no male would survive living on his own. Okay so I am the exception but I used to be a baker so I am a poof anyway.
I somehow fail to see how a mere 20 day bad dieet could kill you. Especially since it is merely poor nutrition. Not like he stuffed himself with lard for 20 days. Or drank cappucino's like it was water.
Perhaps he was just you know. One of those people that die young. It happens. Sure if he had taken better care of himself he might have lived but everyone can tell you they heard of this health nut who died at XX age while their chainsmoking uncle will never see 100 again.
IF you have the most primitive form of keylogger then all it will indeed do is capture ALL the keystrokes. It is/was/should be possible however to also record WHERE the keys are being entered, wich window. Now still not exactly easy BUT you got one huge advantage. Computers LOVE searching through endless amounts of text data for specific strings.
Even if you have the most primitive and complete of keyloggers you can roughly say this about how a login/password pair should appear. A string of characters, usually no spaces, followed by a tab, followed by a string of characters+numbers no spaces followed by an enter. Yup that is the way you fillin an online login.
The kind of sites you are intrested in usually require a number to be part of the password and very few "real" words have numbers in them. Provided you are not keylogging a script kiddie it should be easy to filter out passwords.
Sure attacking them to somewhere to use requires something more especially with this virus where you have no idea what the user is doing unless you also log that. But that should be too hard. Keylogger just sounds nice but if you can install that you can also install a url logger and active window logger.
Why should you believe what I said? Because I once experimented with a setup like this, stricly on my own machine of course, because like you I wondered how practical it was. It quickly became clear that it was very easy to filter out passwords entered to access the local network from emails I typed. Even code was no problem when I realised that most passwords will not start with a $ (unlike variable names) and the login-tab-password-enter combo stands out like a sore thumb to a regex engine.
Remember one other things, this is not about capturing the launch codes to a nuclear arsinal. Get it wrong and all you get is a access denied error. It doesn't have to be perfect same as email harvesters don't have to be perfect or spam randomizers have to be.
It is like those virusses that try to find game keys, they are extremely primitive and often twarted by such dastardly schemes as not installing in C:\Program Files BUT lets say they are only 0.1% effective. With millions of infected pc's that still gives you thousands of keys.
This keylogger virus (if it works) will probably infect a lot of machines that simply have no intresting info to steal. But if they get a thousand working bank accounts. BINGO!
I am not exposed to new songs anymore. Not by new artists or old artists. It was in one of the other replies that I read about Genesis being back but without Phil it seems. And I liked their music (well the later stuff) and even have a number of their cd's.
But yeah, like you I just don't listen to the radio anymore (well the BBC world service but that don't count) and on dutch tv pop programs like countdown and top of the pops have gone. MTV of course is a running joke about not actually having anything to do with music anymore.
I don't even download that much music anymore. Many of my songs are still from the napster days with bittorrent occasionally making an album complete. Or updating the bitrate.
I think somewhere at Sony BGM there is a market researcher who hates his job and just generates some random stats as to what is liked by whom as what sells is not what is being sold. Just check the best selling album charts. The only recent entry is at number 7. That radical new artist pushing the boundries of music, shania twain. Oh sure there was a time when say Pink Floyd was "new" and "alternative" but that is long gone. The "new" music of today just doesn't seem to sell.
Perhaps it is time to just open the back catalog and let the kids of today discover the oldies. As the article said if Dean Martin still sells then by golly, sell him?
What I think is needed is a service where I can easily find new music sorta like my taste where ZERO value is attached as to how hip the D.J. thinks it is.
Your dad's music was mainstream and you being a pathetic herd animal had to do what everyone else does and that is rebel. So you went "alternative" (do what everyone else in your peer group does) by listening to the music that was not openly supported by the MAN. Of course the fact that you could buy your "alternative" music in the shops should have tipped you off that 'the man' was behind it all along but you were/are stupid.
The music industry has however recently made a mistake. They advanced to fast where 'the man' is now trying to push the 'alternative' music too directly. So your kid who has of course inherited your instinct to herd is forced to look in a different direction to be alternative. Cue an intrest in oldie music as that is now the real alternative when alternative has accidently become the mainstream.
It is not the bands, it is that the current "new and happening stuff" is to mainstream and worse, actually BOUGHT by your PARENTS who still want to appear cool or whatever. Nothing kills gangsta rapper music faster then having 40yr old baldies pumping it out of their volvos. It ruins the whole rebelling against your parents thing when your mom says about eminem that she likes his rap. YIKES.
I just can't stand people that judge music by when it was produced or by how many other people like it. Who gives a shit. Do you not eat chocolate because it is mainstream dude? Coffee is out because it is so last century man?
Now please don't hang me for using a buzzword but I think it is like that doc on the x-box security problems said. A lot of small security holes wich on their own don't matter can lead to total security failure.
I think that the decline in music sales is down to a number of small effects that on their own seem harmless but combined have led to this massive fall in sales.
This is going to be a long ramble so bear with me.
A number of factors have combined to make us listen to music in a different way and thus reduce the attractivness of buying cd's in your average limited selection store.
The way we play our music collection has changed
People used to play records (for the kids REALLY big black cd's like objects) and because of hardware limitations the music was usually played from the beginning of the album to the end. You needed an advanced record player if you wanted to play albums back to back (playing A and then B side without getting up was extremely difficult).
If you just wanted to listen to a wide selection of music you either had to record your favorite music to tape and then play the tape (wich until quit recently still forced you to listen in the same order over and over) so the radio was the only way to get a wide selection of music without you after a while being able to predict wich song comes next.
Now with CD-changers or worse mp3 players people can listen to a large selection of their own choosing with still enough randomness in it that it doesn't get to repetetive. My own collection of mp3's is big enough to last a week without repeating. You can now play your entire collection at random or any order you desire without being limited by hardware.
The presentation of music we don't own has changed.
MTV doesn't play music anymore. Neither does the radio. Oh they get the occasional "promotional sound clip of the week we repeat every hour" in and when the D.J. needs to take bathroom break but mostly it is commercials. Dutch tv has no music program anymore like Countdown or Top of the Pops. Simply put, the programs that used to introduce us to a selection of new music have disappeared. There are alternatives available but they are often to alternative to be accepted on the workfloor. You need something middle of the road, not to extreem not to mundane to play during the 9 hours you are at work.
We listen to less music we don't own.
With the decline in radio a lot of people seem to have decided that an mp3 player is a better way to get a bit of background music. Hookup an mp3 player to the company soundsystem is lot easier then everyone bringing tapes to work. We listen to less and less radio. But if you listen to your own music you will not hear a new artist you might want to buy.
The MP3 player is NOT a walkman+
The walkman still suffered from giving you a very limited music selection in a pre-arranged format. A decent Mp3 player can easily hold a day worth of music. I am sometimes shocked to find that I haven't added a new album in months. This is different from my minidisc player where I would buy new minidiscs now and then or at least regurly record a new collection. I got 20gb of mp3's on my player and frankly I so far don't get bored with it.
There is more media to consume
Finanlly regonized by the music bizz the simple fact that the money that used to buy L.P.'s (other word for the big black cd like things kids) now goes to games and dvd's and my mobile phone etc etc.
The new music has a limited appeal
Of course some people will like the "new" music and some young people have a violent reaction to oldy music BUT the simple fact remains that the newer bands do not have the selling power of the oldies. Just google for top album sales and you will find that the top hasn't changed in years. Worse the newbies that do make an appearance lower down are all of the oldie sort (Shania Twain is hardly pushing the envelope). Or simply put Gan
E-books just are not things to curl up with in front of a fire or to read in bed. A book has something special that just can't be replaced by a screen reader. I can put a book in my pocket or bag and not worry about it. So what if it gets wet or crumpled or even ripped. I can still read it and if it gets lost. Well, though. Buy a new one.
E-book readers are hard, run out of power, are either to bright in the dark or to dark in the sun. In short they are a hassle.
None of this applies to cd's. To a certain extent I do not even use cd's, they are the paperbag around my book. It is a container, and I empty the container into my pc from wich I then play the content.
Book more closely resemebles a portable media player. And just like a book is great because I can easily take it with me a pmp is great because I can take it with me.
I agree with the rest you say. But comparing book sales with music sales just doesn't fly.
That 30 second battle you describe allows everyone to get a shot in and some tactics without needing hair trigger reactions (or for that matter a lag free connection).
If a fight lasts say 1-2 seconds, as fights between the hero and stormtroopers last in real Star Wars, then only the first player would get a hit in and the rest would be left targetting a corpse. It was my main problem with the Combat Upgrade where combat seemed to go so fast that melee, who have to run to the target first, just couldn't get a hit in before the ranged had killed the target.
Sure sure, an alternative would be to have massive battlefields with your squad fighting an enemy 10x the size in number where it is 1 hit 1 kill so you get more like the battles in Lord of the Rings. Drool city to be sure but apparently hard on the cpu.
30 second fights are the current way to allow every class to do its thing. No need for damage-over-time attacks if there is no time.
I introduce first to you the humble progress bar. A good progress bar does two things. It shows how far along something is (percentage complete) and it show that activity is taking place and your computer has not just frozen again.
So in days past when screen were primitive you simply had a row of dots appearing with maybe if your lucky the occasional 5% added to give something like......5%........10%....
Add the capabilty for backspace and you usually got a little spinning character made up out of -\|/ to show action taking place. Some more advancement and you got a full bar like 0****5****10****15..| (work with me here this is hard to do in text)
But then GRAPHICS were added. YEAH. So now you could draw a bar slowly being filled (but for some reason loosing the activity indicator). Color was added and now you could make the bar turn from red to green.
2.5d add shadow effect to make the bar appear round. 3d and it can stand up like a real seperate bar on your screen.
And what is the freaking point? Well none. All of them did their work and clearly showed what was happening. Okay they became better looking but it gave no real advantage.
So are there other tasks that can benefit from better graphics? I think you have the following main type of jobs on a pc.
Finding things. Locating that file you know you have but have not got a quick link to. Either you search for it by entering some params, this does not need more then a text interface. You navigate a file tree for it. text interface like Midnight Commander works perfectly fine. Oh graphics enable nice extras like previews for images but that is useless when I am searching for a mp3 file and the previews for text documents are so small I can't spot the difference. That is leaving aside that the preview options are usually so slow that I can move a thousand times faster in MC then the graphical browsers. 3d benefits? Can't think of any.
Manipulating content. Well unless your trying to edit a 3d content item what is the point? The article already points out that text is best displayed on a 2d service. Now sound manipulation might make sense in 3d, after all stereo sound IS 3D in away so instead of manipulating two 2d waves you could mix them in a 3d wave signal. Never seen this so either it is to hard or it does not offer any benefits. Office/paint/code in 3d? Only as a way to make things extra clear (in the same way that it is easier to code with color highlighting) but no. 2d seems to work fine.
Organizing content. Now we are talking. As the article points out 2d is horribly limiting to make complex relations, anyone who has ever drawn a relationship diagram will have found themselves having to cross lines wich always makes things confusing. Add a 3rd dimension and you never have to cross lines. HOWEVER the huge price you pay for it that you now have to control a 3rd dimension wich seems to make things a lot more difficult. You already need a bloody complex mouse to manipulate a large 2d scene (x-y axis mouse + 2 scroll wheels) a 3d scene is even harder. Every 3d game with a free roving camera proves it.
Yes I would like a 3d interface when I am manipulating or inspecting the relations between objects on my pc. But is this a common activity? Well I look up at the tabs of my opera browser. Current desktops already have a sort of 2.5d and perhaps my tabs would be clearer if tabs of new pages where "behind" the tabs they originated from. I arrived at this input screen by opening a new tab from the story page (helps me remember where I was when I am finished here) but this tab is at the end of the tabs not indicating that it has a relation with a tab almost at the beginning.
Still with me? Another example. My music collection has a lot of soundtracks. Trying to organize it completly is a nightmare. Especially if I also want to organize it by genre (so I can easily switch depending on mood). Luckily I am on linux so I can use symlinks so an album can be both in
The moment you bought it. Certainly the moment I bought it. Sigh, next machine will probably have to be a dual core sli 2gig monster. Really sad thing? My current p4 will be scrap as it consumers to much power and doesn't have the desktop performance for of my ancient dual p3 setup.
Oh well I can wait a bit. Apart from Sony MMO games most games still play well enough.
They should make this software available on a camera phone. Next time your girlfriend claims you don't understand here snap her picture and voila, you instantly will be a sensitive man. Anything to keep the dumb cunt happy eh? What?
I thought almost the same thing. Except knowing something about italy she probably said "miaaaoooo".
She has that expression of a woman looking at a naked man and being faintly aroused but also faintly amused at that "last chicken in the poultry shop" display. If your in a long relationship were your girl still fancies you but feels secure enough she doesn't have to constantly worship as a god to keep your ego up you will learn to regonize that look. Oh well it is better then when they break down in laughter while you are trying to pose seductivly. I guess men just aren't designed to look good naked with their socks on.
This guy is an economist? Not very good is he?
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Why You Can't Buy A 360
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· Score: 3, Informative
I mean this is basic economy stuff. Clearly the guy hasn't got a clue. Perhaps he should do some shopping.
Ages ago before computers existed and when dinosaurs still roamed the earth I was a baker by proffesion. Now bakers have a odd product, it is in constant demand (in times of economic crisis be in the food industry, people need to eat) but producing it is a hassle. You can't say, Oh monday is a slow day lets do some extra bread for the rush on saturday. You can't (if you want to keep your customers) sell yesterdays surplus today.
So most bakeries and even supermarkets run out before the end of the day (better sell no then be stuck with merchandise you got to throw away, waste eats up your already slim margin extremely fast). Just try to get bread at 6pm. Can't be done (well recently supermarkets have started with doing an extra run late in the day with bread that just needs to be baked off (sorry don't know the english terms) but many bakeries will already be closed or simply sold out)
So why don't they raise prices this person would ask? Well einstein because people got a very clear picture in their head of what they are willing to pay for their food and they are not going to exceed that. While people need food if the bread they can buy at 6pm is to expensive they will just eat something else.
Same with the 360. It's price is not set by supply and demand. It is set by a combination of what the people are willing to pay for it vs the cost of producing it. E-bay DOES NOT matter, same as people willing to pay 2 euro for a sandwich does not mean they are willing to pay 20 euro for a loaf, a lettuce and some meat (Tell your mom your local stay open late supermarket sells you that for about 7-8 euro and she will complain bitterly about the son she raised). Think of it like this. 1st edition Superman sells for thousands of dollars. That does not mean Marvel can sell their latest comic for 3000 dollar. Perhaps you have to have studied economy not to be able to spot this. It is not something you have to study it just is.
MS also of course will figure in that if they sell the device at 700 and drop the price in two months they will have two effects. The people who bought it at 700 will be pissed and the people who see the new price will think, lets wait for the next price cut.
I am like this with handhelds. I know that within a few months the price will have both come down AND it will have a bundle available. Look at the PSP, with the giga pack you get a 75 euro price cut.
Supply and demand is overrated as a price fixer. Just my example of bread being sold out before many people arrive home from work shows that in retail supply and demand hold very little sway. An other example was a breakfast cereal (brinta) wich I believe due to a fire was out of supply for a few months a while back. Now brinta has no ready replacement (it is a porridge) but did that mean supermarkets spiked the prices on their last supplies? Of course not. Nobody would pay 10 euro's for a package even if the alternative is going without. Even those who could easily afford too.
Some things just have a fixed price. MS realizes this. This economist apparently doesn't. 300 dollars is what the 360 will sell for. Less and they will loose to much (or worse people might think it is bad quality) more and people will just not buy it no matter how rare it is.
Oh and a final thing about e-bay. There supply is far far far more limited. 360 on ebay is like that first edition superman. Its pricing has no place in real world economics. Only a fool or an economist would base its retail prices on what is happening on e-bay.
The established way of doing it is to clearly seperate the "content" makers from the ad-sellers. Newspapers are supposed to work like this were for instance in a real paper NO amount of money will buy you an front page ad covering the entire front and every advertisement has a little header pointing it out and no advertisements accepted that look to much like the regular content.
Of course this line was blurred long ago when newspapers stopped publishing news and started adding lifestyle sections.
Were exactly does the corruption start anyway? Obviously a newspaper that carries no game reviews is probably not a good place for a game maker to advertise. So is adding a game section a way to get game makers to publish ads? What about a movie review section? You will notice that movie ads are always near the reviews. Odd, could the entire review section be a way to toady up to the movie companies?
Of course there is a way around this. Increase subscription fees. If no advertising needs to be carried because the consumer pays for all the costs then no ads are needed.
Except that doesn't work either because there is always some toad who then figures out you could even make more money by requiring both a subscription AND to sell adverts at the same time. Just look at payperview tv like the dutch Canal+. Pay for cable, pay for the decoder and still you get ads.
Ah well, luckily slashdot stands at the last bastion of free expression were no amount of money will cause the editors to sully their integrity by publishing bogus news stories to advertise a product.
If I look at the survey results it looks like a successfull distro must be free of charge (Suse and redhat free versions score slightly higher then their pay versions), binary and have a good package system?
Debian scores higher then I expected and since debian is hardly cutting edge it must be because its package system is considered so good. I can only think that this is also the reason that gentoo actually is visible despite the fact that it is a beast (I use it myself so I know what I am talking about).
It seems that the choice of software is less important. ubuntu is gnome by default (as far as I know) if you want kde it is called kubuntu and since in general KDE seems to be more popular (/me runs from an angry mob of Gnome fans + assorted fans from the gazzilion other desktops out there) it is odd to see a gnome distro score so high.
Oh well good luck to them but lets not be too optimistic about this shall we? The survey was after all only asking wich linux distro people had installed with no option for NONE. Ubuntu having x more installs then suse means very little when you realize both are fighting over the table scraps left by MS.
Although, IF the PS3 + HD addon does indeed have the capacity to run user choosen linux apps (IBM's own site reports that they ported it succesfully and it can run most PPC (mac) linux apps without modification) then we might see a huge potential market for linux being opened up. MS will probably not allow windows to run on the PS3 (although a sony spokesman did suggest that the cell should be able to run any OS) so that leaves the field right open (Apple has already declined to use the cell in its new computers) for linux.
Can you imagine millions of living room desktop machines? Supercomputer linux. Droool. Oh and no driver problems since you will know EXACTLY what hardware is inside a PS3. The biggest handicap of linux (no drivers for every piece of crap hardware outthere) solved in a flash.
Worth considering I think for any distro that wants to be handed a few million virgin computers with NO ms inside and a hardware maker that would love to shaft MS like it has never been shafted before.
I quit after the combat upgrade earlier this year as a game that was bugged just turned into a complete and utter farce. It resembled nothing of the original, had that bug were lairs would be swamped with critters, the combat looked stupid and was boring and it just showed to me that SOE was never going to just fix the damn game and let us play.
Either smedley is insane or people out there are still playing it in big enough numbers to make him think that the players actually like the NGE and other stuff.
Are there any SWG players on/. or even more amazing have any of you recently joined the game?
From everything I hear including the other responses here on/. SWG is rapidly being deserted so what gives this smedley the idea that they have they are heading in the right direction? Could it actually be true that wile the hardcore gamers are leaving there is an influx of new gamers?
Are you an american? See many europeans on your servers? No?
Well that is because the european retail version is for the european servers only. A pretty nasty move as it means that I would be forced to play on servers along side the FRENCH and GERMANS!
If that isn't evil I don't know what is.
Oh you don't get what is so evil about it. Well how would you like a game server where 50% of the people talk in a foreign language spamming the chat channels in non-english begging for X repeatadly because nobody will answer them in their language? At least Sony allows me to play were I please. Remember that the people speaking in german or french are doing it because their command of english is even worse then mine. The only people in europe who do not speak english are 10 yr olds. German 10yr olds. ARGH
In a true sandbox I can be whatever I want. I can be the builder of a beautifull down and next godzilla stomping it flat.
The real problem with SWG was not that it never seemed able to make up its mind about what it wanted to be. In its attempt to be everything to everybody it ends up pissing off everyone. Instead of fixing the bugs they kept redesigning it and introducing even more bugs. I remember after the combat revamp (the first) that you would sometimes drive across places so fucking teeming with live that it was insane. Lairs with 30-40 critters around the entire horizon filled with prey. Granted it was amazing the game did not grind to a halt displaying it all but geez that bug should never have made it past testing.
This guy just doesn't seem to have a clue and if he thinks SWG can in this form compete with WoW he should have himself committed. This is no longer marketing speech this signals a severe mental disorder.
It may amaze some people but in MMO land some people LIKE being an entertainer, yes even a hairdresser. Some people really do enjoy being a cheff or general crafter. Other enjoy going out hunting not for money or xp or leet loot but to find the supplies that the crafters need.
But such a game is not for everybody and would need to be very clearly targetted. An open sandbox style game simply requires a different kind of player then well a fps linear story game.
You know what is odd? The game Guild Wars is advertised as a PvP game yet its quests are actually bloody intresting, with some nice stories and scripted quests that actually are a lot better then the typical EQ2 "go kill ten bears for the next page in a book" quests. GW has NPC's fighting along side you, a central story that actually advances, and in general is very suprising especialy when you consider that it is not a quest game at its heart.
Worse GW is better then EQ2 because you can far more create your own character, you have a maximum of 8 spells from a wide section and while there are only 5 jobs available they have a massive spell selection and 3 specilisations and you have to select a second job as well giving you a huge amount of choice as to how to build your character. Compared to EQ2 where everyone uses the same spells it is a breath of fresh air.
In fact it is a bit like SWG. Well SWG BEFORE Sony made it clear that anyone not adopting the one template to rule them all would just not be able to play with the higher level content. When Sony's idea of a good high level dungeon is filling it with critters that all but the most specced out combat classes can't handle then it becomes clear that Sony decided that the sandbox was not what they wanted.
Remember KOTOR? Nice game but hardly "open". Just try to make all your characters ranged weapon fighters. It was suicide. Jedi was you path and you would damn well take it.
SWG slowly rotted, partly because of bugs, partly because sony either encouraged or failed to discourage the use of quick paths to victory and partly because to many of the players allowed themselves to be drawn in by the lure of the xp grind.
In a recent/. article I put up a post about how SWG was fun before the doc buff and I describe a hunt on dathomir. Perhaps I should also write about how live was AFTER the doc buff became wide spread.
My Sabrak(?) was now an elite TKM/Sword Specialist. Sword being used to do the big damage, TKM for its fantastic healing and for the cheap damage that vibro knuckles give (top sword cost a million, top vibro knuckle a few thousand, your choice). The day would start with unloading your inventory of the previous day loot and checking your armour. Depending on how much you cared about looks your outfit would be the select pieces of armour that critters actually hit with the non-hitted parts of your body wrapped in clothes. If you could be bothered, many couldn't and fighting in your undies was perfectly acceptedle in the SWG universe.
Weapon check to see it had not deterioted to far. Then
It is not the controller OR the less powerfull hardware. It is the constant hammering on making games easy to understand. I mean this article suggests that there are people out there who do not understand current controllers and that nintendo wishes to attract them.
Okay, this is going to be regarded as elitist and it is. I just like to suggest the following. If you have trouble figuring out a console controller perhaps you should go back to the field and settle in the soil with the other vegetables.
I know not everyone has an IQ with 3 digits but come on. KIDS can figure these things out.
The gamecubes lack luster sale were not down to subpar software or hardware it was the perception that Nintendo == Kiddy games. Go to a games store and most people will simply pass the nintendo by. The only people that look at it are the ones with kids in the lower grades. It is just not for adults.
Now of course this isn't entirely true and Nintendo has had some titles on it console wich are for an audience that has been potty trained BUT the perception remains.
I have to wonder why Nintendo seems so desperate to attract a market that in the 2 decades of video games has still not be won over while possibly alienating (as they did with the gamecube) the established market.
Here is a tiny little hint for Nintendo. Non-gamers ARE NOT GOING TO BUY THE REVOLUTION ON THEIR OWN WITHOUT BEING TOLD TO BY THEIR GAMER FRIENDS. This is a hard bit to understand but NON-GAMERS do NOT know about games. They are not reading the articles about the revolution, they will not see it in shops because they are NOT intrested. Whatever kept them non-gamer will not be changed.
I haven't met a single non-gamer who turned to gaming on their own. ALL of them were turned by gamer friends.
If the gamers are not playing your revolution then the device will be sitting unsold like the gamecube.
Now their are Nintendo fans who defend nintendo at all costs here but I would like to ask them to consider this. Are you a gamer? Yes? Then nintendo isn't targetting you so how excited you are about the new controller has no merit. By definition anyone who reads this article IS not the non-gamer Nintendo seems to want to attract.
There is room for innovation, the DS proved that, BUT it is pointless aiming this at people who do not game without having the word of mouth advertising from existing gamers to advertise your product.
What I fear will happen is that the games with the revolution will be considered to simple/dumbed down etc for the existing gamers to buy and therefore the necessary word of mouth will not be generated.
How many gamecube owners have the gamecube as their only console? I know that at least with both the DS and GBA that all the people I know who own one have at least got either a PC or a none nintendo console as well. No one I know has only a gamecube or handheld.
So is Nintendo chasing a dream market? Perhaps. It is all going to depend now on the games. Will they be perceived as to cutesy to be played by the existing gaming public? Or will I be wrong and will Nintendo be able to penetrate the huge market of non-gamers (is it that huge? A recent article on game violence claimed that 90% of boys game and 40% of girls, doesn't leave a lot of people, the majority of young people already game)
It would be intresting to see what sales research Nintendo has shown that makes them believe their current products are bought by non-gamers. I see far to many hard-core gamers like myself who buy their current handheld products.
Isn't anyone else getting fucking tired of the same old crap bullshit over and over.
Not every 3rd wold nation is a disaster zone. Their are plenty of places where there is political stability and food and water and hygiene are no longer the primary concerns.
What is the problem is getting them to the next level. EDUCATION. Books are expensive and you need a lot of them for even basic schooling worse they need to be translated for each country.
While laptops are also expensive you only need 1 per child, its software can be updated constantly to give the latest book the child needs, it can replace paper to make homework on.
Stop thinking the 3rd world is like the horror shows you seen on tv. These occur because the 1st world always looses interest the moment the immidiate horror is over and the real hardwork needs to start.
SCHOOLS are needed much more at the moment. These laptops would help in those 3rd world nations who are at the moment struggling not to feed their citizens but to educate them.
These are not for refugee camps, they are for places like south africa and india.
I think this is part of sony's move to muzzle in on microsofts market. Only fair isn't it? Ah the two evil empire's battling it out. Joy! Remember the cold war, it gave us the intenet and free PORN!!! Eh I mean the internet and a way to communicate easily with our fellow man ABOUT FREE PORN!!!
Oh yeah I would buy one. The first non-handheld console I would own but a legit 300 dollar multi-core linux machine would be too sweet. No need to fear rootkits either, I don't remember any articles were sony was found not to be 100% compliant with the GPL so they could hardly rootkit the kernel. (Would a hacked kernel still be considered a rootkit?)
It is not like if you are lucky enough to buy a new car every 2-3 yrs (or lease them for that time) that you then dump that car with your other garbage. You sell it on and some lucky but less finicky person gets an almost new car for a lot less money.
The car industry is one of the few where the whole idea of recycling instead of throwing away is actually put into practice.
You must be an extremely lax owner if you BMW does not last you ten years or more.
As for reducing the overall number of cars. Well this steam engine could also be fitted to things like busses and trucks and trains (not everywhere is electrified). Personal transport is not unique in having engines radiating waste heat.
I wonder if this steam engine is actually part of the cooling system. After all if it takes heat away from the engine there would be no need for the normal water based cooling system? So you get power by replacing a system that until now only consumed it. (Pure speculation on my part)
I want a cell PC. Sure it will be rooted to hell and back and swear allegiance to the Sony flag at every bootup BUT 8 cores. Holy fucking shit. Instant mainframe. Oh and also rumoured that Linux does run on it. Sure sure like my current old dual P3 most of the cores would idle but it would give you a serious epenis to wag around on irc.
I just find it hilarious that it is the old boring IBM that is making all the upcoming consoles while AMD and Intel are churning out boring old desktop and server cpu's. Yawn. Old iron exciting, hip new trendsetters yawnville. If you had predicted this 10 years ago you would have been a laughingstock.
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I somehow fail to see how a mere 20 day bad dieet could kill you. Especially since it is merely poor nutrition. Not like he stuffed himself with lard for 20 days. Or drank cappucino's like it was water.
Perhaps he was just you know. One of those people that die young. It happens. Sure if he had taken better care of himself he might have lived but everyone can tell you they heard of this health nut who died at XX age while their chainsmoking uncle will never see 100 again.
People die. Go figure.
Even if you have the most primitive and complete of keyloggers you can roughly say this about how a login/password pair should appear. A string of characters, usually no spaces, followed by a tab, followed by a string of characters+numbers no spaces followed by an enter. Yup that is the way you fillin an online login.
The kind of sites you are intrested in usually require a number to be part of the password and very few "real" words have numbers in them. Provided you are not keylogging a script kiddie it should be easy to filter out passwords.
Sure attacking them to somewhere to use requires something more especially with this virus where you have no idea what the user is doing unless you also log that. But that should be too hard. Keylogger just sounds nice but if you can install that you can also install a url logger and active window logger.
Why should you believe what I said? Because I once experimented with a setup like this, stricly on my own machine of course, because like you I wondered how practical it was. It quickly became clear that it was very easy to filter out passwords entered to access the local network from emails I typed. Even code was no problem when I realised that most passwords will not start with a $ (unlike variable names) and the login-tab-password-enter combo stands out like a sore thumb to a regex engine.
Remember one other things, this is not about capturing the launch codes to a nuclear arsinal. Get it wrong and all you get is a access denied error. It doesn't have to be perfect same as email harvesters don't have to be perfect or spam randomizers have to be.
It is like those virusses that try to find game keys, they are extremely primitive and often twarted by such dastardly schemes as not installing in C:\Program Files BUT lets say they are only 0.1% effective. With millions of infected pc's that still gives you thousands of keys.
This keylogger virus (if it works) will probably infect a lot of machines that simply have no intresting info to steal. But if they get a thousand working bank accounts. BINGO!
I am not exposed to new songs anymore. Not by new artists or old artists. It was in one of the other replies that I read about Genesis being back but without Phil it seems. And I liked their music (well the later stuff) and even have a number of their cd's.
But yeah, like you I just don't listen to the radio anymore (well the BBC world service but that don't count) and on dutch tv pop programs like countdown and top of the pops have gone. MTV of course is a running joke about not actually having anything to do with music anymore.
I don't even download that much music anymore. Many of my songs are still from the napster days with bittorrent occasionally making an album complete. Or updating the bitrate.
I think somewhere at Sony BGM there is a market researcher who hates his job and just generates some random stats as to what is liked by whom as what sells is not what is being sold. Just check the best selling album charts. The only recent entry is at number 7. That radical new artist pushing the boundries of music, shania twain. Oh sure there was a time when say Pink Floyd was "new" and "alternative" but that is long gone. The "new" music of today just doesn't seem to sell.
Perhaps it is time to just open the back catalog and let the kids of today discover the oldies. As the article said if Dean Martin still sells then by golly, sell him?
What I think is needed is a service where I can easily find new music sorta like my taste where ZERO value is attached as to how hip the D.J. thinks it is.
Your dad's music was mainstream and you being a pathetic herd animal had to do what everyone else does and that is rebel. So you went "alternative" (do what everyone else in your peer group does) by listening to the music that was not openly supported by the MAN. Of course the fact that you could buy your "alternative" music in the shops should have tipped you off that 'the man' was behind it all along but you were/are stupid.
The music industry has however recently made a mistake. They advanced to fast where 'the man' is now trying to push the 'alternative' music too directly. So your kid who has of course inherited your instinct to herd is forced to look in a different direction to be alternative. Cue an intrest in oldie music as that is now the real alternative when alternative has accidently become the mainstream.
It is not the bands, it is that the current "new and happening stuff" is to mainstream and worse, actually BOUGHT by your PARENTS who still want to appear cool or whatever. Nothing kills gangsta rapper music faster then having 40yr old baldies pumping it out of their volvos. It ruins the whole rebelling against your parents thing when your mom says about eminem that she likes his rap. YIKES.
I just can't stand people that judge music by when it was produced or by how many other people like it. Who gives a shit. Do you not eat chocolate because it is mainstream dude? Coffee is out because it is so last century man?
I think that the decline in music sales is down to a number of small effects that on their own seem harmless but combined have led to this massive fall in sales.
This is going to be a long ramble so bear with me.
A number of factors have combined to make us listen to music in a different way and thus reduce the attractivness of buying cd's in your average limited selection store.
People used to play records (for the kids REALLY big black cd's like objects) and because of hardware limitations the music was usually played from the beginning of the album to the end. You needed an advanced record player if you wanted to play albums back to back (playing A and then B side without getting up was extremely difficult).
If you just wanted to listen to a wide selection of music you either had to record your favorite music to tape and then play the tape (wich until quit recently still forced you to listen in the same order over and over) so the radio was the only way to get a wide selection of music without you after a while being able to predict wich song comes next.
Now with CD-changers or worse mp3 players people can listen to a large selection of their own choosing with still enough randomness in it that it doesn't get to repetetive. My own collection of mp3's is big enough to last a week without repeating. You can now play your entire collection at random or any order you desire without being limited by hardware.
MTV doesn't play music anymore. Neither does the radio. Oh they get the occasional "promotional sound clip of the week we repeat every hour" in and when the D.J. needs to take bathroom break but mostly it is commercials. Dutch tv has no music program anymore like Countdown or Top of the Pops. Simply put, the programs that used to introduce us to a selection of new music have disappeared. There are alternatives available but they are often to alternative to be accepted on the workfloor. You need something middle of the road, not to extreem not to mundane to play during the 9 hours you are at work.
With the decline in radio a lot of people seem to have decided that an mp3 player is a better way to get a bit of background music. Hookup an mp3 player to the company soundsystem is lot easier then everyone bringing tapes to work. We listen to less and less radio. But if you listen to your own music you will not hear a new artist you might want to buy.
The walkman still suffered from giving you a very limited music selection in a pre-arranged format. A decent Mp3 player can easily hold a day worth of music. I am sometimes shocked to find that I haven't added a new album in months. This is different from my minidisc player where I would buy new minidiscs now and then or at least regurly record a new collection. I got 20gb of mp3's on my player and frankly I so far don't get bored with it.
Finanlly regonized by the music bizz the simple fact that the money that used to buy L.P.'s (other word for the big black cd like things kids) now goes to games and dvd's and my mobile phone etc etc.
Of course some people will like the "new" music and some young people have a violent reaction to oldy music BUT the simple fact remains that the newer bands do not have the selling power of the oldies. Just google for top album sales and you will find that the top hasn't changed in years. Worse the newbies that do make an appearance lower down are all of the oldie sort (Shania Twain is hardly pushing the envelope). Or simply put Gan
E-book readers are hard, run out of power, are either to bright in the dark or to dark in the sun. In short they are a hassle.
None of this applies to cd's. To a certain extent I do not even use cd's, they are the paperbag around my book. It is a container, and I empty the container into my pc from wich I then play the content.
Book more closely resemebles a portable media player. And just like a book is great because I can easily take it with me a pmp is great because I can take it with me.
I agree with the rest you say. But comparing book sales with music sales just doesn't fly.
If a fight lasts say 1-2 seconds, as fights between the hero and stormtroopers last in real Star Wars, then only the first player would get a hit in and the rest would be left targetting a corpse. It was my main problem with the Combat Upgrade where combat seemed to go so fast that melee, who have to run to the target first, just couldn't get a hit in before the ranged had killed the target.
Sure sure, an alternative would be to have massive battlefields with your squad fighting an enemy 10x the size in number where it is 1 hit 1 kill so you get more like the battles in Lord of the Rings. Drool city to be sure but apparently hard on the cpu.
30 second fights are the current way to allow every class to do its thing. No need for damage-over-time attacks if there is no time.
I introduce first to you the humble progress bar. A good progress bar does two things. It shows how far along something is (percentage complete) and it show that activity is taking place and your computer has not just frozen again.
So in days past when screen were primitive you simply had a row of dots appearing with maybe if your lucky the occasional 5% added to give something like ......5%........10%....
Add the capabilty for backspace and you usually got a little spinning character made up out of -\|/ to show action taking place. Some more advancement and you got a full bar like 0****5****10****15..| (work with me here this is hard to do in text)
But then GRAPHICS were added. YEAH. So now you could draw a bar slowly being filled (but for some reason loosing the activity indicator). Color was added and now you could make the bar turn from red to green.
2.5d add shadow effect to make the bar appear round. 3d and it can stand up like a real seperate bar on your screen.
And what is the freaking point? Well none. All of them did their work and clearly showed what was happening. Okay they became better looking but it gave no real advantage.
So are there other tasks that can benefit from better graphics? I think you have the following main type of jobs on a pc.
Yes I would like a 3d interface when I am manipulating or inspecting the relations between objects on my pc. But is this a common activity? Well I look up at the tabs of my opera browser. Current desktops already have a sort of 2.5d and perhaps my tabs would be clearer if tabs of new pages where "behind" the tabs they originated from. I arrived at this input screen by opening a new tab from the story page (helps me remember where I was when I am finished here) but this tab is at the end of the tabs not indicating that it has a relation with a tab almost at the beginning.
Still with me? Another example. My music collection has a lot of soundtracks. Trying to organize it completly is a nightmare. Especially if I also want to organize it by genre (so I can easily switch depending on mood). Luckily I am on linux so I can use symlinks so an album can be both in
Oh well I can wait a bit. Apart from Sony MMO games most games still play well enough.
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They should make this software available on a camera phone. Next time your girlfriend claims you don't understand here snap her picture and voila, you instantly will be a sensitive man. Anything to keep the dumb cunt happy eh? What?
She has that expression of a woman looking at a naked man and being faintly aroused but also faintly amused at that "last chicken in the poultry shop" display. If your in a long relationship were your girl still fancies you but feels secure enough she doesn't have to constantly worship as a god to keep your ego up you will learn to regonize that look. Oh well it is better then when they break down in laughter while you are trying to pose seductivly. I guess men just aren't designed to look good naked with their socks on.
Ages ago before computers existed and when dinosaurs still roamed the earth I was a baker by proffesion. Now bakers have a odd product, it is in constant demand (in times of economic crisis be in the food industry, people need to eat) but producing it is a hassle. You can't say, Oh monday is a slow day lets do some extra bread for the rush on saturday. You can't (if you want to keep your customers) sell yesterdays surplus today.
So most bakeries and even supermarkets run out before the end of the day (better sell no then be stuck with merchandise you got to throw away, waste eats up your already slim margin extremely fast). Just try to get bread at 6pm. Can't be done (well recently supermarkets have started with doing an extra run late in the day with bread that just needs to be baked off (sorry don't know the english terms) but many bakeries will already be closed or simply sold out)
So why don't they raise prices this person would ask? Well einstein because people got a very clear picture in their head of what they are willing to pay for their food and they are not going to exceed that. While people need food if the bread they can buy at 6pm is to expensive they will just eat something else.
Same with the 360. It's price is not set by supply and demand. It is set by a combination of what the people are willing to pay for it vs the cost of producing it. E-bay DOES NOT matter, same as people willing to pay 2 euro for a sandwich does not mean they are willing to pay 20 euro for a loaf, a lettuce and some meat (Tell your mom your local stay open late supermarket sells you that for about 7-8 euro and she will complain bitterly about the son she raised). Think of it like this. 1st edition Superman sells for thousands of dollars. That does not mean Marvel can sell their latest comic for 3000 dollar. Perhaps you have to have studied economy not to be able to spot this. It is not something you have to study it just is.
MS also of course will figure in that if they sell the device at 700 and drop the price in two months they will have two effects. The people who bought it at 700 will be pissed and the people who see the new price will think, lets wait for the next price cut.
I am like this with handhelds. I know that within a few months the price will have both come down AND it will have a bundle available. Look at the PSP, with the giga pack you get a 75 euro price cut.
Supply and demand is overrated as a price fixer. Just my example of bread being sold out before many people arrive home from work shows that in retail supply and demand hold very little sway. An other example was a breakfast cereal (brinta) wich I believe due to a fire was out of supply for a few months a while back. Now brinta has no ready replacement (it is a porridge) but did that mean supermarkets spiked the prices on their last supplies? Of course not. Nobody would pay 10 euro's for a package even if the alternative is going without. Even those who could easily afford too.
Some things just have a fixed price. MS realizes this. This economist apparently doesn't. 300 dollars is what the 360 will sell for. Less and they will loose to much (or worse people might think it is bad quality) more and people will just not buy it no matter how rare it is.
Oh and a final thing about e-bay. There supply is far far far more limited. 360 on ebay is like that first edition superman. Its pricing has no place in real world economics. Only a fool or an economist would base its retail prices on what is happening on e-bay.
The established way of doing it is to clearly seperate the "content" makers from the ad-sellers. Newspapers are supposed to work like this were for instance in a real paper NO amount of money will buy you an front page ad covering the entire front and every advertisement has a little header pointing it out and no advertisements accepted that look to much like the regular content.
Of course this line was blurred long ago when newspapers stopped publishing news and started adding lifestyle sections.
Were exactly does the corruption start anyway? Obviously a newspaper that carries no game reviews is probably not a good place for a game maker to advertise. So is adding a game section a way to get game makers to publish ads? What about a movie review section? You will notice that movie ads are always near the reviews. Odd, could the entire review section be a way to toady up to the movie companies?
Of course there is a way around this. Increase subscription fees. If no advertising needs to be carried because the consumer pays for all the costs then no ads are needed.
Except that doesn't work either because there is always some toad who then figures out you could even make more money by requiring both a subscription AND to sell adverts at the same time. Just look at payperview tv like the dutch Canal+. Pay for cable, pay for the decoder and still you get ads.
Ah well, luckily slashdot stands at the last bastion of free expression were no amount of money will cause the editors to sully their integrity by publishing bogus news stories to advertise a product.
God I feel dirty after saying that.
Debian scores higher then I expected and since debian is hardly cutting edge it must be because its package system is considered so good. I can only think that this is also the reason that gentoo actually is visible despite the fact that it is a beast (I use it myself so I know what I am talking about).
It seems that the choice of software is less important. ubuntu is gnome by default (as far as I know) if you want kde it is called kubuntu and since in general KDE seems to be more popular (/me runs from an angry mob of Gnome fans + assorted fans from the gazzilion other desktops out there) it is odd to see a gnome distro score so high.
Oh well good luck to them but lets not be too optimistic about this shall we? The survey was after all only asking wich linux distro people had installed with no option for NONE. Ubuntu having x more installs then suse means very little when you realize both are fighting over the table scraps left by MS.
Although, IF the PS3 + HD addon does indeed have the capacity to run user choosen linux apps (IBM's own site reports that they ported it succesfully and it can run most PPC (mac) linux apps without modification) then we might see a huge potential market for linux being opened up. MS will probably not allow windows to run on the PS3 (although a sony spokesman did suggest that the cell should be able to run any OS) so that leaves the field right open (Apple has already declined to use the cell in its new computers) for linux.
Can you imagine millions of living room desktop machines? Supercomputer linux. Droool. Oh and no driver problems since you will know EXACTLY what hardware is inside a PS3. The biggest handicap of linux (no drivers for every piece of crap hardware outthere) solved in a flash.
Worth considering I think for any distro that wants to be handed a few million virgin computers with NO ms inside and a hardware maker that would love to shaft MS like it has never been shafted before.
Either smedley is insane or people out there are still playing it in big enough numbers to make him think that the players actually like the NGE and other stuff.
Are there any SWG players on /. or even more amazing have any of you recently joined the game?
From everything I hear including the other responses here on /. SWG is rapidly being deserted so what gives this smedley the idea that they have they are heading in the right direction? Could it actually be true that wile the hardcore gamers are leaving there is an influx of new gamers?
Well that is because the european retail version is for the european servers only. A pretty nasty move as it means that I would be forced to play on servers along side the FRENCH and GERMANS!
If that isn't evil I don't know what is.
Oh you don't get what is so evil about it. Well how would you like a game server where 50% of the people talk in a foreign language spamming the chat channels in non-english begging for X repeatadly because nobody will answer them in their language? At least Sony allows me to play were I please. Remember that the people speaking in german or french are doing it because their command of english is even worse then mine. The only people in europe who do not speak english are 10 yr olds. German 10yr olds. ARGH
The real problem with SWG was not that it never seemed able to make up its mind about what it wanted to be. In its attempt to be everything to everybody it ends up pissing off everyone. Instead of fixing the bugs they kept redesigning it and introducing even more bugs. I remember after the combat revamp (the first) that you would sometimes drive across places so fucking teeming with live that it was insane. Lairs with 30-40 critters around the entire horizon filled with prey. Granted it was amazing the game did not grind to a halt displaying it all but geez that bug should never have made it past testing.
This guy just doesn't seem to have a clue and if he thinks SWG can in this form compete with WoW he should have himself committed. This is no longer marketing speech this signals a severe mental disorder.
It may amaze some people but in MMO land some people LIKE being an entertainer, yes even a hairdresser. Some people really do enjoy being a cheff or general crafter. Other enjoy going out hunting not for money or xp or leet loot but to find the supplies that the crafters need.
But such a game is not for everybody and would need to be very clearly targetted. An open sandbox style game simply requires a different kind of player then well a fps linear story game.
You know what is odd? The game Guild Wars is advertised as a PvP game yet its quests are actually bloody intresting, with some nice stories and scripted quests that actually are a lot better then the typical EQ2 "go kill ten bears for the next page in a book" quests. GW has NPC's fighting along side you, a central story that actually advances, and in general is very suprising especialy when you consider that it is not a quest game at its heart.
Worse GW is better then EQ2 because you can far more create your own character, you have a maximum of 8 spells from a wide section and while there are only 5 jobs available they have a massive spell selection and 3 specilisations and you have to select a second job as well giving you a huge amount of choice as to how to build your character. Compared to EQ2 where everyone uses the same spells it is a breath of fresh air.
In fact it is a bit like SWG. Well SWG BEFORE Sony made it clear that anyone not adopting the one template to rule them all would just not be able to play with the higher level content. When Sony's idea of a good high level dungeon is filling it with critters that all but the most specced out combat classes can't handle then it becomes clear that Sony decided that the sandbox was not what they wanted.
Remember KOTOR? Nice game but hardly "open". Just try to make all your characters ranged weapon fighters. It was suicide. Jedi was you path and you would damn well take it.
SWG slowly rotted, partly because of bugs, partly because sony either encouraged or failed to discourage the use of quick paths to victory and partly because to many of the players allowed themselves to be drawn in by the lure of the xp grind.
In a recent /. article I put up a post about how SWG was fun before the doc buff and I describe a hunt on dathomir. Perhaps I should also write about how live was AFTER the doc buff became wide spread.
My Sabrak(?) was now an elite TKM/Sword Specialist. Sword being used to do the big damage, TKM for its fantastic healing and for the cheap damage that vibro knuckles give (top sword cost a million, top vibro knuckle a few thousand, your choice). The day would start with unloading your inventory of the previous day loot and checking your armour. Depending on how much you cared about looks your outfit would be the select pieces of armour that critters actually hit with the non-hitted parts of your body wrapped in clothes. If you could be bothered, many couldn't and fighting in your undies was perfectly acceptedle in the SWG universe.
Weapon check to see it had not deterioted to far. Then
On the other hand it is hitachi, home of the deathstar. Only drives I ever had problems with. NEXT.
Okay, this is going to be regarded as elitist and it is. I just like to suggest the following. If you have trouble figuring out a console controller perhaps you should go back to the field and settle in the soil with the other vegetables.
I know not everyone has an IQ with 3 digits but come on. KIDS can figure these things out.
The gamecubes lack luster sale were not down to subpar software or hardware it was the perception that Nintendo == Kiddy games. Go to a games store and most people will simply pass the nintendo by. The only people that look at it are the ones with kids in the lower grades. It is just not for adults.
Now of course this isn't entirely true and Nintendo has had some titles on it console wich are for an audience that has been potty trained BUT the perception remains.
I have to wonder why Nintendo seems so desperate to attract a market that in the 2 decades of video games has still not be won over while possibly alienating (as they did with the gamecube) the established market.
Here is a tiny little hint for Nintendo. Non-gamers ARE NOT GOING TO BUY THE REVOLUTION ON THEIR OWN WITHOUT BEING TOLD TO BY THEIR GAMER FRIENDS. This is a hard bit to understand but NON-GAMERS do NOT know about games. They are not reading the articles about the revolution, they will not see it in shops because they are NOT intrested. Whatever kept them non-gamer will not be changed.
I haven't met a single non-gamer who turned to gaming on their own. ALL of them were turned by gamer friends.
If the gamers are not playing your revolution then the device will be sitting unsold like the gamecube.
Now their are Nintendo fans who defend nintendo at all costs here but I would like to ask them to consider this. Are you a gamer? Yes? Then nintendo isn't targetting you so how excited you are about the new controller has no merit. By definition anyone who reads this article IS not the non-gamer Nintendo seems to want to attract.
There is room for innovation, the DS proved that, BUT it is pointless aiming this at people who do not game without having the word of mouth advertising from existing gamers to advertise your product.
What I fear will happen is that the games with the revolution will be considered to simple/dumbed down etc for the existing gamers to buy and therefore the necessary word of mouth will not be generated.
How many gamecube owners have the gamecube as their only console? I know that at least with both the DS and GBA that all the people I know who own one have at least got either a PC or a none nintendo console as well. No one I know has only a gamecube or handheld.
So is Nintendo chasing a dream market? Perhaps. It is all going to depend now on the games. Will they be perceived as to cutesy to be played by the existing gaming public? Or will I be wrong and will Nintendo be able to penetrate the huge market of non-gamers (is it that huge? A recent article on game violence claimed that 90% of boys game and 40% of girls, doesn't leave a lot of people, the majority of young people already game)
It would be intresting to see what sales research Nintendo has shown that makes them believe their current products are bought by non-gamers. I see far to many hard-core gamers like myself who buy their current handheld products.
Not every 3rd wold nation is a disaster zone. Their are plenty of places where there is political stability and food and water and hygiene are no longer the primary concerns.
What is the problem is getting them to the next level. EDUCATION. Books are expensive and you need a lot of them for even basic schooling worse they need to be translated for each country.
While laptops are also expensive you only need 1 per child, its software can be updated constantly to give the latest book the child needs, it can replace paper to make homework on.
Stop thinking the 3rd world is like the horror shows you seen on tv. These occur because the 1st world always looses interest the moment the immidiate horror is over and the real hardwork needs to start.
SCHOOLS are needed much more at the moment. These laptops would help in those 3rd world nations who are at the moment struggling not to feed their citizens but to educate them.
These are not for refugee camps, they are for places like south africa and india.
Oh well, the IT industry never made sense, why should it start now.
On the other hand, idiotic alliances to fund startups. Hmmm do I smell a bubble?
I think this is part of sony's move to muzzle in on microsofts market. Only fair isn't it? Ah the two evil empire's battling it out. Joy! Remember the cold war, it gave us the intenet and free PORN!!! Eh I mean the internet and a way to communicate easily with our fellow man ABOUT FREE PORN!!!
Oh yeah I would buy one. The first non-handheld console I would own but a legit 300 dollar multi-core linux machine would be too sweet. No need to fear rootkits either, I don't remember any articles were sony was found not to be 100% compliant with the GPL so they could hardly rootkit the kernel. (Would a hacked kernel still be considered a rootkit?)
300 bucks for a genuine IBM grid machine.
The car industry is one of the few where the whole idea of recycling instead of throwing away is actually put into practice.
You must be an extremely lax owner if you BMW does not last you ten years or more.
As for reducing the overall number of cars. Well this steam engine could also be fitted to things like busses and trucks and trains (not everywhere is electrified). Personal transport is not unique in having engines radiating waste heat.
I wonder if this steam engine is actually part of the cooling system. After all if it takes heat away from the engine there would be no need for the normal water based cooling system? So you get power by replacing a system that until now only consumed it. (Pure speculation on my part)
I just find it hilarious that it is the old boring IBM that is making all the upcoming consoles while AMD and Intel are churning out boring old desktop and server cpu's. Yawn. Old iron exciting, hip new trendsetters yawnville. If you had predicted this 10 years ago you would have been a laughingstock.