Pah, the article is crap right at the start
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The Next-Gen Odd Couple
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· Score: 4, Informative
on the other, you have a U.S.-based company whose fortune was made off operating systems for the PC and whose number of years in the videogame industry can be counted on a single hand.
I am sorry? Exactly when was did MS get involved with flight simulator (first a non-ms game but now firmly owned by ms) vs Sony involvement with games? I spot it as MS being almost a full decade earlier. In 1982 MS licensed the program from sublogic to be released on the IBM-PC (before it had been on all the other platforms of the day but NOT that new fangled thingy). The playstation doesn't make an entry until 1994. (Oh and it even seems that MS flight simulator as it would become known was no fluke but actually commisioned by Bill Gates himself wich would explain why such an odd product would keep being developed)
Or do PC games not count as video games? When an article doesn't even do basic research how worthy can the rest of it be?
So for your info. MS has for a very long time had a game division for its operating platform and continues to do so. Sony wich became a game player much later in live also has a big PC division, almost all of its MMO titles for one. MS of course already had experience with the ancestor of live, MSN chat and similar software. Sony of course did not. MS was late to the internet and the whole online idea but not as late as sony so it is no wonder that the x-box was the first console to have a large online component.
Argh I am bored with this. Game journalists should be shot.
Almost everyone seems to think they somehow managed to spot faults in the concept that nobody at BMW could possibly have imagined. To complex, to heavy, to expensive, go to hydrogen instead.
Geez.
To complex? Compared to what? This is a BMW not some american car. Germans may suck as human beings but they know how to make cars. Cars that actually just bloody work instead of needing to be fixed every ten miles.
To heavy? Compared to what? A giant hydrogen fuel cell? Me thinks BWM engineers would have figured out that adding an old style steam engine as found on trains would not be very effective. Perhaps these engineers already thought of the fact that adding a few hundred kilograms would not make sense so the thing does not weigh a significant amount?
Same with expense. Anyway this is BMW, anything that adds performance (wich it does power performance) is good and they just sell it on their premium models first.
As for hydrogen. Well part of the hydrogen engines are still internal combustion engines and will therefore still produce heat. Same with every fuel source that is burned. This steam engine idea could be used whereever you have waste heat.
It is in itself nothing new, in fact it is extremely old. Steam engines themselves didn't just create some steam put it in a cylinder and then vent the steam. Big engines had up to 3 cylinders. 1st high presure, then a middle pressure to take the waste steam from number 1 and then a low pressure one to take the last bit of energy from the steam.
This steam engine could be used today with virtually no change needed in the infrastructure. Gas stations would only see a increase in the water consumption (wonder if it can use tap?). They all ready sell deminerilzed water and tap water is usually also available.
Hydrogen is not yet mature while petrol and steam engines are.
The whole interface just screamed console to me not making use of the high resoultion available. Weird sliders and just in general not the kind of controls you would expect in pc game. They reminded me far more of the PC version of Final Fantasy (7 I think) where the whole interface was a cludge designed around a gamepad not mouse/keyboard setup.
You say you like the choice of watching the reviews of a movie that was no longer making money, fair enough. I would have preffered a more PC like interface where I could simply go to a subscreen and and see all the movies and sort them and compare them and see what made one a success and not the other.
I like the game but not the micro management and not the interface. I am now in sandbox mode making hammer movies.It is fun because I editted out all the micromanagement crap.
Never trust a soldier to give strategic advice. They always come up with brilliant schemes that yet somehow don't work out in the field. The US only had to bomb the vietnamese supply lines to cripple their fighting capabilty. Oh yeah, that worked.
Go ahead, ask them how they explain the failures of the US and other armies in the recent past to win. Bet they can't but give excuses.
The MMO's I know are "fixed" allowing for the development of quickest way to level up paths.
SWG had the Narf hunt, a mission with good payout, relativaly harmless enemy in a safe enviroment close to the hub of player activity coronet. (Has any SWG server ever developed another hub then coronet?)
What sony should have done the moment they realised (they did keep these statistics) that the majority of kills were narfs to make these critters less atractive to kill. Within the game the code already existed to do this. They could even have added some story content because of it.
Method A: Because of overhunting the narf is going extinct, simply remove them B: Because of overhunting the narf has become a sickened create and now causes disease in the attacking player. Very effective as disease causing enemies were way down on the list of preffered missions. C: A the empire orders hunting narfs illegal as the money gained is being used to fund the rebellion. Attacking narf lair causes an imp shuttle to drop a squad of hostile stormies who penalize imperial players and kill rebel players. Code already existed for this but was used for smuggling checks.
Do this for every to popular item in the game, make brandy illegal and those who trade in it suseptible to imperial raids. Make being buffed up a crime (like being under the influence). Use the game universe to steer people away from undesired behaviour.
Everyone flocks to coronet leaving the other places deserted and making the lag unbearable? Fine, travelling through coronet costs a certain fee payable immidialty.
SWG even tried some of this. Critters dropped crafting resources but their stats varied from time to time changing wich critter was best for hunting if you hunted to sell. They should have made this even more important and less purely random. Oh well. maybe next time
SWG in theory allowed you a lot of freedom. For instance in armour choice. Many an rpg simply gives you constant upgrades and you have the choice of getting killed or wearing the best armour.
In SWG the heaviest armour carried the penalty of restricting your recovery. Simply put in clothes you would take more damage but heal faster, in armour you could get to the point were you no longer healed.
Now they had 1 bug and one design flaw that ruined this choice. The bug was that computer controlled enemies only targetted some of your armour outfit. So you simply wore only part of an armour set getting the high resists but not the high penalty.
Second was that buffs could easily compensate for the penalties. So you had all the leet kiddies running around in their underwear and partial armour calling those choosing full armour of full clothes noobs.
They never really fixed this directly.
Same with content. Remember when they added the Endor bunker? The huge gathering there and then the shock when you found out what was inside? Monsters that took 5 minutes with 20 players to take down? Animal trainers not even possible to take part because you can't call pets inside and anyway they don't fit in the dungeon? Rifle not really an option since it is to small etc etc. Area attacks hitting monsters in other rooms.
That was their idea of "content" a leet kiddie playground.
Part of the failure is the players fault, not sony.
Sony gaves us a sandbox, a bugged sandbox but still a sandbox. NOT a game on rails. SWG is closer to such games as The Sims or MS FlightSimulator then any single person game. Even Never Winter Nights wich relies so much on the user for content cannot compare. NWN after all still is a very story driven game even it is the users that write the stories.
Even sandbox games like the Tycoon games do not compare as they usually give you a clear start and end date.
Like MS flightsimulator it is up to the player himself to create his story. Wether you find that fun depends on how good you are in making a story out of a flight from airport A to airport B.
Why MS flightsimulator? Well just like in that game it is very easy to make it extremely boring. You can choose the most advanced aircraft, perfect weather, forgiving aerodynamics, no hardware failures, no crashes. OR you put yourselve in an obsolete prop plane with no fuel, failing engines, stuck landing gear in a storm of storms on an artic runway that is iced up and a sea 10 meters beyond the runway.
How does this apply to SWG? Well I told this story before on/. but lets just dupe myself to stay in the spirit of/.
SWG gives you several planets on wich to do your thing. Starter planets, medium planets, hard planets and "you get eaten" planets. Dathomir stand at the top and is a seriously hard place.
But I am getting ahead of myself. When you start the game and make the mistake of joining a small european server and choose the wrong starter planet (no longer possible but it was when I joined) you find yourselve all alone with a pathetic starter kit. Figuring out the basic game is easy enough and you start you first mission (SWG has no quests, just random missions of go to X kill the critters there, get paid) killing toads or bunnies. Immidiatly around your starter city things are relativly safe BUT just 1 km out things get nastier and you will probably do a fair bit of running or carefull circling nasties you have no hope yet of tackling.
Payout is crap and the money drain is big. Now in a move that is radically different from other MMO's SWG did not force you into a role and in fact you could easily get started in all the proffesions you wanted. A scout/medic/entertainer/melee/ranged/crafter combo was doable. At the start. Advancing in a proffesion cost skillpoints of wich you only had 250 limiting you in how many specialisations you could buy BUT in the beginning it paid to be diverse. It allowed you to heal your own combat damage and make some stuff. Important because as I said the game was deserted.
I then stumbled across another player who suggested I hop of planet to the central hub and gave me some kit and money to get me started. I literally leaped ahead. I could now afford a vehicle and some food buffs.
I did not yet find out about doc buffs (maybe they did not even exist yet) and that saved the game for a while.
With some more experience under my belt and now a frequent member of large groups I saw someone asking for players to join a dathomir hunt group. Now I knew enough that that place was dangerous, rancors and all, but that it was also something I wanted to try so me and some others joined up. In hindsight we were all NOOBS but it was still in that stage of the game when no group would leave without a solid selection of players such as a scout and certainly a medic or better a doctor (can ressurect dead players). Half medics like me were given healing items by the real medic just to give the group a better chance to survive and then we were off.
Dath was dark, cold and rainy. Some imidiatly called their vehicles and were told not to unless since this was suicide. We were going to walk. If agroed (attacked by hostiles) we would just have to fight, running in every wich way on your own was also not recommended.
We got our missions, a large group of I think about dozen players so we had
A recent stories had Civ3 as the good old days so I fear all the old people like me have died but perhaps some have heard you parents talk about the Pentium 3 processor. Leave aside for a moment that it was the last processor that could be dualled without paying extra for a "special" version Intel had the bright idea to include a unique number with it. http://support.intel.com/support/processors/pentiu miii/sb/CS-007579.htm/
Its function pretty much what this TPM chip seems to want to do. Do not worry, your P4 does not have it nor does your AMD chip. It caused a bit of a stink and Intel backed down. For the time being. At least they claimed. Who knows what is really inside your pc.
Seems this time it has managed to get a little bit further. Now anonimity on the web is a bit of a hassle as/. is probably well aware of. Just count the number of people who feel they can troll websites without fear of being found and getting their teeth kicked in. If you behaved like the GNAA in say a real life setting like a soccer club you would easily find yourselve gently reminded about proper behaviour. On the net there are ways to hide yourselve and it is used.
Any freedom will be used and by some people in ways that other people would rather not want. For instance while you do indeed need legal identification to drive a car and for that indentification to show you are entitled to drive a car there is no real check. Wich means that some people who are not allowed to drive a car do. It is called joyriding and it results in a fair number of deaths. Yet we more or less realize that this is the price to pay for not having to go past a checkpoint when we leave the driveway.
A hardware based identification sounds "nice" if you think about the need to identify yourselve to your bank. Well no actually it doesn't. I don't know how other banks work but the dutch "postbank" sends an SMS to your phone when you have (after giving a login/password pair) entered a transaction to confirm your identity. It works because a wrongdoer can't easily get their hands on both. If you keylog my machine you will not have my hardware phone and if you rob me you will not have my password.
Oh btw this TPM chip does NOT seem to guard against keyloggers. If I get your PIN number I can simply login on your machine and be identified as yours. Not good.
What is worse I think this TPM chip can only work with closed source. A linux machine could of course easily spoof the number unless it was part of the network card (and even Mac adresses can be spoofed) so I think this little chip is far more about MS and (perhaps) Apple wanting to ban opensource software then anything else. Oh they do not need to do it openly. Just that more and more websites and content will require a tpm chip. How about enabling tpm identification by default in every word document so that even in the new "open" format it would only work with MS software, opensource wordproccesor would simply not have the TPM chip to decode it. So you would have to ask each time your send a piece of content please could you send me a non-tpm version?
Nah, nice as it would be to ban the trolls easily I fear that they are the price we pay for the freedom to run the software we want. Time perhaps to mothball one of my current machines just in case in the not to distant future there will be no mobo's left to buy that run linux.
Not that I think that is going to happen. Why? Well our glorious defenders of freedom the chinese. The article suggests that this TPM chips is Bill Gates way of getting the chinese to pay for MS software. Lets hope the chinese are smarter and that the TPM chip is the way to get Chinese even more serious about creating an independent IT system. I rather trust the chinese goverment, who has no control over me a dutch citizen, then our own bought and sold goverments.
First america is totally dependant on the chinese economy. Even more on that region. A war would be a disaster for the american economy ESPECIALLY for the powers that be.
Second china is not an iraq or vietnam. It would kick americas butt in both a ground war and a nuclear exchange. Massive losses for the chinese sure, but so what? Not like they are going to run out.
Third russia would have a fit.
Fourth India would have a fit.
Fifth non-commercial blokkade would suit the chinese just fine. Less capatalist propaganda to filter out. It is not like South Africa were the majority of the population were against the boycotted goverment.
No it is just bash the chinese time in the media, next month it will be the EU's turn.
Black & White. The original game. Glowing reviews and yet some time later virtually everyone acknowledged that the game kinda stunk. To much micro management, bad interface making it hard to do your task (praise or punish your pet) and generally just not worth the scores it got.
So explain it dear game reviewer who gave this game and others like it such high scores? I can think of three reasons.
You were bought, wether directly, through advertising deals or by being invited to exclusive launches and going all gooye I don't know
You are incompetent, you did installed the game, played it for ten minutes and spend the rest of the day jerking off.
or perhaps this, you weren't so much bought as unwilling to be the one that the great "XXX XXXXX" has made a bad game and that perhaps "XXX XXXXX" is not the gaming god everyone claims but just another developer who can screw up. I note that most of the reviews that have you wondering if the reviewer actually played the finished game past the first level come from the big companies/names in the industry.
Frankly I don't care anymore, wod of mouth is worth far more to me. Friends will tell me about games and luckily as an EU customer I usually can wait for the time it takes for worth of mouth to start taking effect because games are released a few months later anyway.
Game review sites are little more then ways to keep track of release schedules and beta signups. Judging wich game I am going to buy has stopped long ago.
Oh and game companies that want to know how best to get a good review of your game? Playable demo. If your game is good a well done demo can create far more excitement then the best bought review.
No actually I did not. Just as my handwriting has gone to hell with keyboard use, constant exposure to the internet has made me capable of reading past the most hideous grammar astrocities and commit themselves with laughing ease.
Future generations will probably have an english more like japanese where grammar is an optional extra and meaning must be derived entirely from the context or by beating your talking partner over the head until they make sense.
It also appears he doesn't know that GTA is for the PC as well, and two of the reviewed games are pc. Civ PC only in fact.
Oh well, what do you expect from a GTA player.
My own "The Movies" review for the pc, Harsh mode
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Holiday Gaming Potpourri
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· Score: 3, Informative
First it is a console game. Now consoles may or may not be your thing. HOWEVER what most people agree upon is that a controller is not the same as a mouse and keyboard. First person shooters are an obvious victim on consoles who survive on, horror of horrors, aimbots.
The Movies is in many ways a The Sims game and controlling this with a gamepad would not be my first choice. Worse the designers seem to have made very few allowences for the PC port. In short the interface is a clutch and often frustating.
But first the game as this will explain why the interface just isn't up to it.
You start the game by creating creating a movie company choosing a company name, your name and a logo. Nice touch is that if you choose the pregenerated company name it actually can be spoken during the oscar awards. There are different ones and it is a nice touch. Pity all the logo's are so.... childish.
Once started you are presented with fixed size typical movie lot. Buzzling street outside the gate (actually a fairly big area with cars driving buy, very scenic but of no use) and 1 fixed building inside the gate where your first unemployed will be queing up. The year is 1920 and you have 150.000 dollars to make a movie empire.
The first fixed building allows you do hire from a que of nice rendered people standing actually in line on your property both builders and janitors. Female and male, white and black (No racism in this hollywood) and all equally crap. Management games are nothing new and usually you start by carefully examining your new empoyees stats to get the best for the price you can afford. None of that here. Just hire builders to build your soon be put up buildings and sets (and maintain them) and some janitors to keep the area clean.
Then start building the other buildings. If you got some experience you know that you got 3 kinds of buildings. Hire buildings wich allow you hire a type of staff, namely movie crew, scientist and actor/directors. Static buildings wich you only use sometimes like the makeover department, script writing building and your actuall movie making buildings namely the casting building and the sets themselves.
Experience will teach you that you can put most of the buildings off to one site and put the casting building at the center of a circle of sets. Your employees actually got to walk between the casting building and the sets so you want to optomize the distances involved. Space will be an issue so learn to optomize.
Your movie crew will all have the same useless stats so just hire some random ones again. Now it is time to select your stars.
There are five movie genre's (comedy/horror/sci-fi/romance/action) and your wannabe's will have some or no stats in either. Ignore it. What is more important is their personality. They got a stat in how they handle stress and how they handle boredom. Working creates stress and reduces boredom, resting reduces stress but increases boredom. Can you spot the conflict? Yes a stressfull and easily bored character will be impossible to keep happy. Work them and they will stressout, let them rest and they will get bored.
One thing must be said about the game and that is you can hire people from other ques for different proffesions, so if you don't like any of the wannabees you can make a janitor hopefull your next star. Just make them an extra first to get their stats to display and promote if needed. Oh and acters can also be used as directors and vice versa. Helps keeping them fresh when the audience gets bored with them I guess.
So you got your hopefulls. you got your buildings and a few sets. Lets make some magic. Drag your script writers over the part of the script building that has the genre you want and after a while a brand new max 1 star script will roll out. Yes it is 1920 and till much much later post ww2 in any case you will only be able to write crap scripts. No matter what you do. No way to improve. The quality of your script is determined by the level of the script building and
Every single MMO game MUST have PvP. It is a rule. If it doesn't it sucks and the PvP fans will flood the forums demanding the inclusion of PvP and they will do it so loudly that the 4 or 5 who want can drown out the 100.000 PvE players who are to busy playing the games to troll the forums.
You know why The Sims Online failed? No PvP. Oh and don't forget PvP doesn't mean simply including the option to engage in duels or even staged arena fights with you know balanced teams and everyone having the same equipment to balance things out.
No proper PvP is allowing level 10000 players to form groups and attack solo new players. And don't you dare call that unfair it is their fault for not been 133t enough.
IF, that is IF, ddo delivers what it promises it could be great. It all depends on how much they succeed in keeping the people like the parent poster out. DDO for the bearded PnP orhpans who couldn't give a toss about PvP or having the latest gear. Just fun.
I don't suppose anyone got a fileplanet subscription to spare?
To be nice, WoW is advertised as a simple action MMORPG. Basically RPG Light. To be nasty, WoW is for leet kiddies who think numbers are part of the alphabet.
DDO from so far as I have it followed is going to be bearded. NWN/Baldur Gate rather then Diablo. If anything it is going to be even more anal the Everquest (although hopefully in depth not endless grinding) so your typical WoW gamer is NOT the kind of customer they want.
Everquest 2 is more of a target and trust me on this, getting people away from EQ2 is easy. It is just that at the moment nothing else is available. Not everyone hates EQ2 because of its heavyness. It is more the constant bugs and huge level gap that forms the problem. Both EQ2 and WoW suffer badly from the fact that a majority of its players shoot to the highest level and are then left wondering what to do.
DDO aims (or claims too) to make the journey the goal not reaching your destination. Less focus on levelling up and more on having fun. Or to put it another way. Less people running around 'Looking for XP group'.
One of the things that still amazes me in EQ2 that I a relative new and in-frequent player can still point out fun quests to complete to players who already got characters at the highest level. DDO hopefully will be more about completing story based quests then in getting to the next level as fast as possible. Nothing ruins an MMO for me faster then being in a fun group and then allowing a new person in only to get them to wine that we could get XP so much faster if only we did X. I can only imagine they must all be teenage boys who need to be thought by their girls, sometimes the price does not go to he who finishes first. Slowdown and take your time, you may find that it is more fun that way.
So you want a reason to stop trying to get your char to level 60? Well okay how about this. Why do you want to be level 60? What is going to happen then? Are you not now enjoying yourselve at your current level? Will your char at level 60 suddenly be fun and challenging to play?
If you set yourselve a goal at least ask yourselve why you set that goal. That is my answer. How you answer it determines wether you should stick with WoW or go on the new hunting grounds. Just that DDO is hopefully not going to be about levelling up.
Yeah the current pricing system is expensive especially if your looking to fill a 30gb iPod BUT I always thought the price was set by the music business. Apple I had understood is very willing to go lower. The music industry wants to go higher. So it is not really apples fault.
The entire industry is incredibly immature but then just try to buy a new car from a non-brand dealer. You know like a car supermarket where the fords and fiats are next to each other? We the consumer are always screwed. Get used to it.
It will explain everything you need to know about politics. In any "democracy".
I have worked for an offshoot of BT and been in england for a couple of times and worked together with brits for a long time and in general, I hate to say this, but you guys are tools.
I mean dutch people can be led by the nose like so many sheep but brits? Yuch.
The media in britain excells at creating moods and your politicians are very successfull in exploiting it. At the foundation lies the idea that britain is still of any importance. It isn't. It has no military power and it has no economic power.
Yet the media can perfectly exploit this sense of superiority and in general can perfectly install a hatred/fear of anything EU while blindly accepting any proposal the media makes you think is your own.
Yes Minister is a comedy show but the suggestion the britain joined the EU to split it up from within sure explains a lot.
It also says a lot about the EU that they have not simply kicked england out of the EU. Simple ban. No more england getting all kinds of cuts on its contributions while claiming every benefit it can.
Surely considering the hatred of the main land and the eu that would be best no?
The EU is NOT run by politicians. Neither is it run by bureaucrats.
It is some weird hybrid that is partially elected and partially appointed and partially employed (like regular bureaucrats). The elections are A usually just a popularity poll for the local goverment of the country the voter is in B have low turnout C has a lot of issues and only one way to vote.
In many ways the american system (or at least I think in california) of combining an election with a referendum on several issues is to be preffered. I think you could for instance vote both for your leader and on such issues as medical joints.
Recently the EU members held a referendum on a new constitution and it was a disaster. Especially in my own country where it became blindly obvious that the politicians of all the big parties had no connect with the feelings on the street. The prime minister even suggested that those who voted against the constitition would cause the EU to collapse and start a new world war. Really.
It was of course rejected and so far politics has reacted to it in the usual dutch fashion, stick your head in the sand and hope the herd of stampeding elephants goes away.
So the elected part of the EU does not work, the appointed part is usually, well the tv show "Yes Minister" said it all, a way to get rid of local politicians in a nice way. EU is where you go off to when you are finished locally but can't just be kicked out your party.
The hired part works for two groups who got no-one they are accountable to and are typically foreigners on high salaries meaning they live in their own society totally detached from their own countrymen and the country they live in. The sort of enviroment that leads to statements like 'Let them eat cake' (on the subject of peasants not being able to afford bread).
It is not a lack of knowledge about IT, it is a culture where the entire elite is totally detached from the real world. Any normal person could have told you that the referendum on the constitution was going to go bad. Especially in holland where the introduction of the Euro has caused a lot of grief (general belief it caused an inflation and politicians responsible countering that A that people were imagining it and B they just didn't understand.) Then there is the subject that holland pays more per citizen to the EU then any other nation and finally the subject of allowing turkey to join.
But it was pushed through wich such arguments as we must just accept it and the citizen can't comprehend it anyway and we know best.
You americans may think you got it bad but the EU is a 100 times worse. Imagine a situation where New York payed less in federal taxes then California (england pays far far less then holland) but a new law is being pushed that gives NY a far bigger vote. Would that be accepted? Well in the EU it would be california/dutch politicans arguing in favor of it.
Total disconnect with the voter and the real world. Time for the revolution.
Oh sure Apple is just as evil as MS if not more so. At least MS has some people working for it who seem to think that DRM is not actually a good move for a software company. But apple fortunally is tiny so that is alright.
But you got yourselve an iPod. Good for you but this hardly then locks you into Apple. You can A: sell it and get another player or B: not use iTunes. There is still the shocking capability that only the most leet people know about getting your content on a revolutionary new media called the CD and throught the magic of an CD-ripper convert and place it on your iPod.
Saying Apple has a monopoly on either music or mp3 players is like saying Ferrari has a monopoly on fast cars. Sure sure, if you think fast cars you think Ferrari but it is hardly like you got no choice. And if you were lucky to be given one as a present (anyone want to give me one?) you would hardly be locked into the Ferrari Gassoline Monopoly.
I can't stand people who use the term lock-in were there is none. You got a choice, your just to lazy or ill informed to see it. And as for looking to MS to free you from a perceived lock-in... [CENSOR] [CENSOR] [CENSOR] [CENSORRED] [CENSOR] [CENSOR] and [CENSOR][CENSOR] [CENSOR] with a [CENSOR] on [CENSOR] you [CENSOR].
Oh boy where shall I start. How about MS being a company intrested ONLY in making sure its software/hardware will be in use for anything and everything. Openess or choice are not in its vocabulary. When MS talks about the freedom to choose they mean you can choose XP Home or XP Proffesional.
WMA is usually reviewed as bad but hey it is the format MS choose and they will damn well push it down peoples throat no matter what.
As for MTV. A music provider? Since when? Reality tv show is more like it. A 24 hour advertisement channel going to sell an MS service. If you can't see the sign of the anti-christ in this you must have had your eyes removed.
I swear when I saw the headline a chill went down my spine. This will result in a shallow service that only offers the most commercial music but will be able to brainwash people with a 24/7 advertisement channel.
Sony is evil but sony is also still the company that defended the VCR. That today Sony BGM has such an unhealthy control over the hardware side is bad but MS is no different.
They are the two evil empires of the cold war but to a certain extent they also keep each other in check. Neither can go too far for fear that consumers will just flock to the other.
I frankly don't want to see MS starting to deal music, this could very well lead to MS like Sony deciding that that business segment gets to control the other segments. At the moment MS still realizes that to a certain extent they have little to gain by a total DRM system. Just like Philips has no business interest (since they sold their music division) in protecting content to the extent the music biz wants. So Philips can sell DVD rippers because they don't give a damn what you do with it just as long as you do it with theirs.
MS selling music would only increase their desire to make a DRM pc. Not good.
That the saying a trained chimp could do this job as reffering to a boring assembly line job is in fact not true. While a monkey/ape could be trained to do simple assembly work it could not do it for the 8 hour shifts that humans can without going insane.
Sure it is nice if you can see the redundancy in your actions but it doesn't seem to allow chimps to keep growing. Childeren may be more limited then chimps but something must work better since adults are clearly superior to chimps. Unless of course you go for the hitchhiker guide explanation of humans experimenting on chimps.
He can butcher it, just because it has the lucas name attached it can be butchered like nothing has been butchered before. Lets just hope it is not a prequel eh.
The problem is with iTunes wich is just another music site. The hot name brand item is the iPod and that one is selling. It is also the item where Apple makes it money, not iTunes. No I am afraid that even in the fifth generation the iPod is still a license for Apple to print money. If anything they can raise prices to take some of the pressure of their production lines. Although they probably end up selling even more.
The competition is just non-existant especially for the nano. You try to get a 4gb flash player for that price from anyone else. Only "lowpoint" for nerds like me is that the iPod does not support ogg. But then very few do, certainly non of the "big" names. iRiver was the only one I saw in local shops.
And it seems that Apple would happily lower prices on iTunes. The music labels however only want to lower song prices if they are allowed to sell new songs at even higher prices. Wich Jobs seems to think might put consumers off. Since he is the one selling overpriced mp3 players at premium prices I think we listen to him when it comes to figuring out how much you can screw the customer for eh?
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I am sorry? Exactly when was did MS get involved with flight simulator (first a non-ms game but now firmly owned by ms) vs Sony involvement with games? I spot it as MS being almost a full decade earlier. In 1982 MS licensed the program from sublogic to be released on the IBM-PC (before it had been on all the other platforms of the day but NOT that new fangled thingy). The playstation doesn't make an entry until 1994. (Oh and it even seems that MS flight simulator as it would become known was no fluke but actually commisioned by Bill Gates himself wich would explain why such an odd product would keep being developed)
Or do PC games not count as video games? When an article doesn't even do basic research how worthy can the rest of it be?
So for your info. MS has for a very long time had a game division for its operating platform and continues to do so. Sony wich became a game player much later in live also has a big PC division, almost all of its MMO titles for one. MS of course already had experience with the ancestor of live, MSN chat and similar software. Sony of course did not. MS was late to the internet and the whole online idea but not as late as sony so it is no wonder that the x-box was the first console to have a large online component.
Argh I am bored with this. Game journalists should be shot.
Geez.
To complex? Compared to what? This is a BMW not some american car. Germans may suck as human beings but they know how to make cars. Cars that actually just bloody work instead of needing to be fixed every ten miles.
To heavy? Compared to what? A giant hydrogen fuel cell? Me thinks BWM engineers would have figured out that adding an old style steam engine as found on trains would not be very effective. Perhaps these engineers already thought of the fact that adding a few hundred kilograms would not make sense so the thing does not weigh a significant amount?
Same with expense. Anyway this is BMW, anything that adds performance (wich it does power performance) is good and they just sell it on their premium models first.
As for hydrogen. Well part of the hydrogen engines are still internal combustion engines and will therefore still produce heat. Same with every fuel source that is burned. This steam engine idea could be used whereever you have waste heat.
It is in itself nothing new, in fact it is extremely old. Steam engines themselves didn't just create some steam put it in a cylinder and then vent the steam. Big engines had up to 3 cylinders. 1st high presure, then a middle pressure to take the waste steam from number 1 and then a low pressure one to take the last bit of energy from the steam.
/. engineers. Pah.
Hydrogen is not yet mature while petrol and steam engines are.
Ah well, it is a good laugh.
You say you like the choice of watching the reviews of a movie that was no longer making money, fair enough. I would have preffered a more PC like interface where I could simply go to a subscreen and and see all the movies and sort them and compare them and see what made one a success and not the other.
I like the game but not the micro management and not the interface. I am now in sandbox mode making hammer movies.It is fun because I editted out all the micromanagement crap.
Go ahead, ask them how they explain the failures of the US and other armies in the recent past to win. Bet they can't but give excuses.
SWG had the Narf hunt, a mission with good payout, relativaly harmless enemy in a safe enviroment close to the hub of player activity coronet. (Has any SWG server ever developed another hub then coronet?)
What sony should have done the moment they realised (they did keep these statistics) that the majority of kills were narfs to make these critters less atractive to kill. Within the game the code already existed to do this. They could even have added some story content because of it.
Method A: Because of overhunting the narf is going extinct, simply remove them B: Because of overhunting the narf has become a sickened create and now causes disease in the attacking player. Very effective as disease causing enemies were way down on the list of preffered missions. C: A the empire orders hunting narfs illegal as the money gained is being used to fund the rebellion. Attacking narf lair causes an imp shuttle to drop a squad of hostile stormies who penalize imperial players and kill rebel players. Code already existed for this but was used for smuggling checks.
Do this for every to popular item in the game, make brandy illegal and those who trade in it suseptible to imperial raids. Make being buffed up a crime (like being under the influence). Use the game universe to steer people away from undesired behaviour.
Everyone flocks to coronet leaving the other places deserted and making the lag unbearable? Fine, travelling through coronet costs a certain fee payable immidialty.
SWG even tried some of this. Critters dropped crafting resources but their stats varied from time to time changing wich critter was best for hunting if you hunted to sell. They should have made this even more important and less purely random. Oh well. maybe next time
SWG in theory allowed you a lot of freedom. For instance in armour choice. Many an rpg simply gives you constant upgrades and you have the choice of getting killed or wearing the best armour.
In SWG the heaviest armour carried the penalty of restricting your recovery. Simply put in clothes you would take more damage but heal faster, in armour you could get to the point were you no longer healed.
Now they had 1 bug and one design flaw that ruined this choice. The bug was that computer controlled enemies only targetted some of your armour outfit. So you simply wore only part of an armour set getting the high resists but not the high penalty.
Second was that buffs could easily compensate for the penalties. So you had all the leet kiddies running around in their underwear and partial armour calling those choosing full armour of full clothes noobs.
They never really fixed this directly.
Same with content. Remember when they added the Endor bunker? The huge gathering there and then the shock when you found out what was inside? Monsters that took 5 minutes with 20 players to take down? Animal trainers not even possible to take part because you can't call pets inside and anyway they don't fit in the dungeon? Rifle not really an option since it is to small etc etc. Area attacks hitting monsters in other rooms.
That was their idea of "content" a leet kiddie playground.
SWG had something but it was ruined.
Part of the failure is the players fault, not sony.
Sony gaves us a sandbox, a bugged sandbox but still a sandbox. NOT a game on rails. SWG is closer to such games as The Sims or MS FlightSimulator then any single person game. Even Never Winter Nights wich relies so much on the user for content cannot compare. NWN after all still is a very story driven game even it is the users that write the stories.
Even sandbox games like the Tycoon games do not compare as they usually give you a clear start and end date.
Like MS flightsimulator it is up to the player himself to create his story. Wether you find that fun depends on how good you are in making a story out of a flight from airport A to airport B.
Why MS flightsimulator? Well just like in that game it is very easy to make it extremely boring. You can choose the most advanced aircraft, perfect weather, forgiving aerodynamics, no hardware failures, no crashes. OR you put yourselve in an obsolete prop plane with no fuel, failing engines, stuck landing gear in a storm of storms on an artic runway that is iced up and a sea 10 meters beyond the runway.
How does this apply to SWG? Well I told this story before on /. but lets just dupe myself to stay in the spirit of /.
SWG gives you several planets on wich to do your thing. Starter planets, medium planets, hard planets and "you get eaten" planets. Dathomir stand at the top and is a seriously hard place.
But I am getting ahead of myself. When you start the game and make the mistake of joining a small european server and choose the wrong starter planet (no longer possible but it was when I joined) you find yourselve all alone with a pathetic starter kit. Figuring out the basic game is easy enough and you start you first mission (SWG has no quests, just random missions of go to X kill the critters there, get paid) killing toads or bunnies. Immidiatly around your starter city things are relativly safe BUT just 1 km out things get nastier and you will probably do a fair bit of running or carefull circling nasties you have no hope yet of tackling.
Payout is crap and the money drain is big. Now in a move that is radically different from other MMO's SWG did not force you into a role and in fact you could easily get started in all the proffesions you wanted. A scout/medic/entertainer/melee/ranged/crafter combo was doable. At the start. Advancing in a proffesion cost skillpoints of wich you only had 250 limiting you in how many specialisations you could buy BUT in the beginning it paid to be diverse. It allowed you to heal your own combat damage and make some stuff. Important because as I said the game was deserted.
I then stumbled across another player who suggested I hop of planet to the central hub and gave me some kit and money to get me started. I literally leaped ahead. I could now afford a vehicle and some food buffs.
I did not yet find out about doc buffs (maybe they did not even exist yet) and that saved the game for a while.
With some more experience under my belt and now a frequent member of large groups I saw someone asking for players to join a dathomir hunt group. Now I knew enough that that place was dangerous, rancors and all, but that it was also something I wanted to try so me and some others joined up. In hindsight we were all NOOBS but it was still in that stage of the game when no group would leave without a solid selection of players such as a scout and certainly a medic or better a doctor (can ressurect dead players). Half medics like me were given healing items by the real medic just to give the group a better chance to survive and then we were off.
Dath was dark, cold and rainy. Some imidiatly called their vehicles and were told not to unless since this was suicide. We were going to walk. If agroed (attacked by hostiles) we would just have to fight, running in every wich way on your own was also not recommended.
We got our missions, a large group of I think about dozen players so we had
Its function pretty much what this TPM chip seems to want to do. Do not worry, your P4 does not have it nor does your AMD chip. It caused a bit of a stink and Intel backed down. For the time being. At least they claimed. Who knows what is really inside your pc.
Seems this time it has managed to get a little bit further. Now anonimity on the web is a bit of a hassle as /. is probably well aware of. Just count the number of people who feel they can troll websites without fear of being found and getting their teeth kicked in. If you behaved like the GNAA in say a real life setting like a soccer club you would easily find yourselve gently reminded about proper behaviour. On the net there are ways to hide yourselve and it is used.
Any freedom will be used and by some people in ways that other people would rather not want. For instance while you do indeed need legal identification to drive a car and for that indentification to show you are entitled to drive a car there is no real check. Wich means that some people who are not allowed to drive a car do. It is called joyriding and it results in a fair number of deaths. Yet we more or less realize that this is the price to pay for not having to go past a checkpoint when we leave the driveway.
A hardware based identification sounds "nice" if you think about the need to identify yourselve to your bank. Well no actually it doesn't. I don't know how other banks work but the dutch "postbank" sends an SMS to your phone when you have (after giving a login/password pair) entered a transaction to confirm your identity. It works because a wrongdoer can't easily get their hands on both. If you keylog my machine you will not have my hardware phone and if you rob me you will not have my password.
Oh btw this TPM chip does NOT seem to guard against keyloggers. If I get your PIN number I can simply login on your machine and be identified as yours. Not good.
What is worse I think this TPM chip can only work with closed source. A linux machine could of course easily spoof the number unless it was part of the network card (and even Mac adresses can be spoofed) so I think this little chip is far more about MS and (perhaps) Apple wanting to ban opensource software then anything else. Oh they do not need to do it openly. Just that more and more websites and content will require a tpm chip. How about enabling tpm identification by default in every word document so that even in the new "open" format it would only work with MS software, opensource wordproccesor would simply not have the TPM chip to decode it. So you would have to ask each time your send a piece of content please could you send me a non-tpm version?
Nah, nice as it would be to ban the trolls easily I fear that they are the price we pay for the freedom to run the software we want. Time perhaps to mothball one of my current machines just in case in the not to distant future there will be no mobo's left to buy that run linux.
Not that I think that is going to happen. Why? Well our glorious defenders of freedom the chinese. The article suggests that this TPM chips is Bill Gates way of getting the chinese to pay for MS software. Lets hope the chinese are smarter and that the TPM chip is the way to get Chinese even more serious about creating an independent IT system. I rather trust the chinese goverment, who has no control over me a dutch citizen, then our own bought and sold goverments.
Second china is not an iraq or vietnam. It would kick americas butt in both a ground war and a nuclear exchange. Massive losses for the chinese sure, but so what? Not like they are going to run out.
Third russia would have a fit.
Fourth India would have a fit.
Fifth non-commercial blokkade would suit the chinese just fine. Less capatalist propaganda to filter out. It is not like South Africa were the majority of the population were against the boycotted goverment.
No it is just bash the chinese time in the media, next month it will be the EU's turn.
Black & White. The original game. Glowing reviews and yet some time later virtually everyone acknowledged that the game kinda stunk. To much micro management, bad interface making it hard to do your task (praise or punish your pet) and generally just not worth the scores it got.
So explain it dear game reviewer who gave this game and others like it such high scores? I can think of three reasons.
Frankly I don't care anymore, wod of mouth is worth far more to me. Friends will tell me about games and luckily as an EU customer I usually can wait for the time it takes for worth of mouth to start taking effect because games are released a few months later anyway.
Game review sites are little more then ways to keep track of release schedules and beta signups. Judging wich game I am going to buy has stopped long ago.
Oh and game companies that want to know how best to get a good review of your game? Playable demo. If your game is good a well done demo can create far more excitement then the best bought review.
Future generations will probably have an english more like japanese where grammar is an optional extra and meaning must be derived entirely from the context or by beating your talking partner over the head until they make sense.
Oh well, what do you expect from a GTA player.
First it is a console game. Now consoles may or may not be your thing. HOWEVER what most people agree upon is that a controller is not the same as a mouse and keyboard. First person shooters are an obvious victim on consoles who survive on, horror of horrors, aimbots.
The Movies is in many ways a The Sims game and controlling this with a gamepad would not be my first choice. Worse the designers seem to have made very few allowences for the PC port. In short the interface is a clutch and often frustating.
But first the game as this will explain why the interface just isn't up to it.
You start the game by creating creating a movie company choosing a company name, your name and a logo. Nice touch is that if you choose the pregenerated company name it actually can be spoken during the oscar awards. There are different ones and it is a nice touch. Pity all the logo's are so.... childish.
Once started you are presented with fixed size typical movie lot. Buzzling street outside the gate (actually a fairly big area with cars driving buy, very scenic but of no use) and 1 fixed building inside the gate where your first unemployed will be queing up. The year is 1920 and you have 150.000 dollars to make a movie empire.
The first fixed building allows you do hire from a que of nice rendered people standing actually in line on your property both builders and janitors. Female and male, white and black (No racism in this hollywood) and all equally crap. Management games are nothing new and usually you start by carefully examining your new empoyees stats to get the best for the price you can afford. None of that here. Just hire builders to build your soon be put up buildings and sets (and maintain them) and some janitors to keep the area clean.
Then start building the other buildings. If you got some experience you know that you got 3 kinds of buildings. Hire buildings wich allow you hire a type of staff, namely movie crew, scientist and actor/directors. Static buildings wich you only use sometimes like the makeover department, script writing building and your actuall movie making buildings namely the casting building and the sets themselves.
Experience will teach you that you can put most of the buildings off to one site and put the casting building at the center of a circle of sets. Your employees actually got to walk between the casting building and the sets so you want to optomize the distances involved. Space will be an issue so learn to optomize.
Your movie crew will all have the same useless stats so just hire some random ones again. Now it is time to select your stars.
There are five movie genre's (comedy/horror/sci-fi/romance/action) and your wannabe's will have some or no stats in either. Ignore it. What is more important is their personality. They got a stat in how they handle stress and how they handle boredom. Working creates stress and reduces boredom, resting reduces stress but increases boredom. Can you spot the conflict? Yes a stressfull and easily bored character will be impossible to keep happy. Work them and they will stressout, let them rest and they will get bored.
One thing must be said about the game and that is you can hire people from other ques for different proffesions, so if you don't like any of the wannabees you can make a janitor hopefull your next star. Just make them an extra first to get their stats to display and promote if needed. Oh and acters can also be used as directors and vice versa. Helps keeping them fresh when the audience gets bored with them I guess.
So you got your hopefulls. you got your buildings and a few sets. Lets make some magic. Drag your script writers over the part of the script building that has the genre you want and after a while a brand new max 1 star script will roll out. Yes it is 1920 and till much much later post ww2 in any case you will only be able to write crap scripts. No matter what you do. No way to improve. The quality of your script is determined by the level of the script building and
You know why The Sims Online failed? No PvP. Oh and don't forget PvP doesn't mean simply including the option to engage in duels or even staged arena fights with you know balanced teams and everyone having the same equipment to balance things out.
No proper PvP is allowing level 10000 players to form groups and attack solo new players. And don't you dare call that unfair it is their fault for not been 133t enough.
IF, that is IF, ddo delivers what it promises it could be great. It all depends on how much they succeed in keeping the people like the parent poster out. DDO for the bearded PnP orhpans who couldn't give a toss about PvP or having the latest gear. Just fun.
I don't suppose anyone got a fileplanet subscription to spare?
To be nice, WoW is advertised as a simple action MMORPG. Basically RPG Light. To be nasty, WoW is for leet kiddies who think numbers are part of the alphabet.
DDO from so far as I have it followed is going to be bearded. NWN/Baldur Gate rather then Diablo. If anything it is going to be even more anal the Everquest (although hopefully in depth not endless grinding) so your typical WoW gamer is NOT the kind of customer they want.
Everquest 2 is more of a target and trust me on this, getting people away from EQ2 is easy. It is just that at the moment nothing else is available. Not everyone hates EQ2 because of its heavyness. It is more the constant bugs and huge level gap that forms the problem. Both EQ2 and WoW suffer badly from the fact that a majority of its players shoot to the highest level and are then left wondering what to do.
DDO aims (or claims too) to make the journey the goal not reaching your destination. Less focus on levelling up and more on having fun. Or to put it another way. Less people running around 'Looking for XP group'.
One of the things that still amazes me in EQ2 that I a relative new and in-frequent player can still point out fun quests to complete to players who already got characters at the highest level. DDO hopefully will be more about completing story based quests then in getting to the next level as fast as possible. Nothing ruins an MMO for me faster then being in a fun group and then allowing a new person in only to get them to wine that we could get XP so much faster if only we did X. I can only imagine they must all be teenage boys who need to be thought by their girls, sometimes the price does not go to he who finishes first. Slowdown and take your time, you may find that it is more fun that way.
So you want a reason to stop trying to get your char to level 60? Well okay how about this. Why do you want to be level 60? What is going to happen then? Are you not now enjoying yourselve at your current level? Will your char at level 60 suddenly be fun and challenging to play?
If you set yourselve a goal at least ask yourselve why you set that goal. That is my answer. How you answer it determines wether you should stick with WoW or go on the new hunting grounds. Just that DDO is hopefully not going to be about levelling up.
The entire industry is incredibly immature but then just try to buy a new car from a non-brand dealer. You know like a car supermarket where the fords and fiats are next to each other? We the consumer are always screwed. Get used to it.
I have worked for an offshoot of BT and been in england for a couple of times and worked together with brits for a long time and in general, I hate to say this, but you guys are tools.
I mean dutch people can be led by the nose like so many sheep but brits? Yuch.
The media in britain excells at creating moods and your politicians are very successfull in exploiting it. At the foundation lies the idea that britain is still of any importance. It isn't. It has no military power and it has no economic power.
Yet the media can perfectly exploit this sense of superiority and in general can perfectly install a hatred/fear of anything EU while blindly accepting any proposal the media makes you think is your own.
Yes Minister is a comedy show but the suggestion the britain joined the EU to split it up from within sure explains a lot.
It also says a lot about the EU that they have not simply kicked england out of the EU. Simple ban. No more england getting all kinds of cuts on its contributions while claiming every benefit it can.
Surely considering the hatred of the main land and the eu that would be best no?
It is some weird hybrid that is partially elected and partially appointed and partially employed (like regular bureaucrats). The elections are A usually just a popularity poll for the local goverment of the country the voter is in B have low turnout C has a lot of issues and only one way to vote.
In many ways the american system (or at least I think in california) of combining an election with a referendum on several issues is to be preffered. I think you could for instance vote both for your leader and on such issues as medical joints.
Recently the EU members held a referendum on a new constitution and it was a disaster. Especially in my own country where it became blindly obvious that the politicians of all the big parties had no connect with the feelings on the street. The prime minister even suggested that those who voted against the constitition would cause the EU to collapse and start a new world war. Really.
It was of course rejected and so far politics has reacted to it in the usual dutch fashion, stick your head in the sand and hope the herd of stampeding elephants goes away.
So the elected part of the EU does not work, the appointed part is usually, well the tv show "Yes Minister" said it all, a way to get rid of local politicians in a nice way. EU is where you go off to when you are finished locally but can't just be kicked out your party.
The hired part works for two groups who got no-one they are accountable to and are typically foreigners on high salaries meaning they live in their own society totally detached from their own countrymen and the country they live in. The sort of enviroment that leads to statements like 'Let them eat cake' (on the subject of peasants not being able to afford bread).
It is not a lack of knowledge about IT, it is a culture where the entire elite is totally detached from the real world. Any normal person could have told you that the referendum on the constitution was going to go bad. Especially in holland where the introduction of the Euro has caused a lot of grief (general belief it caused an inflation and politicians responsible countering that A that people were imagining it and B they just didn't understand.) Then there is the subject that holland pays more per citizen to the EU then any other nation and finally the subject of allowing turkey to join.
But it was pushed through wich such arguments as we must just accept it and the citizen can't comprehend it anyway and we know best.
You americans may think you got it bad but the EU is a 100 times worse. Imagine a situation where New York payed less in federal taxes then California (england pays far far less then holland) but a new law is being pushed that gives NY a far bigger vote. Would that be accepted? Well in the EU it would be california/dutch politicans arguing in favor of it.
Total disconnect with the voter and the real world. Time for the revolution.
But you got yourselve an iPod. Good for you but this hardly then locks you into Apple. You can A: sell it and get another player or B: not use iTunes. There is still the shocking capability that only the most leet people know about getting your content on a revolutionary new media called the CD and throught the magic of an CD-ripper convert and place it on your iPod.
Saying Apple has a monopoly on either music or mp3 players is like saying Ferrari has a monopoly on fast cars. Sure sure, if you think fast cars you think Ferrari but it is hardly like you got no choice. And if you were lucky to be given one as a present (anyone want to give me one?) you would hardly be locked into the Ferrari Gassoline Monopoly.
I can't stand people who use the term lock-in were there is none. You got a choice, your just to lazy or ill informed to see it. And as for looking to MS to free you from a perceived lock-in... [CENSOR] [CENSOR] [CENSOR] [CENSORRED] [CENSOR] [CENSOR] and [CENSOR][CENSOR] [CENSOR] with a [CENSOR] on [CENSOR] you [CENSOR].
WMA is usually reviewed as bad but hey it is the format MS choose and they will damn well push it down peoples throat no matter what.
As for MTV. A music provider? Since when? Reality tv show is more like it. A 24 hour advertisement channel going to sell an MS service. If you can't see the sign of the anti-christ in this you must have had your eyes removed.
I swear when I saw the headline a chill went down my spine. This will result in a shallow service that only offers the most commercial music but will be able to brainwash people with a 24/7 advertisement channel.
Sony is evil but sony is also still the company that defended the VCR. That today Sony BGM has such an unhealthy control over the hardware side is bad but MS is no different.
They are the two evil empires of the cold war but to a certain extent they also keep each other in check. Neither can go too far for fear that consumers will just flock to the other.
I frankly don't want to see MS starting to deal music, this could very well lead to MS like Sony deciding that that business segment gets to control the other segments. At the moment MS still realizes that to a certain extent they have little to gain by a total DRM system. Just like Philips has no business interest (since they sold their music division) in protecting content to the extent the music biz wants. So Philips can sell DVD rippers because they don't give a damn what you do with it just as long as you do it with theirs.
MS selling music would only increase their desire to make a DRM pc. Not good.
That the saying a trained chimp could do this job as reffering to a boring assembly line job is in fact not true. While a monkey/ape could be trained to do simple assembly work it could not do it for the 8 hour shifts that humans can without going insane.
Sure it is nice if you can see the redundancy in your actions but it doesn't seem to allow chimps to keep growing. Childeren may be more limited then chimps but something must work better since adults are clearly superior to chimps. Unless of course you go for the hitchhiker guide explanation of humans experimenting on chimps.
He can butcher it, just because it has the lucas name attached it can be butchered like nothing has been butchered before. Lets just hope it is not a prequel eh.
The problem is with iTunes wich is just another music site. The hot name brand item is the iPod and that one is selling. It is also the item where Apple makes it money, not iTunes. No I am afraid that even in the fifth generation the iPod is still a license for Apple to print money. If anything they can raise prices to take some of the pressure of their production lines. Although they probably end up selling even more.
The competition is just non-existant especially for the nano. You try to get a 4gb flash player for that price from anyone else. Only "lowpoint" for nerds like me is that the iPod does not support ogg. But then very few do, certainly non of the "big" names. iRiver was the only one I saw in local shops.
And it seems that Apple would happily lower prices on iTunes. The music labels however only want to lower song prices if they are allowed to sell new songs at even higher prices. Wich Jobs seems to think might put consumers off. Since he is the one selling overpriced mp3 players at premium prices I think we listen to him when it comes to figuring out how much you can screw the customer for eh?