"70.2 percent of Mac users online have a college degree, compared to 54.2 percent of all Web surfers."
This could have as much to do with price as anything - maybe the proles can't afford the 'Jobs Tax' attached to being an Apple user, so only people with degrees and associated rates of pay can even consider buying a Mac.
"Mac users are 58 percent more likely than the general online population to build their own website."
Oh Kent, people can use statistics to prove anything. Forfty percent of people know that. You could use the above statistic to extrapolate that Mac users are more likely to be lusers with no social life and as such have time to sit around building websites.
"8.2 percent of Americans who surf the Web at home use a Mac, even though Apple's total computer sales amount to less than 5 percent of the overall US PC market."
Hmmm... maybe it's possible that this means Apples are unsuitable for most serious business applications, thus their market share is diluted by the clone army of PCs that ARE used by business.
Ah well, thanks for giving me a good laugh, anyway.
The other alternative, in many cases, is to rush a game out after roughly hacking and hewing away large chunks of nearly-finished content. A good example of this is Deus Ex 2 - it was supposed to have all the ninja biomod powerups for your character, 27 in all I believe, and instead it has 15 or 18 and some of the coolest ones were chopped... it was also supposed to have several cool-sounding levels that were hacked out of it at the last minute. Digging around in the config files has revealed lines and lines of dialogue about non-existent locations and characters. Sad. And of course let's not even *talk* about how they didn't have time to optimise the game AT ALL for PC, with no high-res textures, ridiculously tiny levels thanks to X-box limitations, and very buggy code. So sad, DX1 is still one of the greatest games around.
Well, that's why I have two different hard drives, running XP and ME respectively. The ME one is a cut-down install with nothing but games, and it typically whips the XP install for performance (though not necessarily stability:/).
That's why it's weird though - DX2 runs like crap under XP and ME, but ok when I turn on W2K compatibility under XP. Smells like a major bug to me.
Don't listen to these damn fools, you are correct. It may interest you to read some of George Orwell's writing on the subject. He proposed that one should *never* user a more complex word or phrase when a more straightforward one would express the meaning sufficiently. This does not necessarily lead to 'simplistic' writing; on the contrary, it leads to a direct, readable style (I believe his success as an author is probably greater than that of the other posters deriding your views here).
FYI, visit http://eserver.org/langs/politics-english-language.txt to read an excellent essay by Orwell on the subject. His central hypothesis is that by clouding the clarity of writing with unneccessary or hackneyed words, it is actually possible to affect the ability of the reader and writer to think clearly and in certain ways, and therefore it is possible to use bad writing to exert political 'thought control.' It sounds a little wacky, but if you read it you will see what he means.
Especially disturbing is that his examples of terrible English, which to him are hideously exaggerated, seem perfectly normal to us because we are so swamped in marketing-management-media quasi-English swill today. I think I'm going to go and utilise my leverage for synergistic outcomes elsewhere now...
Maybe it's just me, but I've never found that to be the case. I can download pretty consistently at about 50+KB/s and still only upload at 2-3. Never seems to penalise me...
I have seen it freeze a few times, and also some other weird shit in that game - twice, in fact, I have seen damage infliced when one hit kills were turned on. It was the strangest thing, just the very edges of a grenade explosion and the character, instead of dying, lost all their health but for one bar. Very strange. Allegations of cheating were rampant.
There was that freakin train level, and you ended up coming into the last carriage and having about 1.5 seconds to kill the person holding someone hostage, and if you missed *bam* it was all over after one of the most insanely hard levels imaginable... and if you don't miss, you get stuck in the carriage and have to use your laser watch to escape. It took me SO LONG to finish that on 00 agent, I don't think I can ever play it again.
The moonraker and baron samedi bonus levels were quite cool if challenging.
Let me preface this by saying that I am an avid FPSer and I have played Quake 1, UT (the original) and QIII very extensively, and more recently Counter Strike, MOHAA and similar on-line games. I spend a lot of time playing QIII on a LAN.
Let me also say that Goldeneye is, along with Quake III, the game I have had the most fun playing in a multiplayer FPS environment. With all due respect I must suggest that if you felt that it wasn't a serious FPS, it may have been due to the company you kept. I played Goldeneye obsessively for about 4 years with three other guys who were all big FPS players too. We knew every nook, every cranny, every angle to bounce a grenade, the sound of every door, the likelihood of scoring a kill with every weapon. It became too impossibly tense to play with just two people, because we were all within such a narrow band of skill and knowledge that the score would invariably end up at 9-10 or in many cases 10-10 in deathmatches. We played so many tense games with prox mines, so many crazy grenade launcher shootouts, so many RCP-90 bullet-fests that it's actually kinda disturbing.
Granted, the single player levels were at times completely impossibly hard. Granted, some of the multiplayer levels weren't great. Granted, the graphics are poor by PC standards. But some of the levels were simply glorious - stack, archives, temple, facility - wonderful, wonderful levels with just the right distribution of weapons and spawn points. In a level like the stack, the simple graphics were actually important to the gameplay as they let you see your opponent even in blocky Nintendovision. I'll never forget the enraged screams of newbies playing with us in hideous 20-19-0-0 slaughters of the innocents; the glory of a perfect grenade lob in the temple, dropping on the victim from seemingly out of nowhere (id should learn from the Goldeneye grenade launcher, what a weapon); the joys of rampant screen cheating or shooting blind using the radar.
I must also ask - did you play the standard deathmatch, or one-hit kills? We decided to try the latter early on, and from that day forth there was never any question of which we would play. With one hit deaths the interesting variations of the different weapons really becomes a factor; grenades and rockets become altogether more tricky; and the weapons capable of shooting through walls and doors vastly more important. In this mode the game also showed what a great controller the N64 controller really is: in facility we were able to hit specific letters in the warning signs at the other end of the corridoor using the magnum.
As time has passed (and the original gang of Goldeneye or 'bond-age' freaks has dispersed) I play it less and less; nonetheless, I would trade Far Cry, UT2K3, MOHAA, Counterstrike, all of them, for Goldeneye. Ah, memories.
Actually, I have just cracked it I think... for some reason, if I run in 'Windows 2000 compatability mode' the game runs a hell of a lot better. This is really weird, especially as it runs like a dog under XP and ME...
Anyway, I just got acceptable frame rates, 1280x1024, full lights, full shadows, AA turned on. Weird as hell.
Are you serious? I'm running an Athlon 2000+, 512 Megs of Corsair DDR RAM in double pumped configuration, Radeon 9700 with 128 megs... and for me it absolutely chugs along, maybe 20 fps at 800x600, shadows and lighting on low, bloom off.
Am I crazy? My system runs quake III at like 500 fps... in all seriousness, it runs everything else absolutely fine, Far Cry runs a treat at 1024x768 with everything cranked, Rainbow Six 3 is great at 1280x1024 (which is what I run most things at). DX2 is seriously fucked up IMHO... sometimes when I look around and I'm in a big open area it drops to single digits on the fps count.
Well, I know what you're saying - a lot of those machines will be for business etc. etc.
I guess my point was that even if only a third or fewer were home machines and of those say 1/3 are wiped out by shitty graphics cards etc., that still leaves a potential market of millions of machines capable of playing games reasonably.
And, as a PC and console owner and player, I don't know many 'serious' gamers who would choose a console over a PC. I suspect most people who do so can't afford a PC or couldn't be bothered with the hassle of keeping up to date. Despite the IGN/Gamespot propaganda, consoles are still a world away from the PC in terms of visuals, controls, and quality of games.
I must disagree, in the friendliest possible way. See reply to parent, above.
PC sales in 2003 were 168.9 MILLION units: http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,84 05079%5e15306%5e%5enbv%5e,00.html . Even back at the start of last year reasonably muscular processors were standard, and by the middle of the year the ATi/nVidia war had sent the price of decent-ish video cards crashing. Right now you would probably struggle to find a mainstream PC with less than 256 megs of ram and a 2GHz processor. My folks got a new PC last year with the lowest end GeForce FX - and it runs most games like a dream.
IMHO there are oodles of PCs that can run newer games around. Let's not forget, too, that most of these monster rigs are used to play stuff at max detail, max textures, 1600x1200 hyper resolution (I know, I have one). For the average home user a game running at 800x600 is still walloping anything on a TV screen for detail and clarity.
Apple may finally have released something with a bit of oomph, but they are hardly gonna dominate the games industry.
I agree to a certain extend with your main thesis, though: that high-end gamers drive the market along. Unfortunately this means games like Deus Ex 2 and Doom III will run like a slideshow on any normal machine. Personally I wish each level of technology was given more time to mature, so that we could see the modern equivalent of running Wolfenstein on a 286...
"There must be about as many PC's that can actually handle this game as there are macs."
Uh...huh.
Maybe you should take a look at the high end PC market some time? An insane number of top of the line video cards, memory modules, processors and motherboards are available and they sell like hotcakes. Because PCs are far less generational than Macs there is a tendency for a lot of people to gradually upgrade and thus keep relatively up to date in terms of hardware.
Sorry to ruin the illusion but at a totally uneducated guess I would put money on the number of PCs worldwide that can run this game being in a ratio of at least 50:1 to the number of Macs.
I know it's not underpowered, I was kidding around about the general perception. I mean, relative to the X-Box it's bad for polys, good for textures. I'm happy with it.
Also, I know what Nintendo are like, and indeed this was actually part of my semi-ironic comparison with Apple, who are the most monopolistic pimps on the face of the earth. Nintendo's own reluctance to accept competition has and will cost them very dearly.
As for MS... I do take a great deal of satisfaction in denying them money. Mainly because the X-Box is an ok system that has been marketed down the throats of millions of fanboy 12 year olds using money obtained from drug dealing or worse, selling copies of Windows.
Sony I don't dislike as much and I like their design ethos, but the PS2 is a heaving load of junk and it pisses me off that so many pathetic 16 year olds are so overcome by the kewl-factor that the PS2 routinely outsells two much better consoles.
Interesting that you mention the hard drive - I would say the biggest weakness the GC had is that it can't play DVDs. I think this point is oft overlooked in the analysis of why Nintendo is losing market share steadily (well, until recently). When the PS2 came out, DVD was not ubiquitous and I know that a lot of people got it because they thought the DVD playback was a cool feature.
It makes me sad though... because I look at Generals. I look at Emperor: Battle for Dune. I look at Ground Control. And they all suck compared to TA. Seriously - I mean, I have/had all of these and they all blow.
Generals is the worst of all. The buildings take up a quarter of the screen, and you can't zoom out far enough to make any tactical decisions. The performance is appalling even on a fast system. The maps are tiny. The units are unbalanced and there are so few to choose from that the whole game is just Russian roulette. I have seen a single guy with a rocket launcher beat a large tank (note to EA: TANK SHELLS KILL PEOPLE EVEN FASTER THAN THEY KILL OTHER TANKS). The interface is unintuitive and cluttered beyond belief. The command structure is weak and single layered.
Now if only we could have more TA... build that, that, ten of those, set that to guard this, set that to patrol here, put this behind that to protect it... aaahhh....
Some of my favourite features: - queuing up the building of buildings - the ability to get construction vehicles to guard each other or to guard factories and thereby increase the speed of production - the ability to set patrol routes (why is this so hard, EA?) - the ability to get units to guard other units (again... EA?) - the cool ships (EA???) - the little seperately animated guns on all the units
You should get it. It's on ebay quite often, so try there. Seriously, it is STILL the best RTS ever. And yes, I have Generals. I would say Red Alert/RA2 are a close second.
- a reasonably powerful games console - the satisfaction of not supporting M$ or $ony - the pleasure of an object of unusual grace and beauty - a console 1/100th the size of an X-Box controller - Pikmin, Metroid Prime, F-Zero, Monkey Ball - a large dose of Japano-chic
And for all you Apple fanboys/girls out there, come on, Nintendo couldn't be any more like Apple:
- poses as heroic independent company adrift in a sea of evil corporate competitors - main executives have funny names and wear silly clothes - console is underpowered but 'easier to use' - designers actually thought about what the final product would look like - relatively fewer titles available, but the ones you can get are 'better' - a variety of brightly coloured designs to choose from - you can connect an even smaller, more expensive object to the main system for an enhanced experience
I know, apparently we don't 'need' a bill of rights because we already 'have' rights. Seems to be missing the point.
SMH polls are unfortunately highly likely to reflect a Labor/Green perspective, so should be taken with a heavy grain of salt... we'll see what newspoll and Roy Morgan have to say on the subject, they should be revealing.
Mainly that right now Howard would lose quite convincingly. But more importantly, because in a DD election all Senate seats are up for election, rather than the usual half, so it takes 1/2 the votes to score a seat in the upper house. That means that there is a great likelihood that the Greens would take a significant number of seats and hold the balance of power.
Basically, unless there is a very compelling reason to call a DD the electorate is likely to punish the govt. for calling one as a political maneuver.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of us have little desire to join you...
"70.2 percent of Mac users online have a college degree, compared to 54.2 percent of all Web surfers."
This could have as much to do with price as anything - maybe the proles can't afford the 'Jobs Tax' attached to being an Apple user, so only people with degrees and associated rates of pay can even consider buying a Mac.
"Mac users are 58 percent more likely than the general online population to build their own website."
Oh Kent, people can use statistics to prove anything. Forfty percent of people know that. You could use the above statistic to extrapolate that Mac users are more likely to be lusers with no social life and as such have time to sit around building websites.
"8.2 percent of Americans who surf the Web at home use a Mac, even though Apple's total computer sales amount to less than 5 percent of the overall US PC market."
Hmmm... maybe it's possible that this means Apples are unsuitable for most serious business applications, thus their market share is diluted by the clone army of PCs that ARE used by business.
Ah well, thanks for giving me a good laugh, anyway.
The other alternative, in many cases, is to rush a game out after roughly hacking and hewing away large chunks of nearly-finished content. A good example of this is Deus Ex 2 - it was supposed to have all the ninja biomod powerups for your character, 27 in all I believe, and instead it has 15 or 18 and some of the coolest ones were chopped... it was also supposed to have several cool-sounding levels that were hacked out of it at the last minute. Digging around in the config files has revealed lines and lines of dialogue about non-existent locations and characters. Sad. And of course let's not even *talk* about how they didn't have time to optimise the game AT ALL for PC, with no high-res textures, ridiculously tiny levels thanks to X-box limitations, and very buggy code. So sad, DX1 is still one of the greatest games around.
Well, that's why I have two different hard drives, running XP and ME respectively. The ME one is a cut-down install with nothing but games, and it typically whips the XP install for performance (though not necessarily stability :/).
That's why it's weird though - DX2 runs like crap under XP and ME, but ok when I turn on W2K compatibility under XP. Smells like a major bug to me.
Don't listen to these damn fools, you are correct. It may interest you to read some of George Orwell's writing on the subject. He proposed that one should *never* user a more complex word or phrase when a more straightforward one would express the meaning sufficiently. This does not necessarily lead to 'simplistic' writing; on the contrary, it leads to a direct, readable style (I believe his success as an author is probably greater than that of the other posters deriding your views here).
e .txt to read an excellent essay by Orwell on the subject. His central hypothesis is that by clouding the clarity of writing with unneccessary or hackneyed words, it is actually possible to affect the ability of the reader and writer to think clearly and in certain ways, and therefore it is possible to use bad writing to exert political 'thought control.' It sounds a little wacky, but if you read it you will see what he means.
FYI, visit http://eserver.org/langs/politics-english-languag
Especially disturbing is that his examples of terrible English, which to him are hideously exaggerated, seem perfectly normal to us because we are so swamped in marketing-management-media quasi-English swill today. I think I'm going to go and utilise my leverage for synergistic outcomes elsewhere now...
"I think most people would agree it's not a good idea to use a bittorrent file that wasn't from a trusted source."
Are you kidding? All the interesting stuff is from non-trusted sources!
Maybe it's just me, but I've never found that to be the case. I can download pretty consistently at about 50+KB/s and still only upload at 2-3. Never seems to penalise me...
I have seen it freeze a few times, and also some other weird shit in that game - twice, in fact, I have seen damage infliced when one hit kills were turned on. It was the strangest thing, just the very edges of a grenade explosion and the character, instead of dying, lost all their health but for one bar. Very strange. Allegations of cheating were rampant.
There was that freakin train level, and you ended up coming into the last carriage and having about 1.5 seconds to kill the person holding someone hostage, and if you missed *bam* it was all over after one of the most insanely hard levels imaginable... and if you don't miss, you get stuck in the carriage and have to use your laser watch to escape. It took me SO LONG to finish that on 00 agent, I don't think I can ever play it again.
The moonraker and baron samedi bonus levels were quite cool if challenging.
Let me preface this by saying that I am an avid FPSer and I have played Quake 1, UT (the original) and QIII very extensively, and more recently Counter Strike, MOHAA and similar on-line games. I spend a lot of time playing QIII on a LAN.
Let me also say that Goldeneye is, along with Quake III, the game I have had the most fun playing in a multiplayer FPS environment. With all due respect I must suggest that if you felt that it wasn't a serious FPS, it may have been due to the company you kept. I played Goldeneye obsessively for about 4 years with three other guys who were all big FPS players too. We knew every nook, every cranny, every angle to bounce a grenade, the sound of every door, the likelihood of scoring a kill with every weapon. It became too impossibly tense to play with just two people, because we were all within such a narrow band of skill and knowledge that the score would invariably end up at 9-10 or in many cases 10-10 in deathmatches. We played so many tense games with prox mines, so many crazy grenade launcher shootouts, so many RCP-90 bullet-fests that it's actually kinda disturbing.
Granted, the single player levels were at times completely impossibly hard. Granted, some of the multiplayer levels weren't great. Granted, the graphics are poor by PC standards. But some of the levels were simply glorious - stack, archives, temple, facility - wonderful, wonderful levels with just the right distribution of weapons and spawn points. In a level like the stack, the simple graphics were actually important to the gameplay as they let you see your opponent even in blocky Nintendovision. I'll never forget the enraged screams of newbies playing with us in hideous 20-19-0-0 slaughters of the innocents; the glory of a perfect grenade lob in the temple, dropping on the victim from seemingly out of nowhere (id should learn from the Goldeneye grenade launcher, what a weapon); the joys of rampant screen cheating or shooting blind using the radar.
I must also ask - did you play the standard deathmatch, or one-hit kills? We decided to try the latter early on, and from that day forth there was never any question of which we would play. With one hit deaths the interesting variations of the different weapons really becomes a factor; grenades and rockets become altogether more tricky; and the weapons capable of shooting through walls and doors vastly more important. In this mode the game also showed what a great controller the N64 controller really is: in facility we were able to hit specific letters in the warning signs at the other end of the corridoor using the magnum.
As time has passed (and the original gang of Goldeneye or 'bond-age' freaks has dispersed) I play it less and less; nonetheless, I would trade Far Cry, UT2K3, MOHAA, Counterstrike, all of them, for Goldeneye. Ah, memories.
Thus endeth the rantings.
Actually, I have just cracked it I think... for some reason, if I run in 'Windows 2000 compatability mode' the game runs a hell of a lot better. This is really weird, especially as it runs like a dog under XP and ME...
Anyway, I just got acceptable frame rates, 1280x1024, full lights, full shadows, AA turned on. Weird as hell.
Are you serious? I'm running an Athlon 2000+, 512 Megs of Corsair DDR RAM in double pumped configuration, Radeon 9700 with 128 megs... and for me it absolutely chugs along, maybe 20 fps at 800x600, shadows and lighting on low, bloom off.
Am I crazy? My system runs quake III at like 500 fps... in all seriousness, it runs everything else absolutely fine, Far Cry runs a treat at 1024x768 with everything cranked, Rainbow Six 3 is great at 1280x1024 (which is what I run most things at). DX2 is seriously fucked up IMHO... sometimes when I look around and I'm in a big open area it drops to single digits on the fps count.
Well, I know what you're saying - a lot of those machines will be for business etc. etc.
I guess my point was that even if only a third or fewer were home machines and of those say 1/3 are wiped out by shitty graphics cards etc., that still leaves a potential market of millions of machines capable of playing games reasonably.
And, as a PC and console owner and player, I don't know many 'serious' gamers who would choose a console over a PC. I suspect most people who do so can't afford a PC or couldn't be bothered with the hassle of keeping up to date. Despite the IGN/Gamespot propaganda, consoles are still a world away from the PC in terms of visuals, controls, and quality of games.
That there will be a discount for UT2K3? I vaguely remember hearing something about this...
I must disagree, in the friendliest possible way. See reply to parent, above.
4 05079%5e15306%5e%5enbv%5e,00.html . Even back at the start of last year reasonably muscular processors were standard, and by the middle of the year the ATi/nVidia war had sent the price of decent-ish video cards crashing. Right now you would probably struggle to find a mainstream PC with less than 256 megs of ram and a 2GHz processor. My folks got a new PC last year with the lowest end GeForce FX - and it runs most games like a dream.
PC sales in 2003 were 168.9 MILLION units: http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,8
IMHO there are oodles of PCs that can run newer games around. Let's not forget, too, that most of these monster rigs are used to play stuff at max detail, max textures, 1600x1200 hyper resolution (I know, I have one). For the average home user a game running at 800x600 is still walloping anything on a TV screen for detail and clarity.
Apple may finally have released something with a bit of oomph, but they are hardly gonna dominate the games industry.
I agree to a certain extend with your main thesis, though: that high-end gamers drive the market along. Unfortunately this means games like Deus Ex 2 and Doom III will run like a slideshow on any normal machine. Personally I wish each level of technology was given more time to mature, so that we could see the modern equivalent of running Wolfenstein on a 286...
"There must be about as many PC's that can actually handle this game as there are macs."
Uh...huh.
Maybe you should take a look at the high end PC market some time? An insane number of top of the line video cards, memory modules, processors and motherboards are available and they sell like hotcakes. Because PCs are far less generational than Macs there is a tendency for a lot of people to gradually upgrade and thus keep relatively up to date in terms of hardware.
Sorry to ruin the illusion but at a totally uneducated guess I would put money on the number of PCs worldwide that can run this game being in a ratio of at least 50:1 to the number of Macs.
"maybe i'm just a playstation snob"
Are you serious? The PS2 controller has got to be one of the worst ever... only eclipsed my MS's monolith.
I just wish Nintendo had stuck closer to the N64 design - now *that* was a controller.
Hey, relaxxx bloke.
I know it's not underpowered, I was kidding around about the general perception. I mean, relative to the X-Box it's bad for polys, good for textures. I'm happy with it.
Also, I know what Nintendo are like, and indeed this was actually part of my semi-ironic comparison with Apple, who are the most monopolistic pimps on the face of the earth. Nintendo's own reluctance to accept competition has and will cost them very dearly.
As for MS... I do take a great deal of satisfaction in denying them money. Mainly because the X-Box is an ok system that has been marketed down the throats of millions of fanboy 12 year olds using money obtained from drug dealing or worse, selling copies of Windows.
Sony I don't dislike as much and I like their design ethos, but the PS2 is a heaving load of junk and it pisses me off that so many pathetic 16 year olds are so overcome by the kewl-factor that the PS2 routinely outsells two much better consoles.
Interesting that you mention the hard drive - I would say the biggest weakness the GC had is that it can't play DVDs. I think this point is oft overlooked in the analysis of why Nintendo is losing market share steadily (well, until recently). When the PS2 came out, DVD was not ubiquitous and I know that a lot of people got it because they thought the DVD playback was a cool feature.
Ah, sweet TA. Is there any finer RTS?
It makes me sad though... because I look at Generals. I look at Emperor: Battle for Dune. I look at Ground Control. And they all suck compared to TA. Seriously - I mean, I have/had all of these and they all blow.
Generals is the worst of all. The buildings take up a quarter of the screen, and you can't zoom out far enough to make any tactical decisions. The performance is appalling even on a fast system. The maps are tiny. The units are unbalanced and there are so few to choose from that the whole game is just Russian roulette. I have seen a single guy with a rocket launcher beat a large tank (note to EA: TANK SHELLS KILL PEOPLE EVEN FASTER THAN THEY KILL OTHER TANKS). The interface is unintuitive and cluttered beyond belief. The command structure is weak and single layered.
Now if only we could have more TA... build that, that, ten of those, set that to guard this, set that to patrol here, put this behind that to protect it... aaahhh....
Some of my favourite features:
- queuing up the building of buildings
- the ability to get construction vehicles to guard each other or to guard factories and thereby increase the speed of production
- the ability to set patrol routes (why is this so hard, EA?)
- the ability to get units to guard other units (again... EA?)
- the cool ships (EA???)
- the little seperately animated guns on all the units
You should get it. It's on ebay quite often, so try there. Seriously, it is STILL the best RTS ever. And yes, I have Generals. I would say Red Alert/RA2 are a close second.
I mean, seriously, for $100 you get:
- a reasonably powerful games console
- the satisfaction of not supporting M$ or $ony
- the pleasure of an object of unusual grace and beauty
- a console 1/100th the size of an X-Box controller
- Pikmin, Metroid Prime, F-Zero, Monkey Ball
- a large dose of Japano-chic
And for all you Apple fanboys/girls out there, come on, Nintendo couldn't be any more like Apple:
- poses as heroic independent company adrift in a sea of evil corporate competitors
- main executives have funny names and wear silly clothes
- console is underpowered but 'easier to use'
- designers actually thought about what the final product would look like
- relatively fewer titles available, but the ones you can get are 'better'
- a variety of brightly coloured designs to choose from
- you can connect an even smaller, more expensive object to the main system for an enhanced experience
I know, apparently we don't 'need' a bill of rights because we already 'have' rights. Seems to be missing the point.
SMH polls are unfortunately highly likely to reflect a Labor/Green perspective, so should be taken with a heavy grain of salt... we'll see what newspoll and Roy Morgan have to say on the subject, they should be revealing.
For several reasons.
Mainly that right now Howard would lose quite convincingly. But more importantly, because in a DD election all Senate seats are up for election, rather than the usual half, so it takes 1/2 the votes to score a seat in the upper house. That means that there is a great likelihood that the Greens would take a significant number of seats and hold the balance of power.
Basically, unless there is a very compelling reason to call a DD the electorate is likely to punish the govt. for calling one as a political maneuver.
Wow, it's Red Alert 2! It's all coming true!
"WARNING! Weather control device detected!"
"WARNING! Catastrophic lightning storm created!"
Right, so indirectly they were saying that it is the law to vote correctly. Which is bs, but anyway.