that matters, and that's just as much the realm of designers as it is programmers. And Apple still has the best interface designers around... with Microsoft a distant second. Hell, the pay's good. It's not the quantity of people you've got working for you (ie. the Linux dev community), it's the quality. One really, really amazing designer/coder to lead the interface design department is better than 100,000 mediocre designers/coders who can't even think for themselves.
Linux will never catch up to either Windows or the Mac OS in the desktop metaphor interface. It just won't happen - it's not as if Apple and MS are just sitting around as Linux makes huge advancements. Apple and MS continue to improve their interfaces just as the designers working on KDE and Gnome do, so the Linux interface - and the end user experience - will continue to be a step behind. Which means really, what's the point? Dvorak suggests trying something different, something unique. Put all your brains together and come up with something better; the desktop metaphor's gone about as far as it can anyway.
What's so hard to understand about that? And how can you argue with it?
Re:Hmmmm.... Haven't I seen this before?
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Build Your Own Mac
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· Score: 1
Please, PLEASE tell me this picture is some sort of joke. I just about did a spit-take when I saw this. I guess these Mac people probably still need a little more experience before they learn how to build a computer properly.
(hint: there should be a microscopic layer of thermal grease on the chip, not a dollop of mashed potatoes)
These lists are never accurate at all in terms of rarity, and so much of what constitutes the term "collectible" is subjective. Take Radiant Silvergun, for instance - is a game so easily available really all that rare? It may be desirable, but it's hardly a rare game. Contrast that with Chase the Chuckwagon, which I've seen maybe once in the entire time I've been checking out Ebay (and it sold for around $500, if I recall), and you see the obvious difference.
A lot of games are rarer than any of those on this list, but nobody wants them because either a) there's no story behind the game (this is why people want Chase the Chuckwagon), b) the game sucks, or c) both. On the other hand, a lot of games are a lot more desirable to most people than any of these, but they're quite common. When coming up with a list like this, you're obviously trying to find the balance of games that are ultra-desirable and at least fairly rare - but then I don't think the intro of this list (where the rarity alone is hyped) is all that descriptive of what the list really represents.
If I sound overly analytical, it's because I am one of these collectors myself. When deciding how much is a fair price for a game you really, really want that you know you'll probably never see again, these are the kinds of questions you mull over.
As far as PC games go... no way Zork, Wolfenstein, Leisure Suit Larry or any number of other games I've seen mentioned here are in the same league as a game like Chase the Chuckwagon in terms of rarity. These games were on regular store shelves for years and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people bought them. All of my friends had them, and I still have them. They're obviously somewhat rarer *now* than they were at the time - but think about it. Chase the Chuckwagon was rare when it was produced (and by "rare" I mean you could not ever walk into a store and buy it, you could not and cannot find it at flea markets or garage sales, you cannot find it online). Just imagine how rare it is now 20 years later.
Regardless, "rare" PC games are generally not nearly as collectible as console games because they're not as much of a commodity. I've never personally seen anyone pay $500 or even $200 for a rare PC game, although it's possible someone has at some point.
So does this mean that if I pay twice as much as I should for a CD (as we all do with the industry's fixed pricing) that I've really bought the equivalent of two CD's?
People act as if this is some sort of new phenomenon - the fact is depending on what numbers you count (whether you include hardware and accessories, whether you count worldwide or just US, etc.) the console game industry is anywhere from five to twelve times the size of the PC game industry. That doesn't happen overnight - in fact, I'd bet it's been that way since the days of the Atari 2600. The 2600 sold 28 million units over its lifetime, mostly in the US - does anyone really think 28 million people had PC's (especially for gaming purposes) in this country in, say, 1982? I sure don't. I don't think PC's reached that sort of penetration until the mid 1990's.
There was a time after the video game crash of 1984 when I would guess the PC game industry probably eclipsed the console game industry for a couple of years. But ever since the debut of the NES in 1985 console gaming has been gaining momentum again, and it's only accelerating as the PC game industry slowly dries up.
PC gaming has become very hit driven, and that's really screwed up the economics of it. A lot of people (especially here) think of PC gaming as some sort of panacea of free ideas where any average joe can break in with a brand new concept and make money, but despite the tighter control by manufacturers that actually better describes the console industry than the PC game industry. PC gaming has become little more than MMORPG's, real-time strategy, first-person shooters, and The Sims. It's become extremely tough for the little guy to break into the market. Meanwhile, console developers have better distribution and co-marketing with manufacturers. It's a lot easier for new concepts to gain traction (though the console industry is still very genre-oriented, it's not quite as hit-driven as the PC game industry. It's very easy for a decent game to make money without breaking the top 20). Most console games are games you'd never see on the PC because nobody'd ever take a chance on them, whereas most of the better PC games do appear on consoles.
People have been talking about convergence for a long time, but it seems to me that what we're really seeing is divergence. Instead of using one PC for all sorts of productivity and entertainment applications, we're using many devices for specialized applications. People just seem to like gaming on consoles better than on PC's, and eventually games on PC will probably be pretty few and far between. The PC itself is being redefined and will probably end up more limited in scope than what we've traditionally used them for in the past (despite this "media center" BS that MS is trying to push through) - I'm guessing the laptop form factor will eventually take over as the default PC configuration in the home, which will limit gaming upgrade options even further. No big loss; game consoles are cheap and powerful and there's no real drawback to using one over a PC for gaming.
Not only have Lite-On had a 52X drive out for a while, you can also flash the firmware from an "old" 48X drive up to 52X speed. An "overclocked" Lite-On drive is no different, hardware-wise, than the real thing.
That said, my 48X Lite-On is fast enough for me - and no, I've not burned any coasters writing at that speed. Those of you who believe it's impossible are living in the stone age - high speed writing is here and it works great. And it's cheap! Paid $53 for my drive, and 48X media is no more expensive than slower media - just as with the hardware, as the media improves it replaces the older, slower media at the same price.
There are physical characteristics of CD's that worry me about 52X writing (or reading), however, and that's why I won't go that high - it's not a question of getting a bad write, but a serious issue of exploding discs at such a high rotational speed.
Seems pretty obvious - we're paying $50 these days for something that cost $1,000 20 years ago (the VCR), and the cost of steel and plastic haven't come down *that* much (and you can bet there weren't a whole lot of microchips to drive up the cost in those early VCR's - the control was all mechanical, the processing completely analog).
Seems to me the people who complain about quality are the same people paying $50 for a machine that should rightly cost ten times that - if quality is what you're really after. It's like paying $200 for a round trip ticket from New York to London and complaining that you don't get a free headset or wine with your in-flight meal. You want quality? Pay for it. $500 VCR's still exist (I have one) and they still last - no way to say yet how long, but mine's been going strong for several years and I'm confident it'll be the last analog VCR I ever buy. The build quality (as expressed by fit & finish, and even the sounds it makes while doing various things) is excellent.
Same is true for all home electronics. There's a bare minimum a company needs to pay for the actual materials involved in producing any product. If you're paying a price that seems like it'd barely cover the cost of labor to put it together and shipping to get it here, much less the cost of parts and technology, then you're just not going to get the kind of construction quality you'd probably like. But you shouldn't expect it anyway.
You don't buy low-end stuff and expect high-end results. Build quality is a high-end feature and it always has been - the difference these days is that the low end exists at all in some of these product categories. Computers, VCR's, CD players, all these things used to be the realm of the elite - it's great that they've all slowly come down in price to where everybody can afford them, but please don't complain of the sacrifices made in order to achieve that. You can still get high-end results by paying high-end prices and buying high-end equipment, so nothing's *really* changed. If you've still got $1,000 to spend on a VCR, you'll get just as well-built a product as you would have 20 years ago, *and* with a lot more features (and most definitely vastly improved picture quality).
"As a creative workstation, Windows makes a shitty typewriter."
It's probably true that particular applications are more stable or have more options on one platform or another, but this blanket statement is complete crap. I work for a major game publisher and all of our design work is done on a mix of both PC's and Macs running the same software (Photoshop, Fontographer, Homesite, Dreamweaver, etc.). They talk to each other fine, the files all transfer back and forth fine, and nobody ever complains about something not being available for whatever platform they've chosen to use.
It's a myth that designers always choose Macs. The reason our work is done on a mix of machines is that about half of our designers have *chosen* to use PC's. We give our designers the tools they ask for; we don't force them to use one platform or other (many firms automatically assume designers want Macs, which is why Apple has a stranglehold on that market - the truth is, many designers *don't*). Designers are often just as interested in customizable hardware as techno geeks are, as it directly affects the speed and quality of their work.
Modern Macs are a great product and the marketing is obviously at least fairly successful (at least as far as creating a "boutique" brand). But these blanket statements about Windows being crap for design work are crap themselves. There's nothing inherent about Windows that makes it less useful for design work, and there are advantages and disadvantages to both platforms. In the end, like anything else, it comes down to the specific work you need to do and your own personal preferences. It's certainly not true that all designers prefer the Mac platform.
How will this help TW sell more copies of EW, Time, or whatever? How will it help them sell more ads on the web-based versions?
Seems like robbing Peter to pay Paul. They may get a couple hundred thousand more AOL subscribers (though I doubt it), but they'll get fewer subscriptions to their magazines and fewer ads on their online properties.
Couple of years ago plasma screens were all the rage at E3 (the industry's annual trade show in L.A., for those that don't know). For reasons that became obvious, most publishers switched back to CRT's the following year.
I don't know exactly where the problem lies and I don't know if it's been fixed in more modern plasma screens, but all the video games I saw at E3 on a variety of different plasma screens looked like crap. Most of the problems were with text - which was generally unreadable - but the graphics in general looked both blurry and harsh at the same time (almost as if you took a still image in Photoshop and did a smart-blur on it, then cranked up the sharpness well past the natural limit).
I suppose two things could help here if you're in the market for one of these sets:
a) you could just get used to the way this looks. b) higher-end or newer sets may not exhibit the same problems. No doubt you get what you pay for.
But I can tell you most publishers still use CRT's at E3, after the great experiment at going high-tech a couple years ago. Cost is probably a factor, but it's obviously not the only factor, as the gaming press ravaged quite a few games' visuals mainly because they just looked significantly worse on plasma sets than they otherwise would.
Er, I know we're all pro fair-use, anti-DRM and whatnot, but isn't this about the same as linking to a copyrighted MP3 file for the world to download? Seems like we're crossing a line here - Infogrames does own the copyright to this game, and I doubt they gave this guy permission to use it.
I'm all about beating down the RIAA and MPAA and such, but I'm a little uncomfortable at such a blatant disrespect for copyright law that's been around for far longer than the Internet.
"Obviously LCD still hasn't bettered CRT so keep you old monitor and spend the dosh on something else instead."
RTFA. This is obviously spoken by someone who a) has not seen a modern LCD in operation, anb b) has not bothered to even read what they're commenting on. Most people I know (including myself) who have switched to LCD's would never go back. Why would you want a CRT with its blurry text, imperfect geometry, flicker, massive footprint, unreasonable power requirements, and lack of screen brightness? CRT's do still have their advantages, but LCD's have more, and the advantages an LCD has are also more important, IMO, to the computing tasks most people engage in most often (especially sitting there reading a lot of text - which is something you need to do in nearly *every* computer application).
FYI, I also use my KDS RAD-5 for gaming and watching movies, not to mention image editing, and I love it for all of those applications as well (to be sure, the RAD-5 is exceptional for its price, and many LCD's do not measure up especially as far as the 25ms pixel response time and the quality of the built-in ADC).
Once you use a good, modern LCD, going back to CRT's feels like revisiting the stone ages. I use a 19" Trinitron here at work and it's practically hell compared to my 15" LCD at home (sure, I wish I had a 17" LCD - equivalent to a 19" CRT - but I'll live with my 15" until I can afford larger). The image quality of my LCD is just that much better.
While "silent" computing is a panacea that may or may not be worth it in the end, "quiet" computing is not difficult at all and can result in perfectly acceptable system temps and plenty long life. I've never understood these people that run these 60mm Delta fans on their CPU's on these tiny little clip-on heat-sinks. Here are the secrets to quiet (not silent, but almost unnoticeable) yet stable and cool computing:
1. A large, heavy CPU heatsink such as the Alpha PAL8045 (for an Athlon system - this is what I have for my XP1700+) - clip-ons need not apply. Real men BOLT their heat-sinks to their motherboards.
2. A large fan for said heat-sink. 80mm minimum - 92mm if it'll fit in your system. Large fans can run at lower RPM's for a given amount of air exchange, thereby lowering the noise level. They also simply sound *different* even at the same RPM as smaller fans - the sound is lower in pitch and not as annoying. Preferably get one with either auto- or manual-adjusting fan speed - mine is manual so I can dial down the RPM's in winter.
3. Remove the mobo chipset fan. I have been running with no chipset fan for more than a year with no instability problems at all (my computer simply does not crash, so I haven't even had crashes I may have misattributed to something else). Obviously, I do have a heatsink on there - but it's the stock heatsink the mobo came with (Abit KT7A).
4. One large case fan - 92mm if it'll fit, otherwise 80mm. Again get one with adjustable RPM's. There's really no need to have more than 1 fan if you have a good PSU and a good case.
5. Quiet PSU - I use an Enermax "whisper" model but as this article points out there are others that fit the bill just as well.
6. Quiet hard drive - it is true that Seagate's Barracudas are by far the quietest around right now, and they don't cost any more than other drives. (FYI, the Barracuda V's are even quieter than the Barracuda IV used in this article, but you can't buy them quite yet, apparently.)
And 7. (optional) If you're going to overclock your graphics card, use the stock HSF but make sure you take it off temporarily to apply a good, thin layer of thermal grease (most graphics card suppliers are pretty incompetent in this area). Also, if your card does not have heatsinks on the RAM, no hurt in adding some - they do help in RAM overclocking a bit and look cooler than bare chips. The point is, though, there's no point in using an aftermarket fan for overclocking - stock fans are generally fine and are usually pretty quiet.
That's about it. My temps are very low, as is my noise level. This is a compromise I think anyone on either side of the performance/livability fence would be happy with. I previously tried a Delta fan on my CPU and I could not live with it for even 2 days - my current setup gives me the same temps with very little noise (I sleep in the same room as my PC, and even leave the PC on at night purposefully now - the quiet, low "whir" of the couple of fans I have actually helps me fall asleep). I don't have a decibel meter, but my current PC is no louder to me than my old P-200 from years ago.
Oh, and BTW, my graphics card *is* overclocked with the near-silent stock fan it came with - again, no stability problems at all.
"It seems that this has usually been their strategy with new products. Simply plug away at them as they get progressively better, combined with some nice market leverage. I wonder if in 3 years Nintendo and Sony will still be smiling. This is almost exactly how the Office story played out."
And this kind of thinking is exactly what's going to kill the Xbox. I'm sorry, but game consoles are not office software. What you're saying is no different than saying "that new Microsoft vacuum cleaner may not be doing so great now, but just look at what happened with Office." I mean, they're not comparable products. Microsoft doesn't know anything about vacuum cleaners, and it's likely they'll *never* know as much as Hoover or any of the big boys. It's not their core business. Video games isn't either.
MS has not been successful at everything they've done. Look at Hailstorm. Look at Microsoft Bob. Big companies do make mistakes and bite off more than they can chew and MS is no exception. Video games are not MS's realm, and they're having *more* trouble now than they were in the beginning (look at their waning Japanese developer support, which at root is what's responsible for all these Capcom buyout rumors going around right now).
I was excited about Xbox when it was first announced. But it's been exactly what I feared it would be right from the start; a PC port-box, a system for mainly western games, a big, ugly American console in third place worldwide with waning industry support and a scorched-earth marketing plan behind it. It honestly doesn't help the system's image that it's been cracked by Linux geeks. Talk about marginalizing the branding.
I own an Xbox (along with a bunch of accessories and 7 or 8 games) so don't take this as ill-informed fanboy drivel. The system just hasn't proven itself even to the point the GameCube has, and it's not looking like it's in any position to in the future. These "AAA" games mentioned here would mostly be B- or C-list material on the PS2 or GameCube. About the only game to get excited about at all from X02 is Perfect Dark Zero, and that's a sequel to a game console first-person shooter - and game consoles are not the best venue for first-person shooters.
Quite honestly, if you hate reading subtitles the best way to watch this movie is without them - but in Japanese. (You'd do this in this country by watching a subbed version and simply ignoring the subtitles.) This is the way I saw it (in Japan) and I was able to follow the entire story from beginning to end without much of a problem - such is the genius of Miyazaki. I did need somebody to explain some of the finer plot points afterwards but you could easily find something that accomplishes the same thing online.
I'm sorry, but *adding* dialogue where none existed before (especially as a voice-over, as in Spirited Away) is *not* right. Anyone who's seen both versions of Blade Runner will tell you that - whatever your preference, anyone would admit the film was significantly altered (for better or worse) by adding the voice-over. I'll take the original, thank you (or in BR's case, the version Scott wanted) - call me a purist but I want to see movies the way they were intended.
Yes, of course if subtitles are available I'll take them, as I consider them the least intrusive way of allowing as large an audience as possible to enjoy a film in their own language, but dubbing is already stretching it, and adding dialogue where none existed is going too far. You're not seeing the real Sen to Chihiro/Spirited Away if you watch this film dubbed.
As a sidenote, most of the interpretations I've seen written about the dub have been way off as far as the meaning of the film. Obviously I don't speak Japanese, but I live with someone who does and I've read plenty of articles about the original release from those who *are* bi-lingual (and I was able to get the overall themes myself even without understanding much dialogue). I'm wondering if not just the wording but the actual theme of the film was somehow changed in the dub. The film is about gluttony and greed, not "a little girl's journey into womanhood" or some such nonsense, as I've read in a couple reviews today. Did they change the dialogue to the point of over-sanitizing it for a western children's audience? It's really quite a dark film in Japanese.
Slashdot Mirror
Atari Jaguar - Why wasn't this on the list? I rented this thing too, and it sucked. First of all, if you think that the X-Box's origional controller was big (which it wasn't that bad) try this thing.
Well I have both sitting right in front of me and the Xbox's is bigger and significantly heavier. If anything that tells you how big the Xbox's original controller is - the fact that a controller with a keypad on it could actually be smaller than the XB controller is pretty amazing (though pretty much all the keypad controllers I can think of - Intellivision, Colecovision, 5200, Jaguar to name a few - are smaller than the XB controller). It also tells you how we don't always remember things as they really were. Hindsight is not always 20/20 (though it's usually closer to that than foresight is).
CDI - To tell you the truth, I remember hearing of this, and seeing games in magazines. But I never saw a single one for sale, that I can remember. That's a great recipe for success. I also remember hearing it was expensive.
The CD-i was not specifically intended as a game system. I don't actually recall if the CD-i came before or after the 3DO, but it's possible Philips was trying to learn the lessons of 3DO. CD-i was marketed as a full entertainment set-top box capable of playing CD's, movies and of course games. The gaming capability of the system was not very good, though - not up to the standards of the systems it was "competing" with (though again, they were trying to go for the more casual gaming/home entertainment market). The CD-i is probably the main reason why gamers these days cringe whenever anyone uses the word "set-top box" or starts talking about doing things like adding movie playing or other functionality to game consoles.
Saturn - Two games I wanted to play. I wanted to play Nights (still waiting for a rerelease of that) and Panzer Dragoon (that game looked so amazing at the time.) Plus, the Saturn had all those cool "Theater of the Eye" commercials. Very cool. But of course, it was expensive as hell, the analog controller (when it finally came out for Nights) was weird (and fixed (somewhat) in the Dreamcast). Part of it's problem what that it was supposed to be terrible to develop for because of it's dual CPU nature.
Yes, the Saturn has a complicated architecture, but then so does the PS2 and it doesn't seem to have mattered in its case. Developers will develop for a system no matter how hard it is if they believe it's viable. In fact, the Saturn was viable for a while, and was actually quite successful in Japan (like the TG-16) - which is why it doesn't belong on this list. Sega and other developers continued supporting the Saturn in Japan until after the Dreamcast's release.
There are so many misconceptions about the Saturn it's hard to even count. One of the biggest is that it was designed as a 2D system, with 3D added at the last minute in response to Sony's PSX announcement. This is refuted in section 15.2 of the Saturn hardware FAQ (which you can find at GameFAQs - sorry, they don't allow direct linking). The Saturn was always a 3D system, designed as a sort of home version of the Model 2 arcade board, but had its texture capabilities enhanced in response to Sony's PSX.
The Saturn does remain one of the best 2D systems ever, though (perhaps only the Neo Geo - with its processing power and unlimited, cartridge-based RAM beats it) and in fact had more VRAM and greater raw 3D polygon-pushing power than the PSX (>500,000 vs. ~360,000, by the published specs in the respective manuals). But as MS is trying to do this generation to Sony, Sony basically bought the market out from under Sega last generation. Only Sega ended up thinking it really worthwhile to learn how to program their own system, and games like Virtua Fighter 2 still look better than most anything ever released on the PSX. The Saturn really did have some great games - though most of them were first-party Sega titles.
Lynx - I never played one (it was supposed to be quite good) but I had a friend who thought it was amazing. I don't remember anything about it. I don't know why it failed.
Several reasons - though it was a great system for its time. Big, backlit screen, excellent sound, great graphics for the day. But it was too big, ate batteries like nobody's business (the original version would get you 2 hours on 4 AA's if you were lucky), and was poorly marketed by Atari - who couldn't really do anything right by that point. It also didn't have a killer app like the competing GameBoy did (Tetris). In fact, there aren't that many good games for the Lynx in general, though the few that there are really make you wish the system would have stuck around for a while. Plus, for adult hands, the Lynx II (the version most people have) is really comfortable - even if it is still pretty big.
" first of all 'cause it sucked major ass, and secondly because Atari **COULD** have had sales rights to the Nintendo Entertainment System instead."
Except that those potential rights would have come in 1985, not 1983 (when the 5200 was released).
In fact, the 5200 was not a failure in really any way. It was selling better than the Colecovision when the plug was pulled. It had some great games (mostly ports of Atari franchises from the arcade and 2600, enhanced for the 5200). It was a victim of the same crash of 1984 as everybody else.
The 7800 is the system you're thinking of, though it was clearly even a better system than the 5200. It was just mis-timed and badly marketed. But it had just as reasonable a chance of success as any console - who would have predicted at that time that Nintendo would be this unstoppable juggernaut in the late 1980's? The smart money would all have bet on Atari to win in the end. They just didn't. Predicting these things is often a lot easier with hindsight.
The most interesting thing about this article is what was left out and why. As someone who's been around consoles since the 1970's and owns more than 40(!) of them to this day (including the modern ones), I have to say I actually agree with his methodology. The Jaguar and Saturn both had a good chance at success, the TG-16 was actually a huge success in Japan, and in fact most of the systems considered "failures" here really weren't, in most ways other than the financial. The systems spotlighted in this article were just dismal and atrocious in pretty much every way - I don't even give the same props for the conception of some of these as the author does. How could a $700 console like the 3DO ever sound plausible to anyone? SNK tried the same thing with the Neo Geo AES, though at least they realized their system would never be mass-market despite having a built-in library of great arcade games - 3DO thought they could crack that $700 niche in a huge way from the ground up with all-new games. Stupid business decision, as all of these consoles were.
"Plus we have heard that linux is an excellent replacement for legacy *inxs."
I dunno, I think the first couple of INXS albums rock harder than any Linux distribution ever could.
I stopped reading this "review" as soon as I read this right at the top of the first page:
"Audio CDs and DVDs with Dolby DTS coding can be played back in just the same way with the KiSS Player, as long as an appropriate decoder is connected to the digital output."
There are so many things wrong with that one sentence I don't even know where to begin. For one thing, there is no such thing as "Dolby DTS" - in fact, it says "Dolby Digital" right in the screenshot above this caption. Dolby Digital and DTS are two separate, competing encoding formats. For another, the way this is written seems like he's talking about both DVD's and Audio CD's with "Dolby DTS", which seems too dumb to even contemplate but given the previous mistake you never know. He could be talking about DVD Audio, which doesn't use either standard DTS or Dolby Digital, but which is full surround.
Tom's has been going downhill for a while now, and it's obvious from this one sentence that whoever wrote this review has absolutely no idea what he's talking about and probably very little idea how to write either. It's pointless reading a review of a piece of electronics gear when the reviewer is not even familiar with the underlying technology.
You know, for all Apple likes to talk about the speed of their PC's, or their ease of use or whatever, they really are way more style than substance. Their Powerbook keyboards are a perfect example of this.
Have any of you actually used one of these keyboards? Or more to the point, have any of you used one of these keyboards who have also used a real keyboard? I'm talking one of IBM's Thinkpad keyboards or even better, one of their old Model M keyboards with the tactile feel. Obviously it's a bit difficult to get that same feel into a laptop keyboard but Powerbook keyboards have a cheap, chiclet-style feel that I have a hard time dealing with as someone who's used to using "real keyboards".
And why is it so small? With all that space, you'd think they could do one of the following: a) make the keys bigger, or b) make the layout a bit less constricting. These keyboards are not ergonomic at all (and I'm not talking split - there's a lot more to keyboard ergonomics than just wrist position). They are intended to be nice to look at over anything else - a perfectly rectangular layout rather than true usefulness. They're probably also intended to save money; rather than creating a custom keyboard to take advantage of the notebooks extra size, simply slap in the same keyboard as the 14" Powerbooks have. I expect more in a top-of-the-line system, frankly.
I'll stick with my Thinkpads, thank you. I love the Mac OS but quite honestly, in day to day use the keyboard and screen are the two most important parts of any PC as they are the two components you will be interacting with the most. And the Powerbook keyboard really leaves a lot to be desired.
Ok, just a few opinions/perspectives from someone who is an actual member of the "MAME community" referenced in the Hanaho post.
First off, $300 is not too high for this sort of thing. This is not intended to compete with PS2 or GameCube, this is not going to be a mass market thing. The fact is Hanaho makes money selling $200 joysticks and $1,000 cabinets, and X-Gaming does also. Enough people will pay for this sort of thing for it to be profitable if it's truly as easy and quick as Hanaho says it will be, and truly as customizable. Lots of us have built PC's specifically for use with MAME and spent more than $300 to do it - *and* we have to deal with booting Windows and using the Windows (or Linux, or whatever) interface whenever we want to play. Something that would boot *in seconds* into MAME, and would load all ROMs and play them without a hitch, that's worth $300 to me and I'm sure a lot of other people. It would be a far more elegant solution to making your own MAME-based arcade cabinet than sticking a PC in there like we pretty much all do now, or you could just hook it up to your TV.
It would *have to* be upgradable though, at least as far as CPU and memory. That shouldn't be a major problem, though, as 99% of the games MAME supports will run on a slow CPU, and they'll all run on a faster CPU, so only those of us interested in playing KOF99 or Metal Slug X would really need to worry about it. Basically, build it with PC architecture but make the OS completely dedicated to MAME, and make it small and cheap (for a PC) and boot lightning quick. This thing would be easily profitable. There's far more value to running about 80% of all old arcade games (some of which are actually not that old - only a year or so in some cases) than to running 100% of all NES games (as someone else brought up, regarding those cheap Chinese NES emulators you can buy). We're talking thousands and thousands of games here, arcade-perfect; games you had to pay between a quarter and a buck to play when they were new, and still would if you managed to find them in a real arcade today. The relevant term here is "arcade-perfection" - nobody ever talks about "NES-perfection".
As for the ROMs, few developers are interested in licensing these things because many of them still make money from their older games. Look at Namco with their Namco Museum series, or Midway with their Midway Greatest Hits (not to mention their updates) - they still consider these IP that are worth protecting. It is technically piracy to run these on a MAME box without owning the original game, though nobody really cares that much to do anything about it and many of these publishers I've talked to actually find MAME a very impressive piece of software despite their legal misgivings. Capcom has been more flexible and actually does license their games to Hanaho. It's possible some other companies may follow suit if an actual MAME box were to come out but I doubt it would be worth it - I'd rather keep the costs of the box down than have a few extra licensed games.
Anyway, get to work, Hanaho! If it does all you've said it will and is at least CPU and memory-upgradable, I'm sold.
I think the biggest issue here is in using that trash as *evidence* in an investigation, who's to say it's actually *your* trash??
Your address on a mailing label probably helps. If I'm a cop looking for evidence of child porn possession, and I find an envelope with a known child pornographer's prints with your mailing address on it in the garbage, and I find fibers from photo paper in that envelope, I then have a pretty good case to search your house. And there's no point arguing it's not your garbage.
Scary? Only if you're the guy with the child porn. I'll take my chances with the cops vs. taking my chance with some dumb reporter posting my credit card bill in a newspaper.
It seems to me there is a difference between the police, who are guided by local, state and federal laws regarding use of evidence, and reporters, who have pretty much free reign under the US constitution in what they report. Quite honestly, despite the anti-government, anti-authority slant by both the article and the comments in the posting here, I would be far less comfortable with reporters stealing my garbage than with police collecting it. And I can entirely see the city's point about why reporters going around rummaging through peoples' garbage is a bad idea. Reporters are not answerable to anybody - government is.
That said, why would anyone expect that something they've acknowledged they no longer want and have therefore basically thrown up for grabs on the curb to be secure? As someone who lives in NYC, where it's routine for people to pick up junk they find lying on the side of the street, this just strikes me as idiotic. Not just dumb, not just stupid, but completely moronic. You threw it away; it's on the curb, it's no longer yours. End of story. Whether it's the police or the press taking it, if you're at all worried about it you should have either kept it or destroyed it.
There's a reason why shredders exist. And if you don't want to use one, that's your choice. But then don't complain when people go rummaging through your garbage looking for credit card statements and pay stubs. You put that stuff out on the curb of your own free will.
A 42" screen that I can watch TV on at 640x480. That's only nineteen DPI.
And? The CRT you're probably watching TV on right now is almost certainly equivalent to less than that - and because of the way phosphors work (vs. pixels), it appears even blurrier. Whatever your manufacturer says, nearly all NTSC TV sets struggle to display more than 350 or so lines of resolution across, and all are locked into the same vertical resolution.
I will agree that we're still at something less than the ideal with these plasma displays, and I won't be truly impressed until I see one that does the full 1080i HDTV spec (that's 1920x1080 resolution) and does it for less than $2,000 or so. But that's a ways off, and until it comes, a display that'll do full 480p is still quite a bit sharper than any NTSC CRT.
Of course, for the best picture quality you can always just buy a projection or CRT HDTV that already does do 1080i - there are plenty of them around that are cheaper than this plasma set and are beautiful to look at. But people like these plasma things because they're thin. And one day, thin will be the norm - that day is just not here yet.
Most of the responses I've seen here are simply proving Dvorak's point that most (not all) Linux coders and users simply do not have the ability to think outside the box. Linux is not like Windows because it has a customizable kernel? PLEASE. Do you think this is actually a selling point to all but three people on the planet? Yeah, I can just see my mom going out and buying a Linux-based computer for this reason - "umm, excuse me Mr. computer salesman, can you tell me which of these computers features an OS with a customizable kernel?"
A lot of you have missed the point of the article entirely. Dvorak wants Linux to succeed. He's no fan of Windows, and in fact bashed the hell out of Windows XP when it nearly fried several of his machines on install shortly after its release. The fact that many of you are failing to embrace his fundamental point that Linux needs to be more (or different) than a poor-man's Windows clone to succeed is basically what's ensuring the OS's defeat in all but the server marketplace. He's not bashing Linux, he's telling you all what needs to be done to fix it.
And he's absolutely right that Linux's main problem is that the geeks are in charge. Apple's OSX works because Apple's primary focus has always been interface design, not the underlying code. It took them 12-13 years to finally catch up to the rest of the world in the underlying technology of their OS but you know what? Nobody much cared because the end-user experience on an Apple computer has always been great, even when the system was stuck on a 16-bit unprotected OS. It's the end-user experience that matters, and that's just as much the realm of designers as it is programmers. And Apple still has the best interface designers around... with Microsoft a distant second. Hell, the pay's good. It's not the quantity of people you've got working for you (ie. the Linux dev community), it's the quality. One really, really amazing designer/coder to lead the interface design department is better than 100,000 mediocre designers/coders who can't even think for themselves.
Linux will never catch up to either Windows or the Mac OS in the desktop metaphor interface. It just won't happen - it's not as if Apple and MS are just sitting around as Linux makes huge advancements. Apple and MS continue to improve their interfaces just as the designers working on KDE and Gnome do, so the Linux interface - and the end user experience - will continue to be a step behind. Which means really, what's the point? Dvorak suggests trying something different, something unique. Put all your brains together and come up with something better; the desktop metaphor's gone about as far as it can anyway.
What's so hard to understand about that? And how can you argue with it?
Please, PLEASE tell me this picture is some sort of joke. I just about did a spit-take when I saw this. I guess these Mac people probably still need a little more experience before they learn how to build a computer properly.
(hint: there should be a microscopic layer of thermal grease on the chip, not a dollop of mashed potatoes)
These lists are never accurate at all in terms of rarity, and so much of what constitutes the term "collectible" is subjective. Take Radiant Silvergun, for instance - is a game so easily available really all that rare? It may be desirable, but it's hardly a rare game. Contrast that with Chase the Chuckwagon, which I've seen maybe once in the entire time I've been checking out Ebay (and it sold for around $500, if I recall), and you see the obvious difference.
A lot of games are rarer than any of those on this list, but nobody wants them because either a) there's no story behind the game (this is why people want Chase the Chuckwagon), b) the game sucks, or c) both. On the other hand, a lot of games are a lot more desirable to most people than any of these, but they're quite common. When coming up with a list like this, you're obviously trying to find the balance of games that are ultra-desirable and at least fairly rare - but then I don't think the intro of this list (where the rarity alone is hyped) is all that descriptive of what the list really represents.
If I sound overly analytical, it's because I am one of these collectors myself. When deciding how much is a fair price for a game you really, really want that you know you'll probably never see again, these are the kinds of questions you mull over.
As far as PC games go... no way Zork, Wolfenstein, Leisure Suit Larry or any number of other games I've seen mentioned here are in the same league as a game like Chase the Chuckwagon in terms of rarity. These games were on regular store shelves for years and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people bought them. All of my friends had them, and I still have them. They're obviously somewhat rarer *now* than they were at the time - but think about it. Chase the Chuckwagon was rare when it was produced (and by "rare" I mean you could not ever walk into a store and buy it, you could not and cannot find it at flea markets or garage sales, you cannot find it online). Just imagine how rare it is now 20 years later.
Regardless, "rare" PC games are generally not nearly as collectible as console games because they're not as much of a commodity. I've never personally seen anyone pay $500 or even $200 for a rare PC game, although it's possible someone has at some point.
So does this mean that if I pay twice as much as I should for a CD (as we all do with the industry's fixed pricing) that I've really bought the equivalent of two CD's?
People act as if this is some sort of new phenomenon - the fact is depending on what numbers you count (whether you include hardware and accessories, whether you count worldwide or just US, etc.) the console game industry is anywhere from five to twelve times the size of the PC game industry. That doesn't happen overnight - in fact, I'd bet it's been that way since the days of the Atari 2600. The 2600 sold 28 million units over its lifetime, mostly in the US - does anyone really think 28 million people had PC's (especially for gaming purposes) in this country in, say, 1982? I sure don't. I don't think PC's reached that sort of penetration until the mid 1990's.
There was a time after the video game crash of 1984 when I would guess the PC game industry probably eclipsed the console game industry for a couple of years. But ever since the debut of the NES in 1985 console gaming has been gaining momentum again, and it's only accelerating as the PC game industry slowly dries up.
PC gaming has become very hit driven, and that's really screwed up the economics of it. A lot of people (especially here) think of PC gaming as some sort of panacea of free ideas where any average joe can break in with a brand new concept and make money, but despite the tighter control by manufacturers that actually better describes the console industry than the PC game industry. PC gaming has become little more than MMORPG's, real-time strategy, first-person shooters, and The Sims. It's become extremely tough for the little guy to break into the market. Meanwhile, console developers have better distribution and co-marketing with manufacturers. It's a lot easier for new concepts to gain traction (though the console industry is still very genre-oriented, it's not quite as hit-driven as the PC game industry. It's very easy for a decent game to make money without breaking the top 20). Most console games are games you'd never see on the PC because nobody'd ever take a chance on them, whereas most of the better PC games do appear on consoles.
People have been talking about convergence for a long time, but it seems to me that what we're really seeing is divergence. Instead of using one PC for all sorts of productivity and entertainment applications, we're using many devices for specialized applications. People just seem to like gaming on consoles better than on PC's, and eventually games on PC will probably be pretty few and far between. The PC itself is being redefined and will probably end up more limited in scope than what we've traditionally used them for in the past (despite this "media center" BS that MS is trying to push through) - I'm guessing the laptop form factor will eventually take over as the default PC configuration in the home, which will limit gaming upgrade options even further. No big loss; game consoles are cheap and powerful and there's no real drawback to using one over a PC for gaming.
Not only have Lite-On had a 52X drive out for a while, you can also flash the firmware from an "old" 48X drive up to 52X speed. An "overclocked" Lite-On drive is no different, hardware-wise, than the real thing.
That said, my 48X Lite-On is fast enough for me - and no, I've not burned any coasters writing at that speed. Those of you who believe it's impossible are living in the stone age - high speed writing is here and it works great. And it's cheap! Paid $53 for my drive, and 48X media is no more expensive than slower media - just as with the hardware, as the media improves it replaces the older, slower media at the same price.
There are physical characteristics of CD's that worry me about 52X writing (or reading), however, and that's why I won't go that high - it's not a question of getting a bad write, but a serious issue of exploding discs at such a high rotational speed.
Seems pretty obvious - we're paying $50 these days for something that cost $1,000 20 years ago (the VCR), and the cost of steel and plastic haven't come down *that* much (and you can bet there weren't a whole lot of microchips to drive up the cost in those early VCR's - the control was all mechanical, the processing completely analog).
Seems to me the people who complain about quality are the same people paying $50 for a machine that should rightly cost ten times that - if quality is what you're really after. It's like paying $200 for a round trip ticket from New York to London and complaining that you don't get a free headset or wine with your in-flight meal. You want quality? Pay for it. $500 VCR's still exist (I have one) and they still last - no way to say yet how long, but mine's been going strong for several years and I'm confident it'll be the last analog VCR I ever buy. The build quality (as expressed by fit & finish, and even the sounds it makes while doing various things) is excellent.
Same is true for all home electronics. There's a bare minimum a company needs to pay for the actual materials involved in producing any product. If you're paying a price that seems like it'd barely cover the cost of labor to put it together and shipping to get it here, much less the cost of parts and technology, then you're just not going to get the kind of construction quality you'd probably like. But you shouldn't expect it anyway.
You don't buy low-end stuff and expect high-end results. Build quality is a high-end feature and it always has been - the difference these days is that the low end exists at all in some of these product categories. Computers, VCR's, CD players, all these things used to be the realm of the elite - it's great that they've all slowly come down in price to where everybody can afford them, but please don't complain of the sacrifices made in order to achieve that. You can still get high-end results by paying high-end prices and buying high-end equipment, so nothing's *really* changed. If you've still got $1,000 to spend on a VCR, you'll get just as well-built a product as you would have 20 years ago, *and* with a lot more features (and most definitely vastly improved picture quality).
"As a creative workstation, Windows makes a shitty typewriter."
It's probably true that particular applications are more stable or have more options on one platform or another, but this blanket statement is complete crap. I work for a major game publisher and all of our design work is done on a mix of both PC's and Macs running the same software (Photoshop, Fontographer, Homesite, Dreamweaver, etc.). They talk to each other fine, the files all transfer back and forth fine, and nobody ever complains about something not being available for whatever platform they've chosen to use.
It's a myth that designers always choose Macs. The reason our work is done on a mix of machines is that about half of our designers have *chosen* to use PC's. We give our designers the tools they ask for; we don't force them to use one platform or other (many firms automatically assume designers want Macs, which is why Apple has a stranglehold on that market - the truth is, many designers *don't*). Designers are often just as interested in customizable hardware as techno geeks are, as it directly affects the speed and quality of their work.
Modern Macs are a great product and the marketing is obviously at least fairly successful (at least as far as creating a "boutique" brand). But these blanket statements about Windows being crap for design work are crap themselves. There's nothing inherent about Windows that makes it less useful for design work, and there are advantages and disadvantages to both platforms. In the end, like anything else, it comes down to the specific work you need to do and your own personal preferences. It's certainly not true that all designers prefer the Mac platform.
How will this help TW sell more copies of EW, Time, or whatever? How will it help them sell more ads on the web-based versions?
Seems like robbing Peter to pay Paul. They may get a couple hundred thousand more AOL subscribers (though I doubt it), but they'll get fewer subscriptions to their magazines and fewer ads on their online properties.
Couple of years ago plasma screens were all the rage at E3 (the industry's annual trade show in L.A., for those that don't know). For reasons that became obvious, most publishers switched back to CRT's the following year.
I don't know exactly where the problem lies and I don't know if it's been fixed in more modern plasma screens, but all the video games I saw at E3 on a variety of different plasma screens looked like crap. Most of the problems were with text - which was generally unreadable - but the graphics in general looked both blurry and harsh at the same time (almost as if you took a still image in Photoshop and did a smart-blur on it, then cranked up the sharpness well past the natural limit).
I suppose two things could help here if you're in the market for one of these sets:
a) you could just get used to the way this looks.
b) higher-end or newer sets may not exhibit the same problems. No doubt you get what you pay for.
But I can tell you most publishers still use CRT's at E3, after the great experiment at going high-tech a couple years ago. Cost is probably a factor, but it's obviously not the only factor, as the gaming press ravaged quite a few games' visuals mainly because they just looked significantly worse on plasma sets than they otherwise would.
Er, I know we're all pro fair-use, anti-DRM and whatnot, but isn't this about the same as linking to a copyrighted MP3 file for the world to download? Seems like we're crossing a line here - Infogrames does own the copyright to this game, and I doubt they gave this guy permission to use it.
I'm all about beating down the RIAA and MPAA and such, but I'm a little uncomfortable at such a blatant disrespect for copyright law that's been around for far longer than the Internet.
"Obviously LCD still hasn't bettered CRT so keep you old monitor and spend the dosh on something else instead."
RTFA. This is obviously spoken by someone who a) has not seen a modern LCD in operation, anb b) has not bothered to even read what they're commenting on. Most people I know (including myself) who have switched to LCD's would never go back. Why would you want a CRT with its blurry text, imperfect geometry, flicker, massive footprint, unreasonable power requirements, and lack of screen brightness? CRT's do still have their advantages, but LCD's have more, and the advantages an LCD has are also more important, IMO, to the computing tasks most people engage in most often (especially sitting there reading a lot of text - which is something you need to do in nearly *every* computer application).
FYI, I also use my KDS RAD-5 for gaming and watching movies, not to mention image editing, and I love it for all of those applications as well (to be sure, the RAD-5 is exceptional for its price, and many LCD's do not measure up especially as far as the 25ms pixel response time and the quality of the built-in ADC).
Once you use a good, modern LCD, going back to CRT's feels like revisiting the stone ages. I use a 19" Trinitron here at work and it's practically hell compared to my 15" LCD at home (sure, I wish I had a 17" LCD - equivalent to a 19" CRT - but I'll live with my 15" until I can afford larger). The image quality of my LCD is just that much better.
While "silent" computing is a panacea that may or may not be worth it in the end, "quiet" computing is not difficult at all and can result in perfectly acceptable system temps and plenty long life. I've never understood these people that run these 60mm Delta fans on their CPU's on these tiny little clip-on heat-sinks. Here are the secrets to quiet (not silent, but almost unnoticeable) yet stable and cool computing:
1. A large, heavy CPU heatsink such as the Alpha PAL8045 (for an Athlon system - this is what I have for my XP1700+) - clip-ons need not apply. Real men BOLT their heat-sinks to their motherboards.
2. A large fan for said heat-sink. 80mm minimum - 92mm if it'll fit in your system. Large fans can run at lower RPM's for a given amount of air exchange, thereby lowering the noise level. They also simply sound *different* even at the same RPM as smaller fans - the sound is lower in pitch and not as annoying. Preferably get one with either auto- or manual-adjusting fan speed - mine is manual so I can dial down the RPM's in winter.
3. Remove the mobo chipset fan. I have been running with no chipset fan for more than a year with no instability problems at all (my computer simply does not crash, so I haven't even had crashes I may have misattributed to something else). Obviously, I do have a heatsink on there - but it's the stock heatsink the mobo came with (Abit KT7A).
4. One large case fan - 92mm if it'll fit, otherwise 80mm. Again get one with adjustable RPM's. There's really no need to have more than 1 fan if you have a good PSU and a good case.
5. Quiet PSU - I use an Enermax "whisper" model but as this article points out there are others that fit the bill just as well.
6. Quiet hard drive - it is true that Seagate's Barracudas are by far the quietest around right now, and they don't cost any more than other drives. (FYI, the Barracuda V's are even quieter than the Barracuda IV used in this article, but you can't buy them quite yet, apparently.)
And 7. (optional) If you're going to overclock your graphics card, use the stock HSF but make sure you take it off temporarily to apply a good, thin layer of thermal grease (most graphics card suppliers are pretty incompetent in this area). Also, if your card does not have heatsinks on the RAM, no hurt in adding some - they do help in RAM overclocking a bit and look cooler than bare chips. The point is, though, there's no point in using an aftermarket fan for overclocking - stock fans are generally fine and are usually pretty quiet.
That's about it. My temps are very low, as is my noise level. This is a compromise I think anyone on either side of the performance/livability fence would be happy with. I previously tried a Delta fan on my CPU and I could not live with it for even 2 days - my current setup gives me the same temps with very little noise (I sleep in the same room as my PC, and even leave the PC on at night purposefully now - the quiet, low "whir" of the couple of fans I have actually helps me fall asleep). I don't have a decibel meter, but my current PC is no louder to me than my old P-200 from years ago.
Oh, and BTW, my graphics card *is* overclocked with the near-silent stock fan it came with - again, no stability problems at all.
"It seems that this has usually been their strategy with new products. Simply plug away at them as they get progressively better, combined with some nice market leverage. I wonder if in 3 years Nintendo and Sony will still be smiling. This is almost exactly how the Office story played out."
And this kind of thinking is exactly what's going to kill the Xbox. I'm sorry, but game consoles are not office software. What you're saying is no different than saying "that new Microsoft vacuum cleaner may not be doing so great now, but just look at what happened with Office." I mean, they're not comparable products. Microsoft doesn't know anything about vacuum cleaners, and it's likely they'll *never* know as much as Hoover or any of the big boys. It's not their core business. Video games isn't either.
MS has not been successful at everything they've done. Look at Hailstorm. Look at Microsoft Bob. Big companies do make mistakes and bite off more than they can chew and MS is no exception. Video games are not MS's realm, and they're having *more* trouble now than they were in the beginning (look at their waning Japanese developer support, which at root is what's responsible for all these Capcom buyout rumors going around right now).
I was excited about Xbox when it was first announced. But it's been exactly what I feared it would be right from the start; a PC port-box, a system for mainly western games, a big, ugly American console in third place worldwide with waning industry support and a scorched-earth marketing plan behind it. It honestly doesn't help the system's image that it's been cracked by Linux geeks. Talk about marginalizing the branding.
I own an Xbox (along with a bunch of accessories and 7 or 8 games) so don't take this as ill-informed fanboy drivel. The system just hasn't proven itself even to the point the GameCube has, and it's not looking like it's in any position to in the future. These "AAA" games mentioned here would mostly be B- or C-list material on the PS2 or GameCube. About the only game to get excited about at all from X02 is Perfect Dark Zero, and that's a sequel to a game console first-person shooter - and game consoles are not the best venue for first-person shooters.
Blah. Call me bitter.
Quite honestly, if you hate reading subtitles the best way to watch this movie is without them - but in Japanese. (You'd do this in this country by watching a subbed version and simply ignoring the subtitles.) This is the way I saw it (in Japan) and I was able to follow the entire story from beginning to end without much of a problem - such is the genius of Miyazaki. I did need somebody to explain some of the finer plot points afterwards but you could easily find something that accomplishes the same thing online.
I'm sorry, but *adding* dialogue where none existed before (especially as a voice-over, as in Spirited Away) is *not* right. Anyone who's seen both versions of Blade Runner will tell you that - whatever your preference, anyone would admit the film was significantly altered (for better or worse) by adding the voice-over. I'll take the original, thank you (or in BR's case, the version Scott wanted) - call me a purist but I want to see movies the way they were intended.
Yes, of course if subtitles are available I'll take them, as I consider them the least intrusive way of allowing as large an audience as possible to enjoy a film in their own language, but dubbing is already stretching it, and adding dialogue where none existed is going too far. You're not seeing the real Sen to Chihiro/Spirited Away if you watch this film dubbed.
As a sidenote, most of the interpretations I've seen written about the dub have been way off as far as the meaning of the film. Obviously I don't speak Japanese, but I live with someone who does and I've read plenty of articles about the original release from those who *are* bi-lingual (and I was able to get the overall themes myself even without understanding much dialogue). I'm wondering if not just the wording but the actual theme of the film was somehow changed in the dub. The film is about gluttony and greed, not "a little girl's journey into womanhood" or some such nonsense, as I've read in a couple reviews today. Did they change the dialogue to the point of over-sanitizing it for a western children's audience? It's really quite a dark film in Japanese.