This also means that when the next Microsoft and Sony systems come out (rumors point to 2014), the Nintendo console will be behind in hardware again.
Hmmm, let's take a look at the 6th generation.
GameCube: Released late 2001. Arguably most powerful of the gen. 22 million units sold.
XBox: Released late 2001. Arguably second most powerful of the gen. 24 million units sold.
PS2: Released early to late 2000. Arguably the least powerful of the gen. 150 million units sold.
In the 7th gen the 360 is arguably less powerful than the PS3 and came out about a year earlier, but is (currently at least) ahead in sales, although by a much smaller margin.
The two biggest anomalies are the Dreamcast and the Wii. One was (again, arguably) just as powerful as the competition and came out first, but died horribly. The other was unarguably weaker than the competition, came out _after_ the others, and creamed both of them.
If you believe the Dreamcast fans that claim it had better graphics than the PS2 then the only constant is that the winner of the past two generations has been the _weakest_ console, while _most_ of the time coming out before the competition helps, though certainly not always.
Certainly there are a lot of other factors at play, but arguing that coming out with a weaker system first is likely to hurt sales doesn't have a lot of support behind it.
Uh, citation please? I have a hard time believing that even if cancer was caused on the very day of the quake that it would be detectable only a month and a half later. Cancer cells divide faster than normal cells, but _that_ fast? Unless there's some actual evidence to back the claim up i suspect that anyone reporting cancer now had it long before the earthquake, and this sounds like exactly the kind of "scaremongering" story i was talking about.
Just to elaborate on your already Insightful comment, the "top of its game" is pretty much the right point to announce a successor for any kind of electronics. By definition, once you've reached the "top of your game," it's all downhill from there. You've got to be careful to measure "your game" correctly so you can catch the "good" part of the downhill slope before the actual release, but you never want to wait so long that the old version clearly sucks now. You want people saying "the old one was great, i think i want the new one" not "Well finally! The old one used to be great, but it's been kinda crap for awhile now."
They may not have confirmed any details, but this gives a lot more credit to the rumors that were going around earlier. The internet seems to have gotten pretty good at confirming stuff like this. Certainly _most_ of the rumors around the announcement of the PSP2 and 3DS turned out to be on target. "Back in the day" you'd barely hear anything about new hardware before E3 or TGS. Now rumors start hitting the internet months early and whoever it is usually breaks down and releases a bare bones press release confirming the existence but saving the details until the next big trade show. It _almost_ makes me feel a little sad that we don't get the same big surprises anymore. You get more fun during the speculation period, but the "big reveal" is just a matter of going down the list and seeing which 90% of the rumors were correct and which 10% were false.
Interesting, i can certainly see how someone with different tastes might not like most of my recommendations, as i said it takes all types. However i've never heard anyone describe Lois McMaster Bujold as "flat" before. Unless your only sample was "Shards of Honor," which is acknowledged to be a pseudo-Star Trek fanfic written before she'd really gotten her chops. Since then she's gone on to become pretty much the big female name in SF, having tied Heinlein for the most Hugo awards ever. She's certainly a favorite of a lot of my female friends who prefer their science fiction and fantasy to be more literate than the average, which actually kept me away from her books for awhile for no good reason. (I sometimes have a silly aversion to things that seem too universally popular to me.)
If you have indeed only tried her early work then i'd suggest looking into "Mirror Dance," "Memory," or especially "A Civil Campaign". If you've already sampled her later books and still think she's flat, well, it takes all types.
Personally i've read the Book of the New Sun and found it... adequate, but a little tedious. Not really something i'd personally recommend to others, but as i said... But it certainly sounds like a good idea for anyone who already knows they dislike the authors i suggested to try out your alternatives, and vice versa.
Putting aside the issue of censorship in general, what do they intend to do when their requests are ignored? Are they only going after Japanese media companies? If so, then there's nothing to stop people in Japan from getting information from other sources. For media hosted in Britain they could probably sue for libel, but they'd have a hard time doing anything to media hosted in the US.
I'm also having a hard time telling from the article if they're actually concerned about real scaremongering news, of which we've certainly seen a lot of in the west, or if they're just using that as an excuse to express "scary" but accurate news.
The Wii let you plug in old GameCube controllers and introduced the new Wiimote. You _could_ buy a new "classic" controller for the Wii, but it wasn't necessary.
Project Cafe (i'm really dubious of the "Stream" name) will probably let you use the old Wiimote and sensor bar while introducing the new high tech "regular" controller. There have also been rumors about upgraded motion controls (Wii Motion++?) that will be even more accurate than the Playstation Move, but they will be entirely optional.
They _may_ even make the new analog stick/touchscreen controller optional as well in order to keep the price of the console down. The Kinect and Playstation Plus (not to mention the Wii Board) may have shown that old wisdom about add-on controllers being dead on arrival is no longer true.
Two things which they really need to fix but i'm not sure if they actually will, there needs to be a way to transfer both save files and purchased Virtual Console games to the new system. And that includes those damn protected save files, one of the worst ideas ever.
And finally, what's up with the "Miyamoto has indirectly confirmed it" bit? All he's done is say that they're always working on the next iteration of hardware long before it gets announced, sometimes even before the previous hardware launches. Anyone who thinks that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft aren't all working on new hardware right now is deluded. The only question is when they're going to announce it and when they're going to launch it.
I kinda hate to admit it, but that part that's made me most excited so far was the part about "the system is likely to resemble a modernized version of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)."
I _know_ it's an irrational emotional response, but i can't help it. The SNES just played way too big a part in my childhood. And remember! The "Stream" part is just a rumor as well!
Uh, that makes no sense to me. I don't think i've ever had anyone tell me that they enjoy reading when they didn't actually enjoy reading. Doubly so when they feel the need to talk about how many books they own and/or have read. How does saying you like reading not say you like reading for reading's sake?
On the other hand i've _never_ had anyone tell me that they "enjoy literature." It certainly sounds rather pretentious to me. What's wrong with just saying? "I like books"?
Take a look at this page from a t-shirt vendor i see at a lot of cons. Lots of t-shirts about "reading" and "books" and even "libraries" or "librarians." None at all about "literature." Somehow i really doubt that people who like to go to cons and buy t-shirts boasting about how much they read are just faking it.
I dunno, if just saying "i like reading books" isn't good enough for you then to me it sounds like you've already gotten into snobbery.
It's certainly possible that that was the origin, but given the "depth" of analysis of various tech companies they invested a lot of effort into focusing it on the internet in general and on internet oriented companies in particular.
And does it really matter in the end? Whether they are being deceptive assholes by nature or if they had a reasonable idea at first and then worked really hard at being deceptive assholes afterward, the result is the same.
And even that's really just scratching the surface, i'm sure others will have a lot more suggestions. There are a _lot_ of good authors out there (amongst a lot more really bad ones of course) and which of those you personally consider to be great will depend a lot on what subjects and writing styles you like.
And the "filter for sorting through the drek" is the exact same thing you use for sorting through all the drek in other genres of literature, all the drek in television, all the drek in film, and all the drek in every other form of entertainment. You can read reviews, you can read synopsis, you can ask your friends, you can sample a little before investing in the full product, and you can put all that together to make an educated guess.
If you honestly think you can pick up _any_ non-science fiction book at random or just turn on the TV to a random channel and expect good odds of finding something of quality then i think you're bound to be severely disappointed.
From what I can tell from the article summary, they're saying the Internet pollutes more than it has to. How does that translate into "hating the Internet"?
See a dozen of the other responses to this article about why their logic is questionable at best. In short, they ignore all the good things the internet does and criticize it for using "dirty" electricity, something which for the most part isn't up to the control of anyone remotely responsible for the power usage of the internet. You can't control where the electricity in your sockets come from (not directly anyways) and asking every company planning a data center to choose the location based on the source of the electricity in that area is asking a bit much. Asking everyone with a data center to move somewhere with more eco-friendly electricity is asking even more, and would probably result in more net harm to the environment given all the costs associated with moving/replacing that much equipment.
If their problem is with the nature of the electricity being produced they should pick a fight with the producers of that electricity. Attacking the users of the electricity for their "choice" of providers isn't going to have any effect, so they're just doing it for the publicity.
And using the word "hate" may be a little extreme, but that's just nitpicking. They're clearly presenting it as "these things are bad because they're not being as green as they should be."
Are they intentionally trying to make everyone hate them? I'm not saying that popular things should be immune to criticism, but there's a right way to do so, and Greenpeace seems to be trying to find the exact opposite way of doing it.
If you want to make a difference you need to find actual problems so that even if the initial claim sounds outrageous anyone but the most rabid fanboy will look at the evidence and say "you know, they're actually kinda right." Instead with Greenpeace's strategy everyone initially says "that doesn't sound right", checks the "evidence" and concludes "no, it totally isn't right."
You can get away with boosting your publicity by making outrageous and mostly unfounded accusations against a minority, because most of the majority won't feel any need to defend that minority against the attack. The gains you make for getting the attention of the majority will make up for pissing off the minority. However Greenpeace seems to be trying to piss off not one but multiple large groups of people. I'm sure everyone who doesn't play video games, doesn't own an iPhone and doesn't use the internet loves them right now. Exactly how large and influential is that particular combination?
"How do we know that the mother of that child didn't deserve it?"
Obviously that's a joke, but there clearly is some dissonance between the first half of the blurb and the second. As long as we're doing armchair psychology it seems like there's a pretty clear difference between blaming a victim when something bad happens to them because of a third party, and justifying your own actions when you do something bad to someone else. And if it was really a case of the "just world phenomenon" they wouldn't need to provide any excuses about why it's okay to kill the enemy, you'd invent your own reasons.
After six months of careful study i have determined that the presence of weather, lakes and oceans on Titan indicate that it may in fact have an individual ocean. In the next six months i plan to show that Titan also has an individual lake, followed by showing the existence of an individual cloud. May i have another funding check now please?
Google's _profit_ in 2010 was over $8 billion. The Warner Music Group was sold for $2.6 billion in 2004.EMI is currently up for sale and is also valued at about $3 billion. (Apparently WMG hasn't gone up in value much since 2004, what a shocker.) So in theory, assuming WMG could be convinced to sell, Google could pick them both up with just the profits from a single year. Buying the entire industry would probably take up a couple years worth of profits, but Google wouldn't actually want to buy all of them anyways due to anti-trust issues.
I know almost nothing about the Giana Sisters except that i got a cool remix of its music via OCRemix. I guess it was some kind of Super Mario Bros knock-off that most people have never heard of? It kind of surprises me to see any kind of reference to the game show up, but it totally makes sense that if so it would be a discussion about game music:)
Slashdot Mirror
Smells like chicken!
Yeah, i'm familiar with SAP. The company i work for happens to be suing them for copyright infringement at the moment :)
I guess we're talking about Enterprise Resource Planning? At least that's the only thing on wikipedia that looked like it made sense.
This also means that when the next Microsoft and Sony systems come out (rumors point to 2014), the Nintendo console will be behind in hardware again.
Hmmm, let's take a look at the 6th generation.
GameCube: Released late 2001. Arguably most powerful of the gen. 22 million units sold.
XBox: Released late 2001. Arguably second most powerful of the gen. 24 million units sold.
PS2: Released early to late 2000. Arguably the least powerful of the gen. 150 million units sold.
In the 7th gen the 360 is arguably less powerful than the PS3 and came out about a year earlier, but is (currently at least) ahead in sales, although by a much smaller margin.
The two biggest anomalies are the Dreamcast and the Wii. One was (again, arguably) just as powerful as the competition and came out first, but died horribly. The other was unarguably weaker than the competition, came out _after_ the others, and creamed both of them.
If you believe the Dreamcast fans that claim it had better graphics than the PS2 then the only constant is that the winner of the past two generations has been the _weakest_ console, while _most_ of the time coming out before the competition helps, though certainly not always.
Certainly there are a lot of other factors at play, but arguing that coming out with a weaker system first is likely to hurt sales doesn't have a lot of support behind it.
Uh, citation please? I have a hard time believing that even if cancer was caused on the very day of the quake that it would be detectable only a month and a half later. Cancer cells divide faster than normal cells, but _that_ fast? Unless there's some actual evidence to back the claim up i suspect that anyone reporting cancer now had it long before the earthquake, and this sounds like exactly the kind of "scaremongering" story i was talking about.
Just to elaborate on your already Insightful comment, the "top of its game" is pretty much the right point to announce a successor for any kind of electronics. By definition, once you've reached the "top of your game," it's all downhill from there. You've got to be careful to measure "your game" correctly so you can catch the "good" part of the downhill slope before the actual release, but you never want to wait so long that the old version clearly sucks now. You want people saying "the old one was great, i think i want the new one" not "Well finally! The old one used to be great, but it's been kinda crap for awhile now."
They may not have confirmed any details, but this gives a lot more credit to the rumors that were going around earlier. The internet seems to have gotten pretty good at confirming stuff like this. Certainly _most_ of the rumors around the announcement of the PSP2 and 3DS turned out to be on target. "Back in the day" you'd barely hear anything about new hardware before E3 or TGS. Now rumors start hitting the internet months early and whoever it is usually breaks down and releases a bare bones press release confirming the existence but saving the details until the next big trade show. It _almost_ makes me feel a little sad that we don't get the same big surprises anymore. You get more fun during the speculation period, but the "big reveal" is just a matter of going down the list and seeing which 90% of the rumors were correct and which 10% were false.
Interesting, i can certainly see how someone with different tastes might not like most of my recommendations, as i said it takes all types. However i've never heard anyone describe Lois McMaster Bujold as "flat" before. Unless your only sample was "Shards of Honor," which is acknowledged to be a pseudo-Star Trek fanfic written before she'd really gotten her chops. Since then she's gone on to become pretty much the big female name in SF, having tied Heinlein for the most Hugo awards ever. She's certainly a favorite of a lot of my female friends who prefer their science fiction and fantasy to be more literate than the average, which actually kept me away from her books for awhile for no good reason. (I sometimes have a silly aversion to things that seem too universally popular to me.)
If you have indeed only tried her early work then i'd suggest looking into "Mirror Dance," "Memory," or especially "A Civil Campaign". If you've already sampled her later books and still think she's flat, well, it takes all types.
Personally i've read the Book of the New Sun and found it... adequate, but a little tedious. Not really something i'd personally recommend to others, but as i said... But it certainly sounds like a good idea for anyone who already knows they dislike the authors i suggested to try out your alternatives, and vice versa.
Putting aside the issue of censorship in general, what do they intend to do when their requests are ignored? Are they only going after Japanese media companies? If so, then there's nothing to stop people in Japan from getting information from other sources. For media hosted in Britain they could probably sue for libel, but they'd have a hard time doing anything to media hosted in the US.
I'm also having a hard time telling from the article if they're actually concerned about real scaremongering news, of which we've certainly seen a lot of in the west, or if they're just using that as an excuse to express "scary" but accurate news.
The Wii let you plug in old GameCube controllers and introduced the new Wiimote. You _could_ buy a new "classic" controller for the Wii, but it wasn't necessary.
Project Cafe (i'm really dubious of the "Stream" name) will probably let you use the old Wiimote and sensor bar while introducing the new high tech "regular" controller. There have also been rumors about upgraded motion controls (Wii Motion++?) that will be even more accurate than the Playstation Move, but they will be entirely optional.
They _may_ even make the new analog stick/touchscreen controller optional as well in order to keep the price of the console down. The Kinect and Playstation Plus (not to mention the Wii Board) may have shown that old wisdom about add-on controllers being dead on arrival is no longer true.
Two things which they really need to fix but i'm not sure if they actually will, there needs to be a way to transfer both save files and purchased Virtual Console games to the new system. And that includes those damn protected save files, one of the worst ideas ever.
And finally, what's up with the "Miyamoto has indirectly confirmed it" bit? All he's done is say that they're always working on the next iteration of hardware long before it gets announced, sometimes even before the previous hardware launches. Anyone who thinks that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft aren't all working on new hardware right now is deluded. The only question is when they're going to announce it and when they're going to launch it.
I kinda hate to admit it, but that part that's made me most excited so far was the part about "the system is likely to resemble a modernized version of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)."
I _know_ it's an irrational emotional response, but i can't help it. The SNES just played way too big a part in my childhood. And remember! The "Stream" part is just a rumor as well!
Uh, that makes no sense to me. I don't think i've ever had anyone tell me that they enjoy reading when they didn't actually enjoy reading. Doubly so when they feel the need to talk about how many books they own and/or have read. How does saying you like reading not say you like reading for reading's sake?
On the other hand i've _never_ had anyone tell me that they "enjoy literature." It certainly sounds rather pretentious to me. What's wrong with just saying? "I like books"?
Take a look at this page from a t-shirt vendor i see at a lot of cons. Lots of t-shirts about "reading" and "books" and even "libraries" or "librarians." None at all about "literature." Somehow i really doubt that people who like to go to cons and buy t-shirts boasting about how much they read are just faking it.
I dunno, if just saying "i like reading books" isn't good enough for you then to me it sounds like you've already gotten into snobbery.
It's certainly possible that that was the origin, but given the "depth" of analysis of various tech companies they invested a lot of effort into focusing it on the internet in general and on internet oriented companies in particular.
And does it really matter in the end? Whether they are being deceptive assholes by nature or if they had a reasonable idea at first and then worked really hard at being deceptive assholes afterward, the result is the same.
I would hesitate to say "anything by" about _any_ author, but i'd agree those are all good suggestions. I'd also add Lois McMaster Bujold, James Alan Gardner, Robert J. Sawyer and John Scalzi. If you like space opera and/or cyberpunk, Vernor Vinge. If you like military science fiction then David Weber and "Jack Campbell." If you like alternate history or post-apocalyptic fiction then S.M. Stirling.
And even that's really just scratching the surface, i'm sure others will have a lot more suggestions. There are a _lot_ of good authors out there (amongst a lot more really bad ones of course) and which of those you personally consider to be great will depend a lot on what subjects and writing styles you like.
Really? Worse than _any_ other genre? I think you're exaggerating a bit. I think probably only 90% of all science fiction is crap. Which about matches what i find when i take a look at what's on the shelves in other areas of the bookstore as well. Clearly the bit about Heinlein is just you being a troll or a case of your mileage varying. Personally i've found only about seven of Heinlein's thirty-four books to be "crap." That puts him at about a 75% success rate for me.
And the "filter for sorting through the drek" is the exact same thing you use for sorting through all the drek in other genres of literature, all the drek in television, all the drek in film, and all the drek in every other form of entertainment. You can read reviews, you can read synopsis, you can ask your friends, you can sample a little before investing in the full product, and you can put all that together to make an educated guess.
If you honestly think you can pick up _any_ non-science fiction book at random or just turn on the TV to a random channel and expect good odds of finding something of quality then i think you're bound to be severely disappointed.
From what I can tell from the article summary, they're saying the Internet pollutes more than it has to. How does that translate into "hating the Internet"?
See a dozen of the other responses to this article about why their logic is questionable at best. In short, they ignore all the good things the internet does and criticize it for using "dirty" electricity, something which for the most part isn't up to the control of anyone remotely responsible for the power usage of the internet. You can't control where the electricity in your sockets come from (not directly anyways) and asking every company planning a data center to choose the location based on the source of the electricity in that area is asking a bit much. Asking everyone with a data center to move somewhere with more eco-friendly electricity is asking even more, and would probably result in more net harm to the environment given all the costs associated with moving/replacing that much equipment.
If their problem is with the nature of the electricity being produced they should pick a fight with the producers of that electricity. Attacking the users of the electricity for their "choice" of providers isn't going to have any effect, so they're just doing it for the publicity.
And using the word "hate" may be a little extreme, but that's just nitpicking. They're clearly presenting it as "these things are bad because they're not being as green as they should be."
So Greenpeace doesn't like Apple (expect to hear a lot more about that one soon,) they don't like video games and they _especially_ don't like Nitnendo, and now they hate the Internet?
Are they intentionally trying to make everyone hate them? I'm not saying that popular things should be immune to criticism, but there's a right way to do so, and Greenpeace seems to be trying to find the exact opposite way of doing it.
If you want to make a difference you need to find actual problems so that even if the initial claim sounds outrageous anyone but the most rabid fanboy will look at the evidence and say "you know, they're actually kinda right." Instead with Greenpeace's strategy everyone initially says "that doesn't sound right", checks the "evidence" and concludes "no, it totally isn't right."
You can get away with boosting your publicity by making outrageous and mostly unfounded accusations against a minority, because most of the majority won't feel any need to defend that minority against the attack. The gains you make for getting the attention of the majority will make up for pissing off the minority. However Greenpeace seems to be trying to piss off not one but multiple large groups of people. I'm sure everyone who doesn't play video games, doesn't own an iPhone and doesn't use the internet loves them right now. Exactly how large and influential is that particular combination?
"How do we know that the mother of that child didn't deserve it?"
Obviously that's a joke, but there clearly is some dissonance between the first half of the blurb and the second. As long as we're doing armchair psychology it seems like there's a pretty clear difference between blaming a victim when something bad happens to them because of a third party, and justifying your own actions when you do something bad to someone else. And if it was really a case of the "just world phenomenon" they wouldn't need to provide any excuses about why it's okay to kill the enemy, you'd invent your own reasons.
After six months of careful study i have determined that the presence of weather, lakes and oceans on Titan indicate that it may in fact have an individual ocean. In the next six months i plan to show that Titan also has an individual lake, followed by showing the existence of an individual cloud. May i have another funding check now please?
Google's _profit_ in 2010 was over $8 billion. The Warner Music Group was sold for $2.6 billion in 2004. EMI is currently up for sale and is also valued at about $3 billion. (Apparently WMG hasn't gone up in value much since 2004, what a shocker.) So in theory, assuming WMG could be convinced to sell, Google could pick them both up with just the profits from a single year. Buying the entire industry would probably take up a couple years worth of profits, but Google wouldn't actually want to buy all of them anyways due to anti-trust issues.
Did you actually read the article i linked? Oh wait, this is slashdot, why am i even asking? =P
Actually, the current somewhat substantiated rumor is that Portal 2 will be released early on friday.
I agree, this is a huge success. I should make a note of it to remind myself of this accomplishment later.
I know almost nothing about the Giana Sisters except that i got a cool remix of its music via OCRemix. I guess it was some kind of Super Mario Bros knock-off that most people have never heard of? It kind of surprises me to see any kind of reference to the game show up, but it totally makes sense that if so it would be a discussion about game music :)
and I clearly can't spell to save my life tonight. grr again.
The comment must have been in beta.