Pygmy populations derived from elephants or mammoths are known from several locations throughout the world, including the islands of Malta and Sicily in the Mediterranean, several islands in southeast Asia, and Wrangel Island in the Arctic
Nova did a nice program on the questions about the little hairy elephants a few years ago, I think concentrating on the ones on Wrangel.
His take on it? the whole immigration issue is such a political football that these douchebag politicians jump in and pass some retarded legislation to act like they're actually doing something so often that the people working in the INS offices don't even know what exactly the fucking rules are on any given day.
Oh, there you have me nodding. I've dealt with Chicago too. The INS is completely underfunded for what it does, pretty obviously, just to start with, leaving alone its intransigence and a bureaucracy that's worthy of the Ming Chinese state.
I did a paper on what happened when, in the 1980s, Jesse Helms and company got a "Nobody with HIV should be allowed to come into the country" bill passed. The INS had no resources to enforce the new law, so what ended up happening was that only various HIV activists who were traveling to conferences -- the conspicuous cases -- would up being jailed on their entry points into the country. It sure played well on the senate floor, though.
Regardless of what some people like to believe, this issue has no simple answers and there are far more than two sides to this issue. That little fact means that our political system is entirely incapable of dealing with it.
Natch. No simple answers, more than two sides: Exactly the sort of "nuance" that ain't going to get you elected.
Another case where the news of the incident makes the problem worse.
I'm just dying to know what your criteria is for when something should and shouldn't be released in the media. When do you let the light escape that box? The more powerful an institution is (and therefore the more capable of harm due to misbehavior or ineptness), the less we should report about it? Seems to follow from your premise, doesn't it?
In terms of government accountability, the precedents for and implications of your position are disturbing as all get out. The obvious analog to "Don't report anything bad about [the war], it's only abetting the enemy" is the stuff of any totalitarian state.
You're confusing the role of reporters with that of propagandists.
Or we will have more remakes then you can shake a stick at.
Movies remake almost everything, and really it's only in the past ten years that the production budgets necessary for big release video games have started imitating that. The point is when you have that much money on the table, the producers will tend to play it safe and put their money behind proven winners. That means sequels.
The biggest Xbox360 release title was King Kong: a game based on a lavish remake of a movie. The remake was fabulously larger and more expensive than the original in inflation-adjusted dollars, and... okay, I can't judge it, because I loved the original Kong so much I didn't want to see Peter Jackson's self-indulgent take on it.
Casablanca, to use your example, has been remade in a few different ways, though never as an outright shot-for-shot do-over like the recent Psycho. The most recent version I can think of offhand was "Havana," which was openly acknowledged as having re-set the story in Cuba. (Robert Redford standing in for Bogie -- eck.) Ronnie Reagan was in something that's supposed to be pretty close to Rick's character, too, in 1951. There've been a couple of prequel TV series using the actual characters from the movie.
Every couple of years we get hilarious rumors and spoofs involving today's Hollywood media crushes in an outright remake: Ben Affleck in Bogie's role, or Ashton Kutcher. Thank God those are parodies. Maybe a game studio will use them for the voices in Casablanca Wii, where you wave your Wiimote to hide the travel papers in the piano.
rather than issues like balancing the budget, fixing levees, or fixing the immigration problems we have.
Immigration sticks out as the crossover from your list. Pretty clearly the Repubs were trying to pony up immigration reform as this year's Gay Marriage Amendment: the social wedge issue that would continue to let them play Nixon's "southern strategy" this time around. The "illegal immigration should be a felony" thing was all about that. The grenade went off in their hands a bit, and now they're back to the gay marriage thing as a fallback position.
My Southern Baptist relatives down in Oklahoma would vote for any politician who passed legislation about some sort of "fraud" involving white girls being misled by black men. Seriously. All you have to do is throw them a bone like that, and they're motivated. Politicians know it, just take a look at their Senator Coburn. It's spooky.
but it takes an MS exec to fumble before their eyes open? No wonder people get disenfranchised with big corporations.
My first instinctive response was that you'd used the word "disenfranchised" in an odd and awkward way, there. Upon reflection I'll give you credit for more than that.
There are political analogs to this effect, pretty obvious ones. JFK's "group think" leading to the Bay of Pigs, for example -- one historical precedent that's frighteningly close to our latest misadventure in Iraq. Closed group of advisors, suppression of dissent, hubris, a strong tendency to value loyalty as if that was the supreme virtue: recipe for disastrous oversights.
(Steve Jobs is no saint -- I think of him as being in the same class as a third world generalissimo/President, complete with cult of personality -- but when he explained the reasons for which the iTunes store would work, it was apparent that he'd seen what the p2p world was like. He put himself in our shoes. The contrast with MS's leadership on high is stark.)
His actual motivations for his war on video games probably go no further than a quest for power and publicity. Unless, of course, he's actually out of touch with reality to the extent of believing what he says.
Once one starts down the path of questing for power and publicity, it's easy to lose track of the truth and start believing whatever reinforces your position.
Still, Jackass Thompson belongs to many additional demographics that people aren't collectively blaming. Some Christians agree with him and some don't. Some men agree with him and some don't. Some 50-somethings agree with him and some don't.
Not to mention the coveted jackass demographic. Those people go to movies!
I do think you want to examine the history of U.S. governmental censorship and take a good long look at stuff like the "Hays" code in Hollywood. The Catholic church had a huge influence over "the code," and Joseph Breen who enforced the thing came out of various Catholic advocacy organizations.
I'm having trouble thinking of comparable left-wing examples, at least in the US. The black list didn't ban right wing figures like John Wayne and Ronnie Reagan from the movies, you know? Even at the height of early 1970s counter culture, where were the left-wing laws censoring pro-military/"fascist" films and so on? That would be the equivalent, more or less.
Look at the specs for the xbox and the 360, then just use some common sense.
Let's see. Common sense. Can I afford a $400-$600 system which would then require another $1000-$1400-$2000 monitor just in order to see the improved graphics it puts out? Nope. The performance numbers just cited don't match the experience I would have on either of those systems, because I don't have the monitor to display them. In terms of perception, if I had such a system right now I'd be far more likely to say it was maybe twice as good as the old one than to say it was eight times better or whatever.
Meanwhile, do I want to extend myself that far in order to support either a)Microsoft's market share ambitions, which God knows it will never abuse; or b) Sony's attempt to win the HDVD standards war by leveraging its PS market share? Neither gesture particularly inspires me...
Common sense also tells me that my experience with Mule in 1983 was superior to most experiences with modern consoles, for that matter. I could provide comparative estimates of the number of enjoyable hours, or something, but I'm not sure the math would quite explain things...
On behalf of conservative Christians throughout America: you have no idea what you're talking about.
My Southern Baptist relations down in Oklahoma are exactly the people referred to by the parent poster. They fit his or her statement, to the letter, and have spoken against both "Huckleberry Finn" and GTA to me personally. My point being that Jack Thompson doesn't speak for all conservative Christians -- and neither do you. Both of you claim to do so on some level, however... or you just said you did, anyway.
And don't forget that liberals have been advocating censorship for decades as well. I say that not as an excuse, but as a reminder: don't think that every last person in your political demographic is as anti-censorship as you'd like to believe.
Personally I find the strange political bedfellows over issues like pRon and violent video games to be instructive. This is a good example of how it's sometimes not what you believe, but the way your belief was arrived at. Authoritarian belief systems vary in which authorities they think have the absolute truth, but they think in the same basic ways about the world. So, you get certain fundies and certain radical feminists arguing together for stuff like censoring pop music lyrics. They both think they've got a grip on absolute morality, yes?
So you're right -- this is one of those areas where the political spectrum reveals that it's really more like a circle. The two ends overlap. Fundamentalists from all the religions of the book think alike, in many ways: John Ashcroft, meet the Taliban.
Isn't the problem with immigration that we have today due to those who enter our country illegally?
On the one hand, duh, yeah, and that was my first thought too. Anyone who's ever heard the gun lobby arguments about new laws punishing legitimate hunters while making no difference to criminals should be livid with this idea, shouldn't they?
Of course, the real problem we have with integration is the way it gets used as a political "wedge issue" by politicians who want to divide and conquer us using our fear of immigrants and general xenophobia. Last time around the Republican party used gay marriage amendments; this year our election year B.S. was apparently supposed to be about those dirty immigrants swarthily overwhelming our nation. (Did someone just pass an English as the official language bill, too? Brave patriotism, craven-politician-style.) So far the strategy seems to have backfired on the Republicans, who are turning on each other.
In that sense this suggestion is actually part of the problem -- a company stepping in trying to exploit the fearful politics -- and has nothing whatsoever to do with any solution to... whatever the crisis is. As you say, even by the internal logic of "those horrible immigrants are overrunning us," it doesn't make any sense.
Besides, I think Sony has other irons in the fire.
No doubt Sony's got other fish to fry. That's the whole point. They tried to "leverage" their PS2 market dominance into a win for Blu-Ray in that standards war, and the resulting price of their new console is very likely going to damage them in both markets.
(Sony? Overextend itself in an aggressive attempt to impose a proprietary standard on the marketplace? The heck you say.)
Other than trolling for Mac fanboys, what are you talking about?
I'm honestly seeing no comparison to the Mac OS. Have you had any exposure to or experience with the Mac OS at any point? 'Cause I have, a few different times, and this design has precisely zero to do with anything Apple makes... Is it their Web site, which also uses a controversial white background? Or what?
just because your friends dont have them (and hey, it IS five years old) doesn't mean there aren't stacks of people out there who still have them, and still buy them.
Actually I'm aware of that 360-GameCube comparison in Japan. I think of it as just another example of these companies persisting in their approaches -- MS's utter failure to crack the Japanese market is pretty telling this time around, as they seriously tried to address their failure with the original XBox.
(And yeah, the GC is the only one I own, and the Wii's the only one I'm even remotely considering this time around. Nintendo is the only one of these three companies that's even motivated by providing excellent games. It seems to be their primary motive, even. Which is amazing.)
but I can almost remember them saying nearly the same things about how the learned from mistkes with the N64 and promised for 3rd party support for the 'Cube
These three companies make good examples of how corporate cultures can persist despite different circumstances.
Nintendo has its M.O., yeah? They sell the consoles at a profit and keep prices modest for the market by using less cutting-edge technology. Their franchises really do show a love for game design, for getting the little things right, in a way the other companies just don't approach. (The exception may be the bought-out Bungie-MS relationship.) They love to try out unorthodox controllers, but back them inconsistently. (Anyone for a game of Donkey Kong Bongos? There are maybe three games that'll use those.)
Sony, for a human generation or three now, has been trying to shoehorn standards war victories into various products across all its product lines. "Proprietary memory format" -- quick, what company did you think of? This time around it's Blu-Ray, and they seem to have killed themselves on the PS3 price by forcing it in there. Across most of their product lines, again, they do show a decent eye for conservatively nice design. The little triangle button on the PS controller isn't going to be turning into a Wii gesture any time soon -- and when they try something like that they show iffy results.
MS's gaming division is all about loss leader maneuvering to capture market share. Do they love the games? Frankly I don't see it, and all the poseur's "xtreem XBox" attitude they put on falls flat for me. MS also doesn't "get" the Japanese market, very apparently. They tried to make their release lineup for the 360 more Japanese-friendly, and failed.
It's weird how consistent they all are. You'd think Nintendo would try to play loss leader with the console this time around as a way of regaining market share, but their price is already much lower than the competition... and well, tradition is a powerful thing. So they just keep plugging away at incremental improvements in their way of doing business. For these three, there's no sense radically changing what works... or even what doesn't work so well.
Next time around MS will be talking about the Japanese market again, assuming they're not tired after the $4 billion they've lost yet. Nintendo will release Mario-sensaround. Sony will try to bundle a proprietary.hologram engine in everything. I can't wait for that E3.
At best, this will provide very good camo, where pieces of color from the environment behind you show up on you instead. At worst, the disruption from light working in unexpected ways will make this "invisibility" be a very noticeable beacon. You know how your eyes always flick to something that moves (animated ads, anyone?) This would be like that.
In any case, military applications probably wouldn't be able to keep the cloak up when a weapon was fired from within it, the energy involved being difficult to surround with a smooth, flowing light "cloak" consistently. You'd need to de-cloak to let loose a killing volley of photon torpedos, wouldn't you?
What a nuisance -- though it'd be a boon for the writers.
IIRC, Nintendo doesn't have a history of taking losses on their consoles, someone correct me if I'm wrong. At this low price, is it possible they've taken a turn on this one?
Given the marginalization of the GameCube, I've been wondering whether Nintendo wouldn't be smart to lose a smidge on each console this time around in order to regain market share. Their two competitors have blown prices sky high and narrowed their market considerably (I think) by making it necessary to pony up for an HD screen in order to really see the fun from their new systems. Sony and MS are vulnerable, vulnerable as can be. Nintendo needs to get the third party developers on board, and the relative cheapness of developing for Wii is a step that way. But imagine if the Wii release price was a bit of a loss leader, a $175 sort of thing, and they got a huge jump starting next November or so in their market share. Developers would take note.
I doubt it happens. As you say, Nintendo makes profit on its consoles (and everything else), and doesn't play the market share game a la Microsoft. Sony always tries to bundle everything with some sort of wrongheaded standards war "leverage" move. MS desperately tries to gain market share despite losing rivers of money, and imagines they understand the "extreme" tone "hard core" gamers like, 'cause you know, they're so cool. The teams keep running the same plays... I still think Nintendo is the clear winner this round, in prospect.
I tend to like games/movies/music that aren't wildly popular, where the future production of them depends on how many new copies are sold.
...I hate getting used CDs/DVDs and finding out they're scratched... I refuse to contribute to the strategy of e.g. EB/Gamestop/Blockbuster, where they buy something used and then turn around and sell it for much more.
We can respect these reactions, they're awake and well-intentioned. My advice to you is to concentrate on the positive feelings you get from supporting the small publishers and indies you like. Don't try to spin from that positive feeling a coherent (read: dogmatic) position about the evils of the alternatives, though. It's not working, for you or Sony.
Your posts here are sort of like a microcosm of Sony's approach, actually. Instead of giving us a way to feel good about their buying model and products and so on, they're attempting to re-assert control with a great big "Bad Dog!" to people who do things differently. They don't remind us of any rewards for buying things new, or come up with ways to encourage that; instead they're coming across as control freaks whose punitive approach we have no positive reaction to at all.
Sony, like you, is trying to rewrite the rules to make people who disagree with them actually criminal, as opposed to simply encouraging their customers in the direction they want. Pretty wrongheaded, isn't it? It doesn't have to be that way.
This is purely speculation, but one has to wonder how Jobs would have felt about the Pledge-at-triple-price system, in which OS X laptops would essentially have been sold at 300 bucks. The new MacBook product is selling for more than 3 times that. How many people would have jumped on a $300 Mac laptop? Toss in the social cause good vibe, and you'd be selling a lot of these where college students would have chosen a MacBook instead.
(But yeah, you're right, Jobs "got" this project, whereas Gates displayed his usual defensively arrogant mediocrity.)
I don't like it when programs try to be "smart" and hide features away from me.
Me too. I've never run into anyone who wants the menu items they don't regularly use to "vanish" or be available only when you choose to manually expand them. We all hate this feature. It doesn't simplify things, it complicates them by making us guess where everything is. Duh. Hint to MS and anyone else: When it's a feature we rarely use, we want to be able to find it on the occasions for which we do need it.
Another hint: people don't honestly need a "cut" and "paste" icon on your ribbon or toolbar or whatever. Even the people who use those wouldn't miss them much. Heck, Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V and so on are among the only UI elements that are relatively consistent across windows apps.
Now we've got "ribbons" and right-click menus and so on all changing according to contexts that we can't always guess at. Do I have a set of "paragraph" options for this text in my table, or will this border be for the table cell? Ack. Pfft.
And if anyone upgrades their enterprise to this new version without getting rid of the older version(s), well, they need a new IT director. You _always_ upgrade everyone / everything at once to the same version. Anomolies should be kept to a minimum.
I work at a company with well over 25,000 employees. Way to plan for catastrophic failure and massive support problems. I think we will pass on this dictum of yours -- based as it is on the presumption of incompatibility, which we really ought not to be accepting.
Like any monoculture, IT monocultures are vulnerable to attack, as well. Not that someone using Windows would have any trouble with that...
It isn't actually Calvin, of course, Waterson gets no royalties and has no control.
Yeah, I'm aware. It's kind of sad that he held out against merchandising out of conscience and got rewarded with that stuff. I hate that. Meanwhile the estate of Charles Schulz continues to rake in money on licensing agreements.
(I'm still hoping Bill' writing "Frazz" -- "the older Calvin" -- secretly.)
Since I know the initial price of a console isn't a major factor in the long run, I don't think that it will affect people that much in the beginning either.
And because people pay for cable, the cost of flat panel TVs hasn't kept them from spending more than a grand on those... except it has, and does, still.
You might want to read some of the other comments. Or try my shoes on:
I've got two 12-year-olds. One of their friends has an original X-Box. That friend hasn't seriously considered the 360. It's too expensive for his family, and he and his old brother thought about saving up at first but decided it was just too much. I have a nephew whose (absentee jerk of a) father sent him a PS2 the first week it was out, as a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses sort of thing. (The nephew doesn't play his PS2; he basically plays Zelda Windwaker whenever I've seen him do anything.) The chances of this nephew getting a PS3 are remotely small; his mother (who has no interest in consoles to speak of) went out of her way to tell me how out-of-this-world the announced PS3 prices were. Even she noticed.
From my point of view, and from those of my kids' friends and their families and my sister and her kid, the Sony price point is an extreme obstacle to their choosing that system. Up-front cost is going to deter those people, absolutely. And it deters me.
Meanwhile, as they get their heads around the idea of $400 or $600 for a new box, all these people are being softened up to the expense of the Wii. Again, I know I am. Suddenly $200 bucks seems like the only company that has a clue about my spending habits and expectations.
In the case of the PS3, most people will buy it because it will have the widest selection of games out of the new consoles.
The development costs for PS3 and 360 games are going to be staggeringly higher than for previous systems. We're talking about Hollywood-level budgets just to get in the door. I wouldn't rely on massive libraries of games to start with. Not at all.
(If more people at least feigned respect in their daily lives, think about what a nicer place the world would be.)
My custom-made bumper sticker, which I've not yet had the gumption to stick on the actual car, reads "Try driving like a decent person. Maybe you'll become one." I'm actually afraid to apply the thing; it seems like it might draw some sort of road rage attack.
There's some balancing point between faked respect -- insincerity -- and the sort of "disrespectful" tone we're talking about in the MS and Sony comments. I think we all know which side of that balance U.S. drivers fall on. Think "Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing on the rival truck make's logo" decals. Nice.
(I was going to say Iwata was quintessentially Japanese in these comments, but then Sony is one of the counterexamples.)
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Populations of wooly mammoths did indeed evolve into the "pygmy" mammoth.
Nova did a nice program on the questions about the little hairy elephants a few years ago, I think concentrating on the ones on Wrangel.
His take on it? the whole immigration issue is such a political football that these douchebag politicians jump in and pass some retarded legislation to act like they're actually doing something so often that the people working in the INS offices don't even know what exactly the fucking rules are on any given day.
Oh, there you have me nodding. I've dealt with Chicago too. The INS is completely underfunded for what it does, pretty obviously, just to start with, leaving alone its intransigence and a bureaucracy that's worthy of the Ming Chinese state.
I did a paper on what happened when, in the 1980s, Jesse Helms and company got a "Nobody with HIV should be allowed to come into the country" bill passed. The INS had no resources to enforce the new law, so what ended up happening was that only various HIV activists who were traveling to conferences -- the conspicuous cases -- would up being jailed on their entry points into the country. It sure played well on the senate floor, though.
Regardless of what some people like to believe, this issue has no simple answers and there are far more than two sides to this issue. That little fact means that our political system is entirely incapable of dealing with it.
Natch. No simple answers, more than two sides: Exactly the sort of "nuance" that ain't going to get you elected.
Another case where the news of the incident makes the problem worse.
I'm just dying to know what your criteria is for when something should and shouldn't be released in the media. When do you let the light escape that box? The more powerful an institution is (and therefore the more capable of harm due to misbehavior or ineptness), the less we should report about it? Seems to follow from your premise, doesn't it?
In terms of government accountability, the precedents for and implications of your position are disturbing as all get out. The obvious analog to "Don't report anything bad about [the war], it's only abetting the enemy" is the stuff of any totalitarian state.
You're confusing the role of reporters with that of propagandists.
Or we will have more remakes then you can shake a stick at.
Movies remake almost everything, and really it's only in the past ten years that the production budgets necessary for big release video games have started imitating that. The point is when you have that much money on the table, the producers will tend to play it safe and put their money behind proven winners. That means sequels.
The biggest Xbox360 release title was King Kong: a game based on a lavish remake of a movie. The remake was fabulously larger and more expensive than the original in inflation-adjusted dollars, and... okay, I can't judge it, because I loved the original Kong so much I didn't want to see Peter Jackson's self-indulgent take on it.
Casablanca, to use your example, has been remade in a few different ways, though never as an outright shot-for-shot do-over like the recent Psycho. The most recent version I can think of offhand was "Havana," which was openly acknowledged as having re-set the story in Cuba. (Robert Redford standing in for Bogie -- eck.) Ronnie Reagan was in something that's supposed to be pretty close to Rick's character, too, in 1951. There've been a couple of prequel TV series using the actual characters from the movie.
Every couple of years we get hilarious rumors and spoofs involving today's Hollywood media crushes in an outright remake: Ben Affleck in Bogie's role, or Ashton Kutcher. Thank God those are parodies. Maybe a game studio will use them for the voices in Casablanca Wii, where you wave your Wiimote to hide the travel papers in the piano.
rather than issues like balancing the budget, fixing levees, or fixing the immigration problems we have.
Immigration sticks out as the crossover from your list. Pretty clearly the Repubs were trying to pony up immigration reform as this year's Gay Marriage Amendment: the social wedge issue that would continue to let them play Nixon's "southern strategy" this time around. The "illegal immigration should be a felony" thing was all about that. The grenade went off in their hands a bit, and now they're back to the gay marriage thing as a fallback position.
My Southern Baptist relatives down in Oklahoma would vote for any politician who passed legislation about some sort of "fraud" involving white girls being misled by black men. Seriously. All you have to do is throw them a bone like that, and they're motivated. Politicians know it, just take a look at their Senator Coburn. It's spooky.
but it takes an MS exec to fumble before their eyes open? No wonder people get disenfranchised with big corporations.
My first instinctive response was that you'd used the word "disenfranchised" in an odd and awkward way, there. Upon reflection I'll give you credit for more than that.
There are political analogs to this effect, pretty obvious ones. JFK's "group think" leading to the Bay of Pigs, for example -- one historical precedent that's frighteningly close to our latest misadventure in Iraq. Closed group of advisors, suppression of dissent, hubris, a strong tendency to value loyalty as if that was the supreme virtue: recipe for disastrous oversights.
(Steve Jobs is no saint -- I think of him as being in the same class as a third world generalissimo/President, complete with cult of personality -- but when he explained the reasons for which the iTunes store would work, it was apparent that he'd seen what the p2p world was like. He put himself in our shoes. The contrast with MS's leadership on high is stark.)
His actual motivations for his war on video games probably go no further than a quest for power and publicity. Unless, of course, he's actually out of touch with reality to the extent of believing what he says.
Once one starts down the path of questing for power and publicity, it's easy to lose track of the truth and start believing whatever reinforces your position.
Still, Jackass Thompson belongs to many additional demographics that people aren't collectively blaming. Some Christians agree with him and some don't. Some men agree with him and some don't. Some 50-somethings agree with him and some don't.
Not to mention the coveted jackass demographic. Those people go to movies!
I do think you want to examine the history of U.S. governmental censorship and take a good long look at stuff like the "Hays" code in Hollywood. The Catholic church had a huge influence over "the code," and Joseph Breen who enforced the thing came out of various Catholic advocacy organizations.
I'm having trouble thinking of comparable left-wing examples, at least in the US. The black list didn't ban right wing figures like John Wayne and Ronnie Reagan from the movies, you know? Even at the height of early 1970s counter culture, where were the left-wing laws censoring pro-military/"fascist" films and so on? That would be the equivalent, more or less.
Look at the specs for the xbox and the 360, then just use some common sense.
Let's see. Common sense. Can I afford a $400-$600 system which would then require another $1000-$1400-$2000 monitor just in order to see the improved graphics it puts out? Nope. The performance numbers just cited don't match the experience I would have on either of those systems, because I don't have the monitor to display them. In terms of perception, if I had such a system right now I'd be far more likely to say it was maybe twice as good as the old one than to say it was eight times better or whatever.
Meanwhile, do I want to extend myself that far in order to support either a)Microsoft's market share ambitions, which God knows it will never abuse; or b) Sony's attempt to win the HDVD standards war by leveraging its PS market share? Neither gesture particularly inspires me...
Common sense also tells me that my experience with Mule in 1983 was superior to most experiences with modern consoles, for that matter. I could provide comparative estimates of the number of enjoyable hours, or something, but I'm not sure the math would quite explain things...
My Southern Baptist relations down in Oklahoma are exactly the people referred to by the parent poster. They fit his or her statement, to the letter, and have spoken against both "Huckleberry Finn" and GTA to me personally. My point being that Jack Thompson doesn't speak for all conservative Christians -- and neither do you. Both of you claim to do so on some level, however... or you just said you did, anyway.
And don't forget that liberals have been advocating censorship for decades as well. I say that not as an excuse, but as a reminder: don't think that every last person in your political demographic is as anti-censorship as you'd like to believe.
Personally I find the strange political bedfellows over issues like pRon and violent video games to be instructive. This is a good example of how it's sometimes not what you believe, but the way your belief was arrived at. Authoritarian belief systems vary in which authorities they think have the absolute truth, but they think in the same basic ways about the world. So, you get certain fundies and certain radical feminists arguing together for stuff like censoring pop music lyrics. They both think they've got a grip on absolute morality, yes?
So you're right -- this is one of those areas where the political spectrum reveals that it's really more like a circle. The two ends overlap. Fundamentalists from all the religions of the book think alike, in many ways: John Ashcroft, meet the Taliban.
On the one hand, duh, yeah, and that was my first thought too. Anyone who's ever heard the gun lobby arguments about new laws punishing legitimate hunters while making no difference to criminals should be livid with this idea, shouldn't they?
Of course, the real problem we have with integration is the way it gets used as a political "wedge issue" by politicians who want to divide and conquer us using our fear of immigrants and general xenophobia. Last time around the Republican party used gay marriage amendments; this year our election year B.S. was apparently supposed to be about those dirty immigrants swarthily overwhelming our nation. (Did someone just pass an English as the official language bill, too? Brave patriotism, craven-politician-style.) So far the strategy seems to have backfired on the Republicans, who are turning on each other.
In that sense this suggestion is actually part of the problem -- a company stepping in trying to exploit the fearful politics -- and has nothing whatsoever to do with any solution to... whatever the crisis is. As you say, even by the internal logic of "those horrible immigrants are overrunning us," it doesn't make any sense.
No doubt Sony's got other fish to fry. That's the whole point. They tried to "leverage" their PS2 market dominance into a win for Blu-Ray in that standards war, and the resulting price of their new console is very likely going to damage them in both markets.
(Sony? Overextend itself in an aggressive attempt to impose a proprietary standard on the marketplace? The heck you say.)
I'm honestly seeing no comparison to the Mac OS. Have you had any exposure to or experience with the Mac OS at any point? 'Cause I have, a few different times, and this design has precisely zero to do with anything Apple makes... Is it their Web site, which also uses a controversial white background? Or what?
Actually I'm aware of that 360-GameCube comparison in Japan. I think of it as just another example of these companies persisting in their approaches -- MS's utter failure to crack the Japanese market is pretty telling this time around, as they seriously tried to address their failure with the original XBox.
(And yeah, the GC is the only one I own, and the Wii's the only one I'm even remotely considering this time around. Nintendo is the only one of these three companies that's even motivated by providing excellent games. It seems to be their primary motive, even. Which is amazing.)
These three companies make good examples of how corporate cultures can persist despite different circumstances.
Nintendo has its M.O., yeah? They sell the consoles at a profit and keep prices modest for the market by using less cutting-edge technology. Their franchises really do show a love for game design, for getting the little things right, in a way the other companies just don't approach. (The exception may be the bought-out Bungie-MS relationship.) They love to try out unorthodox controllers, but back them inconsistently. (Anyone for a game of Donkey Kong Bongos? There are maybe three games that'll use those.)
Sony, for a human generation or three now, has been trying to shoehorn standards war victories into various products across all its product lines. "Proprietary memory format" -- quick, what company did you think of? This time around it's Blu-Ray, and they seem to have killed themselves on the PS3 price by forcing it in there. Across most of their product lines, again, they do show a decent eye for conservatively nice design. The little triangle button on the PS controller isn't going to be turning into a Wii gesture any time soon -- and when they try something like that they show iffy results.
MS's gaming division is all about loss leader maneuvering to capture market share. Do they love the games? Frankly I don't see it, and all the poseur's "xtreem XBox" attitude they put on falls flat for me. MS also doesn't "get" the Japanese market, very apparently. They tried to make their release lineup for the 360 more Japanese-friendly, and failed.
It's weird how consistent they all are. You'd think Nintendo would try to play loss leader with the console this time around as a way of regaining market share, but their price is already much lower than the competition... and well, tradition is a powerful thing. So they just keep plugging away at incremental improvements in their way of doing business. For these three, there's no sense radically changing what works... or even what doesn't work so well.
Next time around MS will be talking about the Japanese market again, assuming they're not tired after the $4 billion they've lost yet. Nintendo will release Mario-sensaround. Sony will try to bundle a proprietary.hologram engine in everything. I can't wait for that E3.
In any case, military applications probably wouldn't be able to keep the cloak up when a weapon was fired from within it, the energy involved being difficult to surround with a smooth, flowing light "cloak" consistently. You'd need to de-cloak to let loose a killing volley of photon torpedos, wouldn't you?
What a nuisance -- though it'd be a boon for the writers.
Given the marginalization of the GameCube, I've been wondering whether Nintendo wouldn't be smart to lose a smidge on each console this time around in order to regain market share. Their two competitors have blown prices sky high and narrowed their market considerably (I think) by making it necessary to pony up for an HD screen in order to really see the fun from their new systems. Sony and MS are vulnerable, vulnerable as can be. Nintendo needs to get the third party developers on board, and the relative cheapness of developing for Wii is a step that way. But imagine if the Wii release price was a bit of a loss leader, a $175 sort of thing, and they got a huge jump starting next November or so in their market share. Developers would take note.
I doubt it happens. As you say, Nintendo makes profit on its consoles (and everything else), and doesn't play the market share game a la Microsoft. Sony always tries to bundle everything with some sort of wrongheaded standards war "leverage" move. MS desperately tries to gain market share despite losing rivers of money, and imagines they understand the "extreme" tone "hard core" gamers like, 'cause you know, they're so cool. The teams keep running the same plays... I still think Nintendo is the clear winner this round, in prospect.
...I hate getting used CDs/DVDs and finding out they're scratched... I refuse to contribute to the strategy of e.g. EB/Gamestop/Blockbuster, where they buy something used and then turn around and sell it for much more.
We can respect these reactions, they're awake and well-intentioned. My advice to you is to concentrate on the positive feelings you get from supporting the small publishers and indies you like. Don't try to spin from that positive feeling a coherent (read: dogmatic) position about the evils of the alternatives, though. It's not working, for you or Sony.
Your posts here are sort of like a microcosm of Sony's approach, actually. Instead of giving us a way to feel good about their buying model and products and so on, they're attempting to re-assert control with a great big "Bad Dog!" to people who do things differently. They don't remind us of any rewards for buying things new, or come up with ways to encourage that; instead they're coming across as control freaks whose punitive approach we have no positive reaction to at all.
Sony, like you, is trying to rewrite the rules to make people who disagree with them actually criminal, as opposed to simply encouraging their customers in the direction they want. Pretty wrongheaded, isn't it? It doesn't have to be that way.
(But yeah, you're right, Jobs "got" this project, whereas Gates displayed his usual defensively arrogant mediocrity.)
We've modded that "insightful"? A post that shows no signs of knowing thing one about the Schiavo case?
Me too. I've never run into anyone who wants the menu items they don't regularly use to "vanish" or be available only when you choose to manually expand them. We all hate this feature. It doesn't simplify things, it complicates them by making us guess where everything is. Duh. Hint to MS and anyone else: When it's a feature we rarely use, we want to be able to find it on the occasions for which we do need it.
Another hint: people don't honestly need a "cut" and "paste" icon on your ribbon or toolbar or whatever. Even the people who use those wouldn't miss them much. Heck, Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V and so on are among the only UI elements that are relatively consistent across windows apps.
Now we've got "ribbons" and right-click menus and so on all changing according to contexts that we can't always guess at. Do I have a set of "paragraph" options for this text in my table, or will this border be for the table cell? Ack. Pfft.
I work at a company with well over 25,000 employees. Way to plan for catastrophic failure and massive support problems. I think we will pass on this dictum of yours -- based as it is on the presumption of incompatibility, which we really ought not to be accepting.
Like any monoculture, IT monocultures are vulnerable to attack, as well. Not that someone using Windows would have any trouble with that...
Yeah, I'm aware. It's kind of sad that he held out against merchandising out of conscience and got rewarded with that stuff. I hate that. Meanwhile the estate of Charles Schulz continues to rake in money on licensing agreements.
(I'm still hoping Bill' writing "Frazz" -- "the older Calvin" -- secretly.)
And because people pay for cable, the cost of flat panel TVs hasn't kept them from spending more than a grand on those... except it has, and does, still.
You might want to read some of the other comments. Or try my shoes on:
I've got two 12-year-olds. One of their friends has an original X-Box. That friend hasn't seriously considered the 360. It's too expensive for his family, and he and his old brother thought about saving up at first but decided it was just too much. I have a nephew whose (absentee jerk of a) father sent him a PS2 the first week it was out, as a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses sort of thing. (The nephew doesn't play his PS2; he basically plays Zelda Windwaker whenever I've seen him do anything.) The chances of this nephew getting a PS3 are remotely small; his mother (who has no interest in consoles to speak of) went out of her way to tell me how out-of-this-world the announced PS3 prices were. Even she noticed.
From my point of view, and from those of my kids' friends and their families and my sister and her kid, the Sony price point is an extreme obstacle to their choosing that system. Up-front cost is going to deter those people, absolutely. And it deters me.
Meanwhile, as they get their heads around the idea of $400 or $600 for a new box, all these people are being softened up to the expense of the Wii. Again, I know I am. Suddenly $200 bucks seems like the only company that has a clue about my spending habits and expectations.
In the case of the PS3, most people will buy it because it will have the widest selection of games out of the new consoles.
The development costs for PS3 and 360 games are going to be staggeringly higher than for previous systems. We're talking about Hollywood-level budgets just to get in the door. I wouldn't rely on massive libraries of games to start with. Not at all.
My custom-made bumper sticker, which I've not yet had the gumption to stick on the actual car, reads "Try driving like a decent person. Maybe you'll become one." I'm actually afraid to apply the thing; it seems like it might draw some sort of road rage attack.
There's some balancing point between faked respect -- insincerity -- and the sort of "disrespectful" tone we're talking about in the MS and Sony comments. I think we all know which side of that balance U.S. drivers fall on. Think "Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing on the rival truck make's logo" decals. Nice.
(I was going to say Iwata was quintessentially Japanese in these comments, but then Sony is one of the counterexamples.)