But the article says $35 to $50 for consulting? Assuming the contracting company takes a good bite of that, it sure doesn't sound like much. I think one could make a lot more as a plumber.
Yep, a mighty big number. Except Sony will probably pay off the debt by donating truckloads of excess Mariah Carey CDs to Texas libraries, estimated value $20/per.
In other words, CSI is actually more fictional that GTA because it shows so many things that are either impossible or beyond today's science.
The upset over GTA, on the other hand, is all about things that in fact can and do happen all too often. And rather than passively watching it (like CSI), the audience of GTA is actively participating.
All your arguments about foolish CSI-influenced juries only weakens the stance that nobody will be influenced by GTA. A much stronger argument is that normal people are smart enough to discern fact from fiction - so acting out a fantasy from GTA is bad, and so is expecting CSI evidence in a real courtroom.
I think most of us will agree that video games are no more likely to inspire kids to go on a killing spree any more then violent TV Shows and Movies or an episode of "Barney & Friends."
So what's the problem? If people aren't inspired by fiction (as you state), then anything CSI says about videogames will be taken as fiction by its viewers and have no influence on public policy. Right?
Now, you could argue some viewers won't distinguish CSI from reality, but then you'd have to admit the possibility of the same for GTA.
I did RTA, but you must believe that what a Microsoft executive states to the press is true and factual.
Fair enough. Anyways it's interesting to see the tension between the manufacturing guy who wants to make sure people know Microsoft has all the consoles it planned for, and the marketing guys who want a shortage, or at least the appearance of one.
Mr. Holmdahl is the Microsoft vice president in charge of Xbox manufacturing....
Mr. Holmdahl says he's confident the chip supply will hold strong. "There will be plenty of consoles available" for the holidays, he says.
All that theory seems to be based on buying things solely because they're expensive. I mean, he would have us believe that the cool kids would immediately go down the 2.50 new releases, buying each one and scorning the cheap songs. I don't see it working like that.
I guess you haven't watched how the cool kids shop for jeans and shoes then.
Web forums are useless to me, because they're closed. If I can't search *all* of them in one place, it's too hard to find what I want. If I have to sign up with a new user account for every different topic I want to post about (because they're all on different web forums), I don't bother.
All the cruft on Usenet doesn't bother me too much. If I'm searching for specific info on groups.google.com, I never see most of the junk. If I'm just "channel surfing" to see if anybody has any interesting thoughts, I don't always mind things straying from the designated topic.
Why? 100 million is a huge number of downloads, and really says something about how widespread the program is. (Unless you can name a program that's been downloaded 100 million times and isn't widespread).
If you're misinterpreting the number to mean something it doesn't, that's your problem.
Don't you mean, "I'm aware of the risks of terrorism, and I don't give a fuck if 20 guys with box cutters hijack this flight and smash it into a building, killing thousands of people, just so long as I'm not inconvenienced" instead?
I guess you could put it that way. I just don't think terrorism is that big a risk compared to other things, nor do I think "lie detectors" are terribly likely to help.
What I'm trying to say is that Xbox did not come to market with a higly anticipated game that made the units sell, no one said this about Halo before the Xbox release. In retrospect it certainly helped Xbox stay afloat and Halo 2 gave it another large boost.
Did the original XBox stay afloat? Now that it's about to be obsolete, what's the final verdict on the XBox as a product, did it make a profit after all?
Yes, but short of cloning the entire population of the United States 10-fold, there's not much chance we'll increase those numbers noticably.
That's not true. People do what their culture and economic system rewards them to do. In the US, that means becoming a lawyer.
Maybe our market is right and theirs is wrong, and what a country really needs for long-term prosperity is lots of lawyers and real estate agents. I guess we'll find out.
So what's your point, that Windows and Linux really are interchangeable? I'm pretty sure MS doens't see it that way, and they certainly don't want their customers to see it that way.
It's more a matter of prodding an industry where "standard" computers still come with 256mb ram. Dell's current high end machines come with 512, and some manufacturers can and will sell you a computer with 128mb of ram.
Maybe people don't really want or need more RAM?
I agree 128 mb is scandalous, but I'm a card-carrying geek and only have 512MB on my home system. (Well, I would be if there were such a card, and some reason to carry it).
My work laptop is over 2 years old and has 1 GB, and it seems just fine. Some of my computer vision applications are quite greedy at about 350 MB, but that still leaves enough to run WinXP+Outlook under VMWare, OpenOffice, Mozilla with a dozen tabs open, and compile a big program in the meanwhile. The fact is, a gigabyte is quite a bit of RAM!
I hesitate to say "2GB should be enough for anyone!" but most of us aren't on that particular treadmill any more.
Not strictly true. If you hav a dynamic IP address (which many/most end users do), you need some sort of registration and look-up service
My Comcast IP address has only changed once in 4 years (I have a domain name pointing to it and run my own mail server at home, so I would notice!)
Unfortunately, though, you still have a point... many people do need that.
We already have a ubiquitous DNS service. Instead of hacking up numerous proprietary dynamic DNS services (Vonage, ICQ, etc...), I think it would be better to extend "real" DNS. For home users without their own domain names, it might be as easy as making amy3423.users.aol.com resolve to the current IP address of amy3423@aol.com, and disabling caching.
Slashdot Mirror
Gettin' kinda fancy with the horizontal rule, ain't ya?
But the article says $35 to $50 for consulting? Assuming the contracting company takes a good bite of that, it sure doesn't sound like much. I think one could make a lot more as a plumber.
Yep, a mighty big number. Except Sony will probably pay off the debt by donating truckloads of excess Mariah Carey CDs to Texas libraries, estimated value $20/per.
The upset over GTA, on the other hand, is all about things that in fact can and do happen all too often. And rather than passively watching it (like CSI), the audience of GTA is actively participating.
All your arguments about foolish CSI-influenced juries only weakens the stance that nobody will be influenced by GTA. A much stronger argument is that normal people are smart enough to discern fact from fiction - so acting out a fantasy from GTA is bad, and so is expecting CSI evidence in a real courtroom.
Now, you could argue some viewers won't distinguish CSI from reality, but then you'd have to admit the possibility of the same for GTA.
PS3? It's not too late for Sony to name the thing "PS 361" if it really matters so much.
- the initial launch is extremely important to a hype driven product like a console
- Micrsoft isn't a hardware company so this isn't their specialty
- Microsoft is behind Sony and has lost $4BN on the XBox
- Microsoft is experimenting with more custom parts compared to XBox1 - good idea or bad?
I also thought it interesting that every XBox is tested for 2 hours. That's not true for typical computers, washing machines, even cars AFAIK.Fair enough. I'm not used to thinking of main memory access as "I/O" but maybe that's just me.
I can't.
All the cruft on Usenet doesn't bother me too much. If I'm searching for specific info on groups.google.com, I never see most of the junk. If I'm just "channel surfing" to see if anybody has any interesting thoughts, I don't always mind things straying from the designated topic.
If you're misinterpreting the number to mean something it doesn't, that's your problem.
You got it. Fearless soldiers? Uhh, maybe people have fear for a reason. You're no use to anybody as a casualty.
Maybe our market is right and theirs is wrong, and what a country really needs for long-term prosperity is lots of lawyers and real estate agents. I guess we'll find out.
So what's your point, that Windows and Linux really are interchangeable? I'm pretty sure MS doens't see it that way, and they certainly don't want their customers to see it that way.
I agree 128 mb is scandalous, but I'm a card-carrying geek and only have 512MB on my home system. (Well, I would be if there were such a card, and some reason to carry it).
My work laptop is over 2 years old and has 1 GB, and it seems just fine. Some of my computer vision applications are quite greedy at about 350 MB, but that still leaves enough to run WinXP+Outlook under VMWare, OpenOffice, Mozilla with a dozen tabs open, and compile a big program in the meanwhile. The fact is, a gigabyte is quite a bit of RAM!
I hesitate to say "2GB should be enough for anyone!" but most of us aren't on that particular treadmill any more.
Will 32 bit third-party software still run on 64 bit Windows? I hope so, or this will be a big disruption.
Unfortunately, though, you still have a point... many people do need that.
We already have a ubiquitous DNS service. Instead of hacking up numerous proprietary dynamic DNS services (Vonage, ICQ, etc...), I think it would be better to extend "real" DNS. For home users without their own domain names, it might be as easy as making amy3423.users.aol.com resolve to the current IP address of amy3423@aol.com, and disabling caching.