This has to be the most absurd statement I have ever heard in my life! If there is no DRM, how will media content be "unavailable on his OS"?
Listen to what I'm saying instead of what you want to hear. I didn't say media content would be unavailable, rather media companies wouldn't sell it. Media companies aren't going to sell mp3s or wav files. They have no interest in digital distribution where some form of copy protection doesn't exist.
You missed the part where I asked you to think. You also seem to have jumped over my line item DRM progress outline. DRM is not an algorithm. Until you realize that technology does not live in a vacuum you won't get it. DRM + DMCA + Ignorance = Death of OSS.
I'm thinking just fine. You're still confusing DRM with TCPM. DRM manages content, not software. TCPM manages software, not content. OSS will live on just fine, just as it always has, not being able to access media in proprietary formats.
If you cannot figure out that this is true even after it is explicitly pointed out to you by me (and others) then I can only conclude you are an M$ schill. In fact, given the absurdity of your first statement, it is hard to imagine that you are anything but a schill.
Blah blah blah. If you don't like the message attack the messenger. Moron.
None of what you have said is true. It is speculation based on paranoid delusions. Just keep wearing that tinfoil hat, I'm sure it'll keep all of those mind control signals out of your brain.
Of course, you're welcome to describe how specifically DRM prevents OSS software from being written and running on a machine. But you won't -- you'll just go on about how I'm an MS shill and how I must be too stupid to comprehend your nebulous fictional world.
Gates is pro-drm because that's the only way he can get media companies to make the media content his customers want available on his OS.
You're also confusing DRM with TCPM. While related, they aren't tied.
What I find so amusing about all of the anti-DRM arguements is that not a SINGLE one of them goes on at any length about what ACTUAL harm people who purchase it ACTUALLY incur. It's all paranoid tinfoil hat "they're gonna get you" boogyman crap.
I'm sure XBL caps out your bandwith and that could cause some lag, but couldn't they just implement a cap to the download speed?
Capping the speed won't prevent lag.
It makes sense if you think about it for a bit... you have no way of knowing how the data transmitted will "come down" the line -- Best case, if you can have the server control the rate at which the data is sent, you aren't guaranteed to receive it at that rate consistantly. IE: the server could send the data at a constant rate, but you may recieve it in chunks.
Re:Pasting for the PS3 because it invents not copi
on
How the PS3 Hit $600
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· Score: 5, Informative
Can you think of a SINGLE technical reason to back HD-DVD over Blu-ray if you were Microsoft making that decision, BEYOND considering Sony to be competition?
I can think of a few off the top of my head:
1) HD-DVD drives are less expensive 2) HD-DVD has a mandatory managed copy requirement 3) HD-DVD doesn't have region coding 4) HD-DVD discs are less expensive to produce 5) HD-DVD discs can be produced with DVD9 content on one side and HD-DVD content on the other (ie: good upgrade story) 6) HD-DVD discs are more fault tolerant than blu-ray 7) Hi-def Movies don't need more than 25 of storage space with modern codecs
The idea of fixing bugs is NOT a binary one: Fix all or fix none.
You fail to differentiate between known and unknown bugs. You can't fix a bug you don't know about.
My general rules/laws/axioms about bugs:
Some bugs are worse than others. Fixing bugs is good. Fixing bugs may introduce unknown bugs. Introducing bugs is bad. There is always at least 1 unknown bug. Unknown bugs are found over time. All bugs cannot be found in finite time. Uknown bugs may be worse than known bugs.
If your goal is to ship with zero bugs, you never ship. If your goal is to fix every known bug before you ship, you risk shipping a product with serious unknown bugs.
* NPD data covers US sales only * NPD data does not account sales of all retailers in the US * "Big" shipments started to hit retailers at the end of April
Or, conversly:
* NPD data does not include sales from Europe * NPD data does not include sales from Canada, Mexico, etc * NPD data does not include figures from retailers like Walmart * "Big" shipments weren't occuring during the sampling period
I'd actually say that GC on average had better looking games than the Xbox... It is almost useless to compare the paper (clockspeeds, et al) numbers with architecutres that vary so greatly. The GC design was very well done and really allowed the hardware to hit its limits. The Xbox design was constrained by its PC heritage, which really hurt it IMO.
The Wii's graphics will definately be an improvement over the GC, and won't by any measure of the word be bad. They just won't be as good as the PS3 or 360. But they don't have to be -- they just have to be "good enough", and I think they've succeeded in that arena.
Nintendo is focusing on their new control scheme; they aren't interested in being the top dog in some spec pissing match. Their real challenge is ensuring that 3rd parties don't push out games where the only "draw" is some noval use of the controller (such as their tennis E3 tech demo, which was essentially "press a button when the ball is near your player").
Oh, I fully agree that all things being equal, you can render more stuff faster in a lower resolution frame. In this case, however, all things are not equal.
There are a lot of factors involved in rendering an image, and it isn't something one can go "well, if you render in a lower resolution you need x% less power". Bandwidth comes into play. Pixel shaders come into play. Vertex shaders come into play. Goemetry comes into play. And so on.
The Wii's graphic hardware (well, the specs that have been "leaked") isn't something that produces images at 480p that look "the same" as the images produced by the 360 or PS3. Examining screenshots from Red Steel should demonstrate this -- there is no detail to any of the geometry in the images; they're all flat textured surfaces.
Yeah, fuck lighting. All games should have only one light source, fixed at one point an infinite distance above the playing area.
You're not arguing "the graphics capabilities are the same", you're trying to justify to yourself that the difference doesn't matter. An intelligent conversation with that attitude isn't possible.
Resolution (detail) isn't the only thing that makes games look different. Lighting, precision, shaders, etc all have a large impact on the final image quality and the number of objects that can be rendered on screen at any given moment. Rendering at a higher-res and resampling to a lower resolution also does wonders to get rid of aliasing, fwiw.
Random note: I'm not referencing the Wii anywhere here; it isn't directly comparable given the completely different target audience/fanbase.
1: No arguement from me on this one. Hell, if you could get people to pay $2000 for it, why not charge that?
2: It doesn't matter if it sells on Ebay or in the stores. This isn't going to keep these things from selling on Ebay unless demand is so low that units can easily be found in stores -- at which point one could argue that they're asking price is too high.
3: Not quite that simple. If they announced a price of $400, people on the fence willing to buy one for $400 would wait until it launched. If they couldn't get one at launch, then MAYBE they MIGHT get a 360. Right now, people on the fence WILL be getting a 360. This drives more 360 sales sooner, increasing the 360 install base before the PS3 launches.
4: No arguement from me on this one from a business perspective. Assuming, of course, their price/demand ratio is correct.
5a: The PS3 doesn't have "9 cores". It has 1 hyperthreaded core and 7 SPU's. An SPU is not a "core" in the traditional sense; it is more analagous to a DSP or coprocessor, albiet a very fast one.
5b: The "cheap" Toshiba HD-A1 HD-DVD player sells for $500. Given that game consoles make for craptastic players, "cheap" is the market range you should be considering. Compared to other blue-ray players, it is indeed cheaper. Still, not something I'd personally consider a huge checkmark in the win column (seriously, I want to play games on my game console; if I want to play movies I'd break out the 3D0).
6: People are complaining because it is a cheap knockoff of what Nintendo is doing. They're also complaining about Sony's hipocrasy (Sony ridiculed the Nintendo controller). It also removes the "dual-shock" (rumble) from the controller. Minor technical negatives for the removal of the rumble from the controller.
Linux: I hate to break it to you, but you'll never see Sony support it while they're losing money on each console they sell. And quite frankly, gamers don't give a crap about running Linux on their game console. They play games on their game console. People that want to run Linux on their game console are just looking for an inexpensive server/computer, which is a no-win situation for Sony.
To top it off, the difference is a 20gb harddrive versus a 60gb harddrive. Last I checked, the price difference between those sizes was not $100. Is there something I failed to garner from the coverage?
The base model lacks HDMI output, built-in WiFi, and the various memory card slots.
The "mindless" games you so easily dismiss are actually types of games that heavily appeal to the non-hardcore gaming audiance.
If you want to be really technical, you could classify FN3 as a sports title.
Outpost Kolaki is a simple RTS-like game.
GRAW belongs in the list of shooters (and is in my opinion one of the best titles released so far this year).
Your summary also dropped several titles from the list, including Oblivion and Kameo.
While you are free to have you own opinion, Condemned is technically classified as an Action game; the primary focus of the game is not "shooting" things. Shooter certainly isn't the first category that comes to my mind when attempting to classify that game anyway...
Likewise, I find it interesting that to this date MS refuse to state how many Live subscribers and users they have.
If you're looking for specific numbers accurate down to single digits, you aren't going to find it -- no company is that specific; specific information gives too much away to compeditors. They occasionally release figures when they hit milestones, and release general information about the service in their quarterly reports.
They always issue press releases with non specific, skewed numbers to celebrate success.
It's statistics. What, you expect them to intentionally select a set of numbers that make them look bad? Would you even consider a set of numbers that look good to be anything but skewed?
And Halo 2 continues to be the top game on Live. Not a 360 title.
Duh. Halo 2 sold more copies on it's first day of release than the number of Xbox 360's sold to date. Imagine that... the most popular game on a console that has an install base of over 20 million is played more often than the most popular game on a console with an install base of 3.2 million.
They've sold 3.2 million Xbox 360's as of FY06Q3; they expect to sell 5-5.5m by the end of FY06.
I can't seem to find 5-6 month figures for other console launches, so you'll have to deal with the figures that I can find. If you can do better I welcome you to do so.
There were 700,000 360s allocated to the initial US launch. There were 500,000 ps2s allocated to the initial US launch. There were ~0.5 million Xbox1s sold within one week of launch. There were ~0.5 million Gamecubes sold within one week of launch. There were 1.5 million 360s sold by the end of FY06Q2 (end of December; ~5 weeks). There were 1.4 million PS2s sold within 4 weeks of launch.
I couldn't find any sales figures for the dreamcast or saturn, but I'd be willing to bet money that they are far lower than the figures listed above.
Certainly doesn't look like the worst selling console ever to me.
May I ask where you got this statistic from? I cannot outright deny it, but it seems pretty fishy, comparing the number of people that use iTunes with the number of XBox owners. What entails a "download" from XBox live? Is that something people actually pay for? Are these things you download once, or are these things you download regularly (as iTunes provides)?
Unless the original poster was referring to sheer number of bytes downloaded (or a per-customer weighted average), iTunes kicks Live's ass. There were 50 million downloads from iTunes in 2 months while there have been 10 million downloads from live in 5 months.
Still, considering the size of the install base the the size of the files it is a fairly impressive number.
Slashdot Mirror
This has to be the most absurd statement I have ever heard in my life! If there is no DRM, how will media content be "unavailable on his OS"?
Listen to what I'm saying instead of what you want to hear. I didn't say media content would be unavailable, rather media companies wouldn't sell it. Media companies aren't going to sell mp3s or wav files. They have no interest in digital distribution where some form of copy protection doesn't exist.
You missed the part where I asked you to think. You also seem to have jumped over my line item DRM progress outline. DRM is not an algorithm. Until you realize that technology does not live in a vacuum you won't get it. DRM + DMCA + Ignorance = Death of OSS.
I'm thinking just fine. You're still confusing DRM with TCPM. DRM manages content, not software. TCPM manages software, not content. OSS will live on just fine, just as it always has, not being able to access media in proprietary formats.
If you cannot figure out that this is true even after it is explicitly pointed out to you by me (and others) then I can only conclude you are an M$ schill. In fact, given the absurdity of your first statement, it is hard to imagine that you are anything but a schill.
Blah blah blah. If you don't like the message attack the messenger. Moron.
None of what you have said is true. It is speculation based on paranoid delusions. Just keep wearing that tinfoil hat, I'm sure it'll keep all of those mind control signals out of your brain.
Of course, you're welcome to describe how specifically DRM prevents OSS software from being written and running on a machine. But you won't -- you'll just go on about how I'm an MS shill and how I must be too stupid to comprehend your nebulous fictional world.
Gates is pro-drm because that's the only way he can get media companies to make the media content his customers want available on his OS.
You're also confusing DRM with TCPM. While related, they aren't tied.
What I find so amusing about all of the anti-DRM arguements is that not a SINGLE one of them goes on at any length about what ACTUAL harm people who purchase it ACTUALLY incur. It's all paranoid tinfoil hat "they're gonna get you" boogyman crap.
The car still has brakes and reverse, doesn't it? Just carry a chainsaw in the trunk and you'll be fine... :p
I'm sure XBL caps out your bandwith and that could cause some lag, but couldn't they just implement a cap to the download speed?
... you have no way of knowing how the data transmitted will "come down" the line -- Best case, if you can have the server control the rate at which the data is sent, you aren't guaranteed to receive it at that rate consistantly. IE: the server could send the data at a constant rate, but you may recieve it in chunks.
................XXXXX.................XX
Capping the speed won't prevent lag.
It makes sense if you think about it for a bit
Ex: (. = no data, X = data)
Server:
* X....X....X....X....X....X....X....X....
Client:
*
Can you think of a SINGLE technical reason to back HD-DVD over Blu-ray if you were Microsoft making that decision, BEYOND considering Sony to be competition?
I can think of a few off the top of my head:
1) HD-DVD drives are less expensive
2) HD-DVD has a mandatory managed copy requirement
3) HD-DVD doesn't have region coding
4) HD-DVD discs are less expensive to produce
5) HD-DVD discs can be produced with DVD9 content on one side and HD-DVD content on the other (ie: good upgrade story)
6) HD-DVD discs are more fault tolerant than blu-ray
7) Hi-def Movies don't need more than 25 of storage space with modern codecs
By the end of the article, I was looking for their idea of a hypothetical best-case pony.
:)
That would be a sphere, right?
"Last bug's fixed! Ship it!"
Except the last bug isn't fixed. There are still unknown bugs. If you ship a product with zero known bugs, you haven't tested it very long.
It isn't a matter of a few milliseconds when you're dealing with a large document.
The idea of fixing bugs is NOT a binary one: Fix all or fix none.
You fail to differentiate between known and unknown bugs. You can't fix a bug you don't know about.
My general rules/laws/axioms about bugs:
Some bugs are worse than others.
Fixing bugs is good.
Fixing bugs may introduce unknown bugs.
Introducing bugs is bad.
There is always at least 1 unknown bug.
Unknown bugs are found over time.
All bugs cannot be found in finite time.
Uknown bugs may be worse than known bugs.
If your goal is to ship with zero bugs, you never ship. If your goal is to fix every known bug before you ship, you risk shipping a product with serious unknown bugs.
A few points:
* NPD data covers US sales only
* NPD data does not account sales of all retailers in the US
* "Big" shipments started to hit retailers at the end of April
Or, conversly:
* NPD data does not include sales from Europe
* NPD data does not include sales from Canada, Mexico, etc
* NPD data does not include figures from retailers like Walmart
* "Big" shipments weren't occuring during the sampling period
The instructions also only work with 1 of the 3 dvd drives the 360 ships with.
I'd actually say that GC on average had better looking games than the Xbox... It is almost useless to compare the paper (clockspeeds, et al) numbers with architecutres that vary so greatly. The GC design was very well done and really allowed the hardware to hit its limits. The Xbox design was constrained by its PC heritage, which really hurt it IMO.
The Wii's graphics will definately be an improvement over the GC, and won't by any measure of the word be bad. They just won't be as good as the PS3 or 360. But they don't have to be -- they just have to be "good enough", and I think they've succeeded in that arena.
Nintendo is focusing on their new control scheme; they aren't interested in being the top dog in some spec pissing match. Their real challenge is ensuring that 3rd parties don't push out games where the only "draw" is some noval use of the controller (such as their tennis E3 tech demo, which was essentially "press a button when the ball is near your player").
Oh, I fully agree that all things being equal, you can render more stuff faster in a lower resolution frame. In this case, however, all things are not equal.
There are a lot of factors involved in rendering an image, and it isn't something one can go "well, if you render in a lower resolution you need x% less power". Bandwidth comes into play. Pixel shaders come into play. Vertex shaders come into play. Goemetry comes into play. And so on.
The Wii's graphic hardware (well, the specs that have been "leaked") isn't something that produces images at 480p that look "the same" as the images produced by the 360 or PS3. Examining screenshots from Red Steel should demonstrate this -- there is no detail to any of the geometry in the images; they're all flat textured surfaces.
Yeah, fuck lighting. All games should have only one light source, fixed at one point an infinite distance above the playing area.
You're not arguing "the graphics capabilities are the same", you're trying to justify to yourself that the difference doesn't matter. An intelligent conversation with that attitude isn't possible.
Resolution (detail) isn't the only thing that makes games look different. Lighting, precision, shaders, etc all have a large impact on the final image quality and the number of objects that can be rendered on screen at any given moment. Rendering at a higher-res and resampling to a lower resolution also does wonders to get rid of aliasing, fwiw.
If I want my game console to play movies I'll break out the 3D0...
Random note: I'm not referencing the Wii anywhere here; it isn't directly comparable given the completely different target audience/fanbase.
1: No arguement from me on this one. Hell, if you could get people to pay $2000 for it, why not charge that?
2: It doesn't matter if it sells on Ebay or in the stores. This isn't going to keep these things from selling on Ebay unless demand is so low that units can easily be found in stores -- at which point one could argue that they're asking price is too high.
3: Not quite that simple. If they announced a price of $400, people on the fence willing to buy one for $400 would wait until it launched. If they couldn't get one at launch, then MAYBE they MIGHT get a 360. Right now, people on the fence WILL be getting a 360. This drives more 360 sales sooner, increasing the 360 install base before the PS3 launches.
4: No arguement from me on this one from a business perspective. Assuming, of course, their price/demand ratio is correct.
5a: The PS3 doesn't have "9 cores". It has 1 hyperthreaded core and 7 SPU's. An SPU is not a "core" in the traditional sense; it is more analagous to a DSP or coprocessor, albiet a very fast one.
5b: The "cheap" Toshiba HD-A1 HD-DVD player sells for $500. Given that game consoles make for craptastic players, "cheap" is the market range you should be considering. Compared to other blue-ray players, it is indeed cheaper. Still, not something I'd personally consider a huge checkmark in the win column (seriously, I want to play games on my game console; if I want to play movies I'd break out the 3D0).
6: People are complaining because it is a cheap knockoff of what Nintendo is doing. They're also complaining about Sony's hipocrasy (Sony ridiculed the Nintendo controller). It also removes the "dual-shock" (rumble) from the controller. Minor technical negatives for the removal of the rumble from the controller.
Linux: I hate to break it to you, but you'll never see Sony support it while they're losing money on each console they sell. And quite frankly, gamers don't give a crap about running Linux on their game console. They play games on their game console. People that want to run Linux on their game console are just looking for an inexpensive server/computer, which is a no-win situation for Sony.
Don't you mean PS36Tii?
To top it off, the difference is a 20gb harddrive versus a 60gb harddrive. Last I checked, the price difference between those sizes was not $100. Is there something I failed to garner from the coverage?
The base model lacks HDMI output, built-in WiFi, and the various memory card slots.
That's what LUA friggin does.
The "mindless" games you so easily dismiss are actually types of games that heavily appeal to the non-hardcore gaming audiance.
...
If you want to be really technical, you could classify FN3 as a sports title.
Outpost Kolaki is a simple RTS-like game.
GRAW belongs in the list of shooters (and is in my opinion one of the best titles released so far this year).
Your summary also dropped several titles from the list, including Oblivion and Kameo.
While you are free to have you own opinion, Condemned is technically classified as an Action game; the primary focus of the game is not "shooting" things. Shooter certainly isn't the first category that comes to my mind when attempting to classify that game anyway
Likewise, I find it interesting that to this date MS refuse to state how many Live subscribers and users they have.
... the most popular game on a console that has an install base of over 20 million is played more often than the most popular game on a console with an install base of 3.2 million.
If you're looking for specific numbers accurate down to single digits, you aren't going to find it -- no company is that specific; specific information gives too much away to compeditors. They occasionally release figures when they hit milestones, and release general information about the service in their quarterly reports.
They always issue press releases with non specific, skewed numbers to celebrate success.
It's statistics. What, you expect them to intentionally select a set of numbers that make them look bad? Would you even consider a set of numbers that look good to be anything but skewed?
And Halo 2 continues to be the top game on Live. Not a 360 title.
Duh. Halo 2 sold more copies on it's first day of release than the number of Xbox 360's sold to date. Imagine that
Yeah, the only games on the 360 are "shooters". Well, except for Amped, Bankshot Billards, Bejeweled, Blazing Angles, Burnout, Condemned, Crystal Quest, DOA4, Fight Night, Feeding Frenzy, FF11, Gauntlet, Geometry Wars, Backgammon, Hearts, Spaids, Hexic, Jewel Quest, Joust, Kameo, Tomb Raider, Madden, MLB 2k6, Marble Blast Ultra, Need for Speed, Outpost Kaloki, PGR3, Ridge Racer, Oblivion, Tiger Woods, Tony Hawk, Top Spin 2, Wik, or Zuma.
But, you know, who would want to count any of those anyway?
They've sold 3.2 million Xbox 360's as of FY06Q3; they expect to sell 5-5.5m by the end of FY06.
I can't seem to find 5-6 month figures for other console launches, so you'll have to deal with the figures that I can find. If you can do better I welcome you to do so.
There were 700,000 360s allocated to the initial US launch.
There were 500,000 ps2s allocated to the initial US launch.
There were ~0.5 million Xbox1s sold within one week of launch.
There were ~0.5 million Gamecubes sold within one week of launch.
There were 1.5 million 360s sold by the end of FY06Q2 (end of December; ~5 weeks).
There were 1.4 million PS2s sold within 4 weeks of launch.
I couldn't find any sales figures for the dreamcast or saturn, but I'd be willing to bet money that they are far lower than the figures listed above.
Certainly doesn't look like the worst selling console ever to me.
May I ask where you got this statistic from? I cannot outright deny it, but it seems pretty fishy, comparing the number of people that use iTunes with the number of XBox owners. What entails a "download" from XBox live? Is that something people actually pay for? Are these things you download once, or are these things you download regularly (as iTunes provides)?
Unless the original poster was referring to sheer number of bytes downloaded (or a per-customer weighted average), iTunes kicks Live's ass. There were 50 million downloads from iTunes in 2 months while there have been 10 million downloads from live in 5 months.
Still, considering the size of the install base the the size of the files it is a fairly impressive number.