Geez you stupid mods! I knew i was going to get modded down for the above post but i expected at least a minimum level of competence to be exercised in the process. Commenting about the ISS confusion and asking for clarification on the blurb is most certainly not offtopic, it's redundant! I even spelled it out for you in the subject! Get it right! _This_ post is offtopic. Or flamebait, your choice. Just stick to one of those two and you can't get it wrong.
The mods are going to have their work cut out for them today. 11 messages posts so far and every single one is along the lines of "IBM bought a space station?" To be fair even after reading all 11 posts my mind was _still_ going "huh?" So could someone who isn't at work and behind an overly restrictive web filter kindly let the rest of us know which ISS they're _actually_ talking about?
Great thing they are concerned about the consumer. Really, are they nuts? Charging hundreds more than their competitors (one of which has a released product and one of which has a product which will be released near it that also has better press) for the console, and running a freaking shortage?
In Sony's defense, they probably don't have the resources to produce as many units as they'd ideally like to. Economies of scale only apply up to a certain point and over a certain time frame. They probably can't simply hire a couple factories for just a few months to produce extra consoles for the launch except at prohibitive expense. Alternately the people in charge of researching such things at Sony may have a better handle on the likely demand that you think, it's possibly that they've accepted that their higher price point will result in somewhat lower initial sales and are underproducing to match.
I don't disagree that at least one of [over-priced console] and [possibly low initial shipments] is a mistake, however i expect that Sony has painted themselves into a corner at this point in that regard. It's probably far too late to take significant actions to affect either of those situations.
Zonk, give it a rest. You're accomplishing nothing other than making yourself look ridiculous.
Are you suffering from the misapprehension that Zonk is somehow making these stories up out of wholecloth? A lot of negative Sony articles are getting posted, but i suspect that's because a lot of negative Sony articles are being submitted. Zonk also posted the article about the marketing study saying "PS3 Predicted to Lead Market Through 2011." Note that no one congratulated Zonk for overcoming his anti-sony "bias," or argued how this study proved that all the other articles Zonk posted were wrong. Instead everyone criticized the study as being unrealistic and uninformed. Right or wrong the majority of the vocal slashdot crowd seems to have it in for Sony, and these are probably the same people sending in articles.
I think the ones constantly railing against Zonk's "tirades" and "favortisim" are the ones who are looking more and more ridiculous at this point.
"the 360 in short supply had an effect of freezing the market [...] This year, there will be a Wii and there will be a 360, so I can't believe that it will have the same kind of impact that the 360 [shortages] had."
Okay, it certainly won't have the same effect on the market as a whole as the 360 shortages (might have) had. However if not having enough of a product to sell people is bad, not having enough when there are two competing products is _really_ bad. Convincing people to buy a $500-$600 console is hard enough, but if they show up at the store to buy one and the store is out but there's a 360 and possibly a Revolution there in stock there's probably going to be at least some temptation to get one or both of them instead.
WTF? It's FUBAR! Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. Do you also say "for all intensive purposes?" I bet you do.
I'm a programmer. I'm also very silly. So although i'm aware of the original acronym and what it stands for, for all intents and purposes the two terms are interchangeable for that meaning in my vernacular.
From the article: "A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet."
I guess the center of rotation of the Pluto-Charon system is actually above the surface of Pluto, making it a double-planet system? So far so good.
The bit about plutons and dwarf planets is a _lot_ less clear however.
"The IAU proposal suggests (but does not require) that these be called dwarf planets. Pluto could also be considered a dwarf, which the IAU recommends as an informal label.
So to recap: Pluto would be a planet and a pluton and also a dwarf."
So we've gone from the term planet being an indistinct label that we apply to whatever we happen to think deserves it to it being an exact definiton, but added _two_ new indistinct labels that we apply to whatever we happen to think deserves it. To me this doesn't seem like a great deal of improvement.
At least i'm not the only one who thinks this is a bit foobared:
"Boss was bothered by the lack of definitiveness on this and other points.
Boss, along with Stern, was on an IAU committee of astronomers that failed to agree on a definition. After a year, the IAU disbanded that committee and formed the new one, which included the author Dava Sobel in an effort to bring new ideas to the process.
Boss called their proposal "creative" and "detailed" but said it does not hang together as a cohesive argument."
I think whatever definition they finally settle on should be a usefull one once we actually start traveling between solar systems (wishfull thinking.) If we were just coming across the Sol system for the first time we would probably be concerned about the 8 major planets as places for potential habitation, convenient gravity wells and sources of resources. We might care about Pluto and Charon, but i doubt it would be for any practical purpose. We almost certainly wouldn't care about the 20-50 other planets this new definition would add other than as a curiosity.
I'm not sure if there's an easy way to clearly differentiate between the two, but there really ought to be at least two clearly distinct categories, "major planets" and "minor planets" or "planets" and "planetoids" or "dwarf planets."
The only people who would buy the Wii specifically for that purpose are those few "hardcore" (wow, overused) retro gamers who won't, for whatever reason, download emulators and ROMs.
And gee, there might be a few of us who look forward to being able to legitemately purchase some of the games that we missed out on back on the first run of the NES and SNES. The fact that they'll be on a real console should make getting together groups of people for multiplayer a lot easier. I've never had much luck convincing other people to play multiplayer games on an emulator. I'm particularly looking forward to MULE which i used to have a lot of fun playing with my friends back in the day.
I never owned a Sega Saturn and never got very many games for the Sega Genesis so i'm especially looking forward for the chance to play those games. And i'm really hoping that they release whichever version of Bomberman it was that let you have more than four players playing at a time. (How many controllers can the Revolution handle? The fact that it can do four wireless controllers _and_ has four ports for GameCube controllers makes me hope that it will be able to handle at least eight at a time, though admitedly i don't have anything to base that on other than wishfull thinking.)
That may be an answer to the last question, but it doesn't address the first part at all. I'm curious what the price point will be for the PS2 collection and how it will compare to the price point on the virtual console version if the collection gets relased for it. Nintendo might not be happy if the Sega collection is cheap enough to make people reconsider purchasing NES and SNES games at whatever pricepoint Nintendo was originally thinking of. On the other hand if it turns out to be cheaper to get on the virtual console, either as a whole or piecemeal, some people might feel a little silly if they jump to get the PS2 version as soon as it comes out. I should keep telling myself that when it does come out:)
So will the same bundle be available on Nintendo's virtual console? Or will we have to buy each game separately for that format? Or is Sega going to outright renege on the agreement they presumably had with Nintendo to support the virtual console?
Zelda is a port af a Gamecube game, MetroidPrime is the successor of Gamecube game with some new controls, so are Need for Speed, Metal Slug, Madden, MonkeyBall, FF:Chronicals and plenty of others. That list reads like a "been there, done that"
As opposed to the games people are looking forward to on the other consoles, such as Metal Gear Solid 4, Final Fantasy 12, Halo 3, God of War 2, Gran Turismo Whatever, etc?
Is your conclusion that people would rather play the same old games with a large graphics improvement rather than the same old games with more moderate graphics improvements and some new interface changes that might improve playability? And which will probably be somewhat cheaper to boot?
It's funny that people have been complaining forever about how little work the Slashdot editors have been doing. Now that said editors have suddenly started editing stuff more by putting together these Backslashes everyone has responded by... complaining about them. Clearly some people aren't happy with _anything._
Come on Zonk! We know you're a total XBox 360 fanboy but do you _really_ need to post so many articles slamming Sony? It's not like... er, wait, _Sega's_ many mistakes? Sorry, my bad, nevermind.
There's a pretty much totally unsubstantiated story that the release date for the Nintendo Revolution has been leaked and it's coming out at the same time. If true that will be a bad week for many gamers' pocketbooks:)
First of all, it's still a stupid name. Second of all, i don't know who you talk to but people _are_ still making jokes about the name. The initial rush has worn off so the jokes aren't as common, but they're still out there.
I'm still going to get one, but _damn_ "Wii" is a stupid name!
The other responder is right on, but here's a simpler answer.
If i accept the statement that no other species has culture (somewhat debateable) then there's a simple reason why ants won't develop culture. Because we'd kick their asses. They won't develop into large herd beasts because cows, horses, gazelle, etc would kick their asses. They won't develop into large carnivores because lions tigers and bears would kick their asses.
When the human tree first started developing culture there were no other species to compete with us in that arena. Note however that there _were_ several other branches of "humanity" that may have been headed in the same direction (most noteably the Neanderthal) so our specific branch of humanity probably isn't the only one to develop/evolve culture as you cliam. But we're here now and they're not cause we kicked their asses and not the other way around. Now we've got the high ground and if any other species tries to encroach we'll most likely beat the crap out of them. Not very enlightened of us, but historically that's the way things have usually gone.
Now if you killed off all animal life on the planet except for ants then in a hundred or so million years you'd see herd ants and predator ants and possibly cultured ants. Assuming of course that the ecosystem managed to survive at all in the first place of course.
So does this mean that we can save the environment by using enough nukes to reduce the elevation of Tibet to a more reasonable level? I suppose we'd have to deal with the rest of the Himalayas similarly, but hey, we've got enough nukes to destroy the world several times over, right? So this ought to be easy!
So after buying the $40 WiFi reciever and the $20-40 memory card adapter you're practically made up the price difference:) Right after the announcement when i thought the only difference was the size of the hard drive i was wavering on which would be the better buy. After hearing about about the other missing features however it's become clear that getting the $500 version would be pretty dumb. If you can manage to set aside $500 for a console, what is after all a pure entertainment expense, you can either get an extra $100 now or wait until you've saved enough or the price has dropped enough that you can get the _real_ model.
The no HDMI part really confuses me though. Hasn't HD been the BIG thing that both MS and Sony have been pushing? The thing all the MS and Sony fanboys have been critisizng Nintendo for not having on the Revoluion?
Really i don't understand why Sony is even bothering with the $500 version other than just so they can say it starts at $500 rather than $600. Once you've got the people in the store looking at the system it's a lot easier to argue them up the extra $100 then. But i'm not sure that gain outweighs the risk of confusing the market and pissing off the people who don't do enough research and get the $500 without realizing what it's missing (not that those people don't deserve it, but that still doesn't make it good PR.) Perhaps they're only planning to ship a grand total of about 10 of the $500 model?
The very best thing about the PS3 is that it has provided the _only_ thing to make me happy about the name "Wii."
That being of course "PlayStation ThWii":)
I'm still planning on getting a PSWii of course, well, once the price has gone down a bit anyways, which is sad because i got both PS2 and GameCube on the day of release. But regardless of the merits of the rest of the system you've got to laugh (or perhaps cry) at the blatant "me too"ism of the controller. On the plus side as someone else pointed out, this might do a lot to legitimize the Wii controller to a big segement of the market. With Sony saying right up front that they're "not interested in gimmicks" and then wrapping up by announcing a motion sensitive controller they've made it a lot harder for themselves or anyone else to critisize Nintendo's controller.
Sony may actually have helped change the perception of the public from Nintendo being out on the fringe to Nintendo being at the forefront of, well, a Revolution:)
That may be, but the time difference between the hammer hitting the ground and the feather hitting the ground probably won't be observable to us....
You're probably correct, and the grandparent poster is clearly either having fun or is a total nutcase. However i think it's an important distinction to make. The whole "all objects fall at the same speed no matter their mass" thing always bothered me. My physics teacher stated that was the case but it didn't make intuitive sense to me. I understood that feathers fall a hell of a lot faster without air resistance but it seemed to me that if you dropped the moon on the earth (ie instantly killed its orbital rotation) that it ought to fall quite a bit faster. It took me longer than it should have to realize that although the mass of the moon would be canceled out just like for the feather or the hammer, that would be completly ignoring the other side of the equation in which the earth would fall towards the moon much faster than towards the feather or hammer.
Really everything we know is a series of aproximations approaching the truth. Telling people a simpler "mostly true" version that covers their needs at the moment is fine, as long as you're willing to go on to the more complicated explanations as the need arises. All physics teachers/professors should be ready to explain the difference in the gravitational pull of objects on the earth if any students have trouble believing the first explanation (or that explanation should be offered by default, which is the better idea in my opinion.)
Understanding that the difference in the "falling" rate was the difference between the gravitation pull of the feather and the gravitational pull of the hammer actually made the original statement make a lot more sense to me because i could see how one might technically fall faster than the other while practically the difference was irrelevant.
The site seems slashdoted so i can't see for myself, but is it really that big deal? Sites with reviews are a dime a dozen, even sites focused on a single machine aren't that uncommon, and if the quality of their reviews is any better than the average you'll see them rise to the top of the GameRankins lists after awhile anyways. (You're allowed to rate each review for each game and the aggregate score is displayed when you look at the list of reviews.)
Slashdot Mirror
Geez you stupid mods! I knew i was going to get modded down for the above post but i expected at least a minimum level of competence to be exercised in the process. Commenting about the ISS confusion and asking for clarification on the blurb is most certainly not offtopic, it's redundant! I even spelled it out for you in the subject! Get it right! _This_ post is offtopic. Or flamebait, your choice. Just stick to one of those two and you can't get it wrong.
The mods are going to have their work cut out for them today. 11 messages posts so far and every single one is along the lines of "IBM bought a space station?" To be fair even after reading all 11 posts my mind was _still_ going "huh?" So could someone who isn't at work and behind an overly restrictive web filter kindly let the rest of us know which ISS they're _actually_ talking about?
In Sony's defense, they probably don't have the resources to produce as many units as they'd ideally like to. Economies of scale only apply up to a certain point and over a certain time frame. They probably can't simply hire a couple factories for just a few months to produce extra consoles for the launch except at prohibitive expense. Alternately the people in charge of researching such things at Sony may have a better handle on the likely demand that you think, it's possibly that they've accepted that their higher price point will result in somewhat lower initial sales and are underproducing to match.
I don't disagree that at least one of [over-priced console] and [possibly low initial shipments] is a mistake, however i expect that Sony has painted themselves into a corner at this point in that regard. It's probably far too late to take significant actions to affect either of those situations.
Are you suffering from the misapprehension that Zonk is somehow making these stories up out of wholecloth? A lot of negative Sony articles are getting posted, but i suspect that's because a lot of negative Sony articles are being submitted. Zonk also posted the article about the marketing study saying "PS3 Predicted to Lead Market Through 2011." Note that no one congratulated Zonk for overcoming his anti-sony "bias," or argued how this study proved that all the other articles Zonk posted were wrong. Instead everyone criticized the study as being unrealistic and uninformed. Right or wrong the majority of the vocal slashdot crowd seems to have it in for Sony, and these are probably the same people sending in articles.
I think the ones constantly railing against Zonk's "tirades" and "favortisim" are the ones who are looking more and more ridiculous at this point.
Okay, it certainly won't have the same effect on the market as a whole as the 360 shortages (might have) had. However if not having enough of a product to sell people is bad, not having enough when there are two competing products is _really_ bad. Convincing people to buy a $500-$600 console is hard enough, but if they show up at the store to buy one and the store is out but there's a 360 and possibly a Revolution there in stock there's probably going to be at least some temptation to get one or both of them instead.
I'm a programmer. I'm also very silly. So although i'm aware of the original acronym and what it stands for, for all intents and purposes the two terms are interchangeable for that meaning in my vernacular.
(By the way, you bet incorrectly.)
I guess the center of rotation of the Pluto-Charon system is actually above the surface of Pluto, making it a double-planet system? So far so good.
The bit about plutons and dwarf planets is a _lot_ less clear however.
"The IAU proposal suggests (but does not require) that these be called dwarf planets. Pluto could also be considered a dwarf, which the IAU recommends as an informal label.
So to recap: Pluto would be a planet and a pluton and also a dwarf."
So we've gone from the term planet being an indistinct label that we apply to whatever we happen to think deserves it to it being an exact definiton, but added _two_ new indistinct labels that we apply to whatever we happen to think deserves it. To me this doesn't seem like a great deal of improvement.
At least i'm not the only one who thinks this is a bit foobared:
"Boss was bothered by the lack of definitiveness on this and other points.
Boss, along with Stern, was on an IAU committee of astronomers that failed to agree on a definition. After a year, the IAU disbanded that committee and formed the new one, which included the author Dava Sobel in an effort to bring new ideas to the process.
Boss called their proposal "creative" and "detailed" but said it does not hang together as a cohesive argument."
I think whatever definition they finally settle on should be a usefull one once we actually start traveling between solar systems (wishfull thinking.) If we were just coming across the Sol system for the first time we would probably be concerned about the 8 major planets as places for potential habitation, convenient gravity wells and sources of resources. We might care about Pluto and Charon, but i doubt it would be for any practical purpose. We almost certainly wouldn't care about the 20-50 other planets this new definition would add other than as a curiosity.
I'm not sure if there's an easy way to clearly differentiate between the two, but there really ought to be at least two clearly distinct categories, "major planets" and "minor planets" or "planets" and "planetoids" or "dwarf planets."
And gee, there might be a few of us who look forward to being able to legitemately purchase some of the games that we missed out on back on the first run of the NES and SNES. The fact that they'll be on a real console should make getting together groups of people for multiplayer a lot easier. I've never had much luck convincing other people to play multiplayer games on an emulator. I'm particularly looking forward to MULE which i used to have a lot of fun playing with my friends back in the day.
I never owned a Sega Saturn and never got very many games for the Sega Genesis so i'm especially looking forward for the chance to play those games. And i'm really hoping that they release whichever version of Bomberman it was that let you have more than four players playing at a time. (How many controllers can the Revolution handle? The fact that it can do four wireless controllers _and_ has four ports for GameCube controllers makes me hope that it will be able to handle at least eight at a time, though admitedly i don't have anything to base that on other than wishfull thinking.)
That may be an answer to the last question, but it doesn't address the first part at all. I'm curious what the price point will be for the PS2 collection and how it will compare to the price point on the virtual console version if the collection gets relased for it. Nintendo might not be happy if the Sega collection is cheap enough to make people reconsider purchasing NES and SNES games at whatever pricepoint Nintendo was originally thinking of. On the other hand if it turns out to be cheaper to get on the virtual console, either as a whole or piecemeal, some people might feel a little silly if they jump to get the PS2 version as soon as it comes out. I should keep telling myself that when it does come out :)
So will the same bundle be available on Nintendo's virtual console? Or will we have to buy each game separately for that format? Or is Sega going to outright renege on the agreement they presumably had with Nintendo to support the virtual console?
As opposed to the games people are looking forward to on the other consoles, such as Metal Gear Solid 4, Final Fantasy 12, Halo 3, God of War 2, Gran Turismo Whatever, etc?
Is your conclusion that people would rather play the same old games with a large graphics improvement rather than the same old games with more moderate graphics improvements and some new interface changes that might improve playability? And which will probably be somewhat cheaper to boot?
but what are the latest worldwide shipped figures for the PSP?
It's funny that people have been complaining forever about how little work the Slashdot editors have been doing. Now that said editors have suddenly started editing stuff more by putting together these Backslashes everyone has responded by... complaining about them. Clearly some people aren't happy with _anything._
Come on Zonk! We know you're a total XBox 360 fanboy but do you _really_ need to post so many articles slamming Sony? It's not like... er, wait, _Sega's_ many mistakes? Sorry, my bad, nevermind.
There's a pretty much totally unsubstantiated story that the release date for the Nintendo Revolution has been leaked and it's coming out at the same time. If true that will be a bad week for many gamers' pocketbooks :)
I'm still going to get one, but _damn_ "Wii" is a stupid name!
Hey, i don't know about you but _my_ evolutionary process uses C++ functions!
(Of course that means that i have to worry about developing a memory leak as i get older...)
If i accept the statement that no other species has culture (somewhat debateable) then there's a simple reason why ants won't develop culture. Because we'd kick their asses. They won't develop into large herd beasts because cows, horses, gazelle, etc would kick their asses. They won't develop into large carnivores because lions tigers and bears would kick their asses.
When the human tree first started developing culture there were no other species to compete with us in that arena. Note however that there _were_ several other branches of "humanity" that may have been headed in the same direction (most noteably the Neanderthal) so our specific branch of humanity probably isn't the only one to develop/evolve culture as you cliam. But we're here now and they're not cause we kicked their asses and not the other way around. Now we've got the high ground and if any other species tries to encroach we'll most likely beat the crap out of them. Not very enlightened of us, but historically that's the way things have usually gone.
Now if you killed off all animal life on the planet except for ants then in a hundred or so million years you'd see herd ants and predator ants and possibly cultured ants. Assuming of course that the ecosystem managed to survive at all in the first place of course.
So does this mean that we can save the environment by using enough nukes to reduce the elevation of Tibet to a more reasonable level? I suppose we'd have to deal with the rest of the Himalayas similarly, but hey, we've got enough nukes to destroy the world several times over, right? So this ought to be easy!
That's not actually a shell, it's a separate controller. Looks pretty cool though :)
The no HDMI part really confuses me though. Hasn't HD been the BIG thing that both MS and Sony have been pushing? The thing all the MS and Sony fanboys have been critisizng Nintendo for not having on the Revoluion?
Really i don't understand why Sony is even bothering with the $500 version other than just so they can say it starts at $500 rather than $600. Once you've got the people in the store looking at the system it's a lot easier to argue them up the extra $100 then. But i'm not sure that gain outweighs the risk of confusing the market and pissing off the people who don't do enough research and get the $500 without realizing what it's missing (not that those people don't deserve it, but that still doesn't make it good PR.) Perhaps they're only planning to ship a grand total of about 10 of the $500 model?
That being of course "PlayStation ThWii" :)
I'm still planning on getting a PSWii of course, well, once the price has gone down a bit anyways, which is sad because i got both PS2 and GameCube on the day of release. But regardless of the merits of the rest of the system you've got to laugh (or perhaps cry) at the blatant "me too"ism of the controller. On the plus side as someone else pointed out, this might do a lot to legitimize the Wii controller to a big segement of the market. With Sony saying right up front that they're "not interested in gimmicks" and then wrapping up by announcing a motion sensitive controller they've made it a lot harder for themselves or anyone else to critisize Nintendo's controller.
Sony may actually have helped change the perception of the public from Nintendo being out on the fringe to Nintendo being at the forefront of, well, a Revolution :)
Why not? In my mind it's pretty clearly one half fantasy and one half alternate history.
You're probably correct, and the grandparent poster is clearly either having fun or is a total nutcase. However i think it's an important distinction to make. The whole "all objects fall at the same speed no matter their mass" thing always bothered me. My physics teacher stated that was the case but it didn't make intuitive sense to me. I understood that feathers fall a hell of a lot faster without air resistance but it seemed to me that if you dropped the moon on the earth (ie instantly killed its orbital rotation) that it ought to fall quite a bit faster. It took me longer than it should have to realize that although the mass of the moon would be canceled out just like for the feather or the hammer, that would be completly ignoring the other side of the equation in which the earth would fall towards the moon much faster than towards the feather or hammer.
Really everything we know is a series of aproximations approaching the truth. Telling people a simpler "mostly true" version that covers their needs at the moment is fine, as long as you're willing to go on to the more complicated explanations as the need arises. All physics teachers/professors should be ready to explain the difference in the gravitational pull of objects on the earth if any students have trouble believing the first explanation (or that explanation should be offered by default, which is the better idea in my opinion.)
Understanding that the difference in the "falling" rate was the difference between the gravitation pull of the feather and the gravitational pull of the hammer actually made the original statement make a lot more sense to me because i could see how one might technically fall faster than the other while practically the difference was irrelevant.
The site seems slashdoted so i can't see for myself, but is it really that big deal? Sites with reviews are a dime a dozen, even sites focused on a single machine aren't that uncommon, and if the quality of their reviews is any better than the average you'll see them rise to the top of the GameRankins lists after awhile anyways. (You're allowed to rate each review for each game and the aggregate score is displayed when you look at the list of reviews.)