Everything I've read shows that the new Tony Hawk game has some major slowdown issues on the PS3, while on the 360 it's pretty smooth but does sometimes take an odd dip in the frame rate here and there. All this hype how the PS3 was going to smash the 360 in performance seems to be false. The Motorstorm demos on the kiosks looks pretty bad as well. I'm wondering if this will end up being another PS2 compared to the Gamecube / Original XBox.
This is kind of amusing. So does this mean if we pay a "piracy tax" up front, that we can then pirate music? And how can a music company possibly expect Apple to make some sort of deal like this. Are they going to boycott Apple if they don't? Haha.
You would be surprised how many people are holding off on buying a 360 for this simple feature alone. You wouldn't think it would be a big deal for people, but it certainly seems to be. You can't read any message board or blog site without seeing people wanting DivX support anymore. I suppose this will have to be done eventually to compete with the PS3, as it'll be bootable into Red Dog Linux, which already supports pretty much every codec out there.
Competition is great, but man, some companies are really stubborn. They should have had a look at the XBMC and copied it entirely from the getgo, it was one of the most popular reasons people even bought the first XBox.
Why do people have to do a quest to get the longsword +1? Will that blue armor you spent an hour trying to get actually be better than the pink you start out with? Achievements are just another way for people to enjoy gaming, and something to play for. Games themselves are entirely entertainment, you play them for fun, be it to find all the special items, armor, do all the hidden quests, or even, yes, finish the achievements.
I would argue that Achievements are one of the best things to happen to gaming since its inception. Right next to online multiplayer and the D-Pad. Not only does it allow you to set personal goals and gains, but everyone else can look at them and compare as well. Gaming without them is just a bit more bland.
My friends and I played it quite a bit. Granted, it was actually easy and short, but enjoyable. It took us about a weekend to beat it, but back then it was pretty good for a platformer. It was no Shadow of the Beast, but certainly not a bad game.
Actually, the people who "grew up" with Halo were in their late 20s and early 30s. Right now the average console owner is 35 years old. Teens who buy games are a small number compared to the grown adults who buy games. I'm not sure what the average comic buyer is at, but from what ive seen they seem to be the same age, and mostly the same market. Grown adults. I will agree that nostalgia did help the comic movies a bit, but if you're basing your sales on age alone, you're way way off.
Honestly, your attitude is a bit elitist. Many people know what DRM is, and what it does. 1 out of 10 you say? Phooey, i'd say easily 5 out of 10 would know, if not more. This is 2006. Computers and Media content players are mainstream and not some device that only "special" people can use.
iTunes is still popular with DRM because Apple specifically shows you how to remove the DRM by burning the songs onto Audio CD the moment you download the song. Saying iTunes has any sort of DRM is as ignorant as all get out. It simply isn't there as far as i'm concerned.
I think you under estimate people at large. The world isn't filled with hapless technodweebs right out of the movie Hackers. People are up to speed and know of all these issues. The real importance is whether or not they really care.
That functionality is dependant on an HDMI, or a digital DVI input to work properly.
Considering the majority of HDTV owners still don't have a single HDMI input, the companies decided that enabling this downscaling flag would basically kill the formats outright. Until all the first and second generation (And even a lot of third generation) of HDTV adopters upgrade their HDTVs to something more current, this will probably never be enabled.
They say they may enable it in the future, but not until a few years after the format gets off the ground. You are correct in the fact that they will now never be able to enable this flag. Ever. People typically don't replace their TV sets very often. Perhaps every 10-15 years, or even longer for a lot of people.
Including the kids. Some day they may grow up to sell a product themselves. Also, the fact that the parents can complain is their right. Banning the games would soon erode into these parents not able to complain down this slippery slope. So yes, the kids, and even the parents benefit from this law being reversed. Their free speech has been protected, regardless if they realise it or not.
If you want to call yourself that, then go ahead. But you hold no values of what defines a conservative. Centrist, possibly, but certainly not a conservative.
Nintendo was never about to go third party, and never will go third party. They could lose the bank with the Wii and would still only make games for their own systems. It just wont ever happen with the current leadership.
And the Japanese gaming market was always larger than the USAs. Unless you go back to the days of Atari and Intellivision.
Have you actually used it? There may be a ton under the hood that has changed, but up front, I find myself sitting here wondering if this just isn't XP with a different skin. It really isn't a worthy upgrade after using it. And certainly nothing like OSX on any sense of scale. They will need to really push why people need to upgrade because visually, i'm not seeing it.
This simply is not true. Apple is huge over in Japan, and their iPod has outsold anything and everything Sony has released, and countless other Japanese and other Asian based companies. The same can be said about a whole ton of other markets.
Japan doesn't have a problem with Microsoft being a western company, it's just that Microsoft just doesn't have the lineups that the Japanese market craves. Microsoft needs to simply invest huge amounts of cash into companies like Square/Enix, Atlus, Bandai, etc. They need the games made exclusively for their system, and not side projects, but actual games that wont be on the PS3 or Wii. They will win no love for having FFXI on their console when it is available on the PS2 and PC.
You just burn the song to a CD and rerip it as an unprotected MP3.
And yes, the CD burning and ripping part is built-in to iTunes already.
And yeah, Apple even tells you to do this to back your music up. So it's not like it is a hidden feature or some secret backdoor around the DRM or anything.
Wireless in laptops are typically set to connect to the strongest and first open connection they can find without any user intervention needed. So your bike analogy would be that if you're walking down the street and the bike suddenly shot up and under your behind and rode you down the street would be more correct. In this case it wouldn't be illegal, even though the bike isn't yours.
Heck, the guy could probably hold the coffee shop liable for anything he did for something like this if you got really technical about it.
Many stations also have nationally advertised commercials for gambling sites, with the web address and whatnot as well. I would assume the channels running them will all be facing felony charges as well? ESPN execs are going to be in a lot of trouble....
Just because it is happening everywhere else, means its OKAY to happen here too? Oh, I see, you wanted to point out the irony of the silly American. Your post was nothing more than a well worded troll.
Change has to happen somewhere, and some companies, believe it or not, will be held to higher standards. No one would give to winks if they found out Microsoft was doing the same thing with their XBoxes, but when you have a company like Apple, who prides themselves of being a very progressive, different, and generally feel-good company.. you just can't let it slide by.
Change has to happen somewhere, and passing it off because it's the norm doesn't hold up.
I think you haven't been paying attention lately. This practice of outsourcing was popular years ago and nearly all companies that boasted saving money have brought back the jobs to their former countries. Why? Because in the end, while the labor was cheap, it was inferior in quality. People got upset trying to understand half English speaking people on the phones who put you on hold ever five minutes to "talk to their supervisor" for the most simple of things. Companies spent more money trying to bring them up to speed and MAINTAIN it that they were spending more than they would have just by keeping their former employees who knew everything inside and out, and could be understood very easily and knew their particular culture and mannerisms.
So, no, they are NOT doing anything better. Just cheaper. If you don't believe me, look into it. You get what you pay for, and when a company, especially a BANK of all things, realise that their customers are concerned about SECURITY more than anything else, find out people in another country have access to their records and information, it's going to be a shot in the foot. No, both feet.
This is going to be a disaster for BoA. Wealthy people are VERY particular about who has access to their records and money. And especially businesses.
If you want to move the engine from your Corvette to a Civic, you can. Likewise, if you want to put your iTunes music on another player, you can. Simply burn the music to an unprotected audio CD which iTunes does built-in (And they even suggest you do this as soon as you buy your music), and then rerip the music onto the other player.
I fail to see the problem. iTunes doesn't lock any music from being played on other players or devices at all. It allows you to burn anything you buy to an audio CD for fair use and backup purposes.
You can probably expect them all to appear on the Wii. Either as free, or bonus games for buying a Wii game, or just really cheap.
I would suggest doing this instead of blatantly pirating these classics. Developers being screwed out of money only hurts the industry you seem to love.
They want an injunction against a "file list" sorting method, which iPod took from NextStep and then into OSX itself (In Finder). Creative got the patent for it before the iPod came out, yes, but not before NextStep or the fact that this patent is not their core business, would make it clear that there will be no injunction.
If Creative had a patent for portable music players, yes, this would be considered their "core" business somewhat, and the injunction would be valid. But this patent only covers the GUI, nothing else, so this is not enough. Basically, yeah, this is blatant patent trolling on Creatives part and will ultimately lose them a lot of money and be tossed out.
You will see quite a few devs not jump on the 360 console because of this alone. Much like Dreamcast in its early life, devs never came because of this. They all went to the PS2 instead. Eventually both the XBox and PS2 were hacked as well, but they were far enough along in their timeline that devs were already too invested in the systems to go anywhere else.
Right now is a very critical time for future devs looking to see what platform they might set sail with. If the 360 is really this easily piratable out of the gates, then you wont see much support down the road.
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Everything I've read shows that the new Tony Hawk game has some major slowdown issues on the PS3, while on the 360 it's pretty smooth but does sometimes take an odd dip in the frame rate here and there. All this hype how the PS3 was going to smash the 360 in performance seems to be false. The Motorstorm demos on the kiosks looks pretty bad as well. I'm wondering if this will end up being another PS2 compared to the Gamecube / Original XBox.
This is kind of amusing. So does this mean if we pay a "piracy tax" up front, that we can then pirate music? And how can a music company possibly expect Apple to make some sort of deal like this. Are they going to boycott Apple if they don't? Haha.
Between all the distros available, it gets my head broked.
You would be surprised how many people are holding off on buying a 360 for this simple feature alone. You wouldn't think it would be a big deal for people, but it certainly seems to be. You can't read any message board or blog site without seeing people wanting DivX support anymore. I suppose this will have to be done eventually to compete with the PS3, as it'll be bootable into Red Dog Linux, which already supports pretty much every codec out there. Competition is great, but man, some companies are really stubborn. They should have had a look at the XBMC and copied it entirely from the getgo, it was one of the most popular reasons people even bought the first XBox.
I would argue that Achievements are one of the best things to happen to gaming since its inception. Right next to online multiplayer and the D-Pad. Not only does it allow you to set personal goals and gains, but everyone else can look at them and compare as well. Gaming without them is just a bit more bland.
My friends and I played it quite a bit. Granted, it was actually easy and short, but enjoyable. It took us about a weekend to beat it, but back then it was pretty good for a platformer. It was no Shadow of the Beast, but certainly not a bad game.
Actually, the people who "grew up" with Halo were in their late 20s and early 30s. Right now the average console owner is 35 years old. Teens who buy games are a small number compared to the grown adults who buy games. I'm not sure what the average comic buyer is at, but from what ive seen they seem to be the same age, and mostly the same market. Grown adults. I will agree that nostalgia did help the comic movies a bit, but if you're basing your sales on age alone, you're way way off.
iTunes is still popular with DRM because Apple specifically shows you how to remove the DRM by burning the songs onto Audio CD the moment you download the song. Saying iTunes has any sort of DRM is as ignorant as all get out. It simply isn't there as far as i'm concerned.
I think you under estimate people at large. The world isn't filled with hapless technodweebs right out of the movie Hackers. People are up to speed and know of all these issues. The real importance is whether or not they really care.
I never noticed that before. I'll never look at the PS3 the same way again.
Considering the majority of HDTV owners still don't have a single HDMI input, the companies decided that enabling this downscaling flag would basically kill the formats outright. Until all the first and second generation (And even a lot of third generation) of HDTV adopters upgrade their HDTVs to something more current, this will probably never be enabled.
They say they may enable it in the future, but not until a few years after the format gets off the ground. You are correct in the fact that they will now never be able to enable this flag. Ever. People typically don't replace their TV sets very often. Perhaps every 10-15 years, or even longer for a lot of people.
Including the kids. Some day they may grow up to sell a product themselves. Also, the fact that the parents can complain is their right. Banning the games would soon erode into these parents not able to complain down this slippery slope. So yes, the kids, and even the parents benefit from this law being reversed. Their free speech has been protected, regardless if they realise it or not.
If you want to call yourself that, then go ahead. But you hold no values of what defines a conservative. Centrist, possibly, but certainly not a conservative.
And the Japanese gaming market was always larger than the USAs. Unless you go back to the days of Atari and Intellivision.
Have you actually used it? There may be a ton under the hood that has changed, but up front, I find myself sitting here wondering if this just isn't XP with a different skin. It really isn't a worthy upgrade after using it. And certainly nothing like OSX on any sense of scale. They will need to really push why people need to upgrade because visually, i'm not seeing it.
This simply is not true. Apple is huge over in Japan, and their iPod has outsold anything and everything Sony has released, and countless other Japanese and other Asian based companies. The same can be said about a whole ton of other markets.
Japan doesn't have a problem with Microsoft being a western company, it's just that Microsoft just doesn't have the lineups that the Japanese market craves. Microsoft needs to simply invest huge amounts of cash into companies like Square/Enix, Atlus, Bandai, etc. They need the games made exclusively for their system, and not side projects, but actual games that wont be on the PS3 or Wii. They will win no love for having FFXI on their console when it is available on the PS2 and PC.
You just burn the song to a CD and rerip it as an unprotected MP3.
And yes, the CD burning and ripping part is built-in to iTunes already.
And yeah, Apple even tells you to do this to back your music up. So it's not like it is a hidden feature or some secret backdoor around the DRM or anything.
"You just take DirectX 9, add the new calls, and let them return "sorry, I cannot do that"."
And then you end up with a black screen. Then what???
Wireless in laptops are typically set to connect to the strongest and first open connection they can find without any user intervention needed. So your bike analogy would be that if you're walking down the street and the bike suddenly shot up and under your behind and rode you down the street would be more correct. In this case it wouldn't be illegal, even though the bike isn't yours. Heck, the guy could probably hold the coffee shop liable for anything he did for something like this if you got really technical about it.
Many stations also have nationally advertised commercials for gambling sites, with the web address and whatnot as well. I would assume the channels running them will all be facing felony charges as well? ESPN execs are going to be in a lot of trouble....
Just because it is happening everywhere else, means its OKAY to happen here too? Oh, I see, you wanted to point out the irony of the silly American. Your post was nothing more than a well worded troll.
.. you just can't let it slide by.
Change has to happen somewhere, and some companies, believe it or not, will be held to higher standards. No one would give to winks if they found out Microsoft was doing the same thing with their XBoxes, but when you have a company like Apple, who prides themselves of being a very progressive, different, and generally feel-good company
Change has to happen somewhere, and passing it off because it's the norm doesn't hold up.
So, no, they are NOT doing anything better. Just cheaper. If you don't believe me, look into it. You get what you pay for, and when a company, especially a BANK of all things, realise that their customers are concerned about SECURITY more than anything else, find out people in another country have access to their records and information, it's going to be a shot in the foot. No, both feet.
This is going to be a disaster for BoA. Wealthy people are VERY particular about who has access to their records and money. And especially businesses.
If you want to move the engine from your Corvette to a Civic, you can. Likewise, if you want to put your iTunes music on another player, you can. Simply burn the music to an unprotected audio CD which iTunes does built-in (And they even suggest you do this as soon as you buy your music), and then rerip the music onto the other player.
I fail to see the problem. iTunes doesn't lock any music from being played on other players or devices at all. It allows you to burn anything you buy to an audio CD for fair use and backup purposes.
I would suggest doing this instead of blatantly pirating these classics. Developers being screwed out of money only hurts the industry you seem to love.
If Creative had a patent for portable music players, yes, this would be considered their "core" business somewhat, and the injunction would be valid. But this patent only covers the GUI, nothing else, so this is not enough. Basically, yeah, this is blatant patent trolling on Creatives part and will ultimately lose them a lot of money and be tossed out.
Right now is a very critical time for future devs looking to see what platform they might set sail with. If the 360 is really this easily piratable out of the gates, then you wont see much support down the road.