My gut instinct, or rather hope, is the thing will come with enough mass storage to handle a lot of game saves and fulfill the purpose of the hd in the current xbox as far as streaming and other things are concerned. There are rumors that flash storage will be used, and this kind of makes sense as a smaller, 1-2GB drive in the base unit. That way, you can still use tricks like hd streaming, you can still expect that everyone can save to the HD, you can still (potentially) support backwards compatibility, and you can still expect that everyone can do custom soundtracks (and you have a place built in for settings like live accounts and what not).
Then the HD add-on really only becomes important when you either want to load up a bunch more soundtracks or you want the box to become more of a media server, storing a lot of content or perhaps doing tivo-like stuff. That way, the HD isn't an "option" doomed to failure because of lack of dev support, but actually a real value-add feature that makes you box do entirely new things. Note that both Sony and MS are rabidly pursuing that whole tivo/media center angle in the next generation.
The only question I have about using flash storage in the base unit is the speed of storage. I don't know how fast flash storage is in comparison to a low-end hard drive like the one in the box now. If it's a lot slower, then maybe the base unit is a bit more limited, at least as far as streaming and backwards compatibility are concerned.
I am SO sick of the misguided impression that Nintendo is some saintly group of craftsmen chugging along, doing their work like a bunch of elves cobbling shoes, whose artistry is lost in a world where people buy sweatshop shoes from Southeast Asia.
Nintendo is one of the most mercenary, profit-driven companies out there. Look at their history (including when they were the monopoly and they "owned the market"). Has Sony or MS ever made anything as heinously market-driven and self-serving as "The Wizard"? What about shoving Pokemon down kids throats, and releasing every Pokemon game in 2 different versions, just to get kids to get their parents to by the same game twice? What about the relentless marketing of sequels? What about the fact that Nintendo turned down Sony's original overtures to jointly product a "playstation" because they didn't want to turn over any part of the market? What about the ruthless way they treated third party developers throughout their history, especially when they completely controlled the market?
Please do not confuse the fact that Nintendo is smart enough to realize that good games will encourage loyalty and thus profit with some sort of actual desire to do right by gamers. Also, recognize that Nintendo is lucky enough to employ one of the most brilliant game designers in history (Miyamoto), and that without him, they would have done as well financially but the games would not have been as good.
Nintendo is a ruthless competitor and it backfired on them in the last generation. Now that they're playing catch up, everyone wants to look on them with rose colored glasses and see them as some sort of boutique developer. But they are a console maker through and through, churning out and rehashing crap and playing hardball just like any other company.
If you look at it in the long run, then you can't say that the xbox was a bust. Because they've broken even finally, they've established a brand name, and they have a good foothold in the next generation. Whether they beat Sony is debatable, but they will have a large foothold, and that's a huge market to get into.
So if you were hoping to bash MS with their lack of ability to see the long term (not saying you were!), then it doesn't really work.
Repeat after me: that's a code name for internal use that will never see the light of day.
Just like Fable was Project Ego.
Just like Java was Oak.
Just like every other major project embarked on by a big company has a code name for internal use so people can talk about and refer to their project.
Enough with the Xenon or 360 talk by everyone who thinks they know something the rest of us don't. No one knows what the final retail name will be yet. Even Microsoft doesn't. Anyone who says otherwise is just guessing and has an inflated opinion of his/her "inside knowledge".
When you can remember getting excited about Combat and Air/Sea Battle on the Atari 2600, and when you remember looking forward to Atari Age magazine for info on the new Raiders of the Lost Ark game, then you're an old man.
That's actually not true about the xbox. At the time of xbox launch, the xbox sported an nvidia chipset that was a generation ahead of their most powerful PC card at the time. Although the processor was a mid-to-low range processor compared to PCs at the time, it was the graphics chip that was to handle most of the heavy lifting. Sure, given the memory and the processor, the xbox couldn't pump out frame rates in the 3 figures, but it didn't have to because of the resolution it was targeting. But it could do a lot of really nifty things that were just starting to come into the PC world, like pixel shading. Also, the audio chip in the xbox was far and away better than anything on the market at the time. No PC audio card at the time could do real-time Dolby Digital processing. Xbox could. Of course, that's changed in the interim, but at the time, it really was a good bit ahead of PCs, at the targeted resolutions.
Years ago I was working a job that I had been laid off from, but had a month to go. They were cool about letting me just hang out in the back room and work on the computer. This was before there was much to read on the internet, so I was stuck playing Solitaire on Windows 3.1. I played so much that when I went outside to get lunch or go home, I kept envisioning stacking women in front of men, then men in front of women, to get the whole Jack-Queen-King thing going. Frightening.
As I recall, one of the biggest problems with MS software is their insistence on backward compatibility. WHy do you think Win95 and its devil spawn blew so much? Because they were backwards compatible with DOS.
Um, Tecmo bowl had NFL players and teams. Part of the fun was getting to play as Bo Jackson, who was the fastest player in the game.
Re:Effects on the future of [Actors and actresses]
on
Cell Workstations in 2005
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well said. I think a lot of people watch ET and hear about the huge salaries and think, damn, all those actors are overpaid! What they don't realize is that about 1% of all actors make enough from acting to live on.
More to the point, it's not as if acting is the biggest expense on a movie. Most movies, the film stock alone costs more than most of the actors. When a film does have a huge actor salary, it's for a reason. The producers sign Julia Roberts for $20million because they know that her name alone will make them more than that at the box office. So bringing in a whole CGI team to replace the actors doesn't exactly sound like a cost-effective measure to me, since you'd need a few people plus a lot of equipment to do the work of one actor. I'm not even going to get into what acting actually involves and how you can't just program it, because if I have to argue that point with anyone, it's a waste of time.
The urban dictionary is wrong. xbox is a special kind of box, and the plural for box is "boxes", not "boxen". The use of the word "xboxen" is an irritating attempt by people to be clever. If Microsoft released a new form of hay cart transportation based on the ox, and called it the xb-ox, then its plural would be xboxen.
Re:I've never understood the obsession with Halo
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 1
Awesome point. Great. Way to invalidate anything I said. Selling a few million copies must mean it's a bad game.
If you don't like the game, that's fine, but if you can't understand that others might, and for valid reasons, then I don't know what to say. Enjoy wearing the blinders. I hope your side wins.
Re:I've never understood the obsession with Halo
on
Halo 2 Reviews
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Um, that's about as poorly justified a statement as you could possibly make. Do you have some sort of information on Halo demographics that the rest of us don't? That's pure conjecture on your part.
I've been playing FPS games since the first time I got a copy of the three-floppy shareware of Doom back in 93. Sorry, my "street-cred" doesn't reach back the year before to Wolfenstein. I've played them all, from the early doom clones to the later quake clones and so on and so forth. For most of the 90s I was exclusively a pc gamer, since none of the consoles at the time interested me. But this latest generation did, and Halo is by far my favorite game on the consoles.
It's appeal lay in the fact that it does what it does extremely well. It is a very polished game, and plays exceedingly well on xbox. It can appeal to PC gamers and console gamers alike because it's very well done. To claim that only non-pc players would like it, or to imply that it's somehow FPS gaming on training wheels, is simply granting yourself far too much credit as a gamer. As if somehow you know the "real deal" while the rest of the sheep just follow trends. Bullshit. People recognize a good game when they see it, and therein lay its popularity.
And before you spend too much time on your PC gamer high horse, remember that PC games caught on in popularity well after console games (atari, intellivision, and later, nintendo). Any attempt to see PC gaming as a precursor to the more "childish" console gaming just shows a lack of understanding about the history of videogames.
Maybe you didn't think it was a good game, or a good console shooter, but a lot of people did. Hence, its popularity.
A lot of people tend to mistake their own opinion for "the truth". Judging games is about as subjective an activity as could be imagined, so please, recognize that before making blanket statements. "I didn't think it was a good game" is as true a statement as you could make. "Was it a good game? No." is just pissing in the wind.
There's a lot of talk about MS releasing early to gain a foothold. There's a side of this whole thing that makes me think this is a bad move. Besides the fact that a year early release won't necessarily help that much, there's the whole disc format issue. One of the main reasons the PS2 did so well, especially in comparison to the dreamcast, was its incorporation of a DVD drive. As DVD was taking off, PS2 came with one for free. That convinced a lot of people to pick one up when otherwise they might not have.
Now we have the HD format wars brewing. Sony is pushing for BluRay, and all indications are that the PS3 will be using it. There's no word yet on which format (blu ray or HDDVD) the xbox 2 will support, or even if it will support an HD format.
This is going to be a key success factor, IMHO. Now that HD-ready tvs are becoming more widespread, people will start to get eager to use them for things besides games and TV. HD DVD, in some format, will take off, only because people will already have the TVs for it. I don't know if people will be super-eager to buy an HD DVD player right off the bat, but if they can get one for free with a game machine, they'll probably be like that. In fact, my main point is that if one game machine offers an HD DVD player for free and another doesn't, that's a HUGE selling point. Maybe not in 2005 but definitely in 2006 and 2007.
For that reason, I think it's a mistake for MS to release early without either understanding which HD format will succeed or waiting for the drives themselves to come down in price.
True, a lot is learned, but some things are easier to learn than others. That's why common GUI metaphors, despite their shortcomings, are easier to learn than text commands. People have real world experience moving files into folders and into cabinets, so a drag-and-drop UI that works with those as abstractions is not as far removed from their experience as the set of commands necessary to do the equivalent from a terminal window.
Good interface design does not involve bludgeoning users into submission with unintuitive commands until the commands become second nature. It involves working with how people actually learn and how they interact with things. Often, it involves metaphors drawn against experiences or interactions that are already common. These experiences may have been learned rather than intrinsic; as you said, the only instrinsically intuitive interface is the nipple.
The point is that some things are more intuitive than others either because they are common experiences or they are instinctive like nipples. Unix commands are neither to anyone except developers and administrators. They could be learned but because they're not based on anything beyond the actual nuts and bolts of how computers work internally (eg. file system commands based on how a filesystem works rather than how a person might use it), the vast computing majority won't have any common experience with them, and shouldn't have to adapt themselves to them.
Again, you don't have to be a mechanic to drive a car, and you shouldn't have to know how filesystems are structured or other computing internals to use a computer.
No, the proper analogy is you don't need to be a mechanic to drive a car. The operation of a car isn't complex, just the maintenance.
Computers have an advantage over cars in that their maintenance can be automated, allowing most end users the luxury of just working the controls without worrying about the underpinnings. Or at least, that's how it should be. For most, not all, users.
held linux back on the desktop i mean. I would love for Linux to be a viable alternative to linux on the desktop. But it's not there yet. I'm not talking about embedded systems but personal computer use. Server uptime is great but most people aren't running servers. And if they use anything based on a server, it's usually through some sort of front end (like a web page) that hide what the server is doing.
Despite what you may think, "your average joe" is the computer market. There are far more of them then there are/.ers. Your disdain for them is exactly what I meant by tech elitism. If Linux is going to have a chance on the desktop to give the world another competitor (and in the process improve the overall personal computing experience for everyone), then that kind of bullshit has to be recognized for what it is: snobbery.
My parents can use a radio because radio interface design has evolved to where it's intuitive. Some elements of computer design are evolving that way as well, but linux/unix is as far from the other side of the spectrum as can be imagined. For a developer or admin who is used to it, it makes sense, but even then there was a learning curve somewhere. For the everyday user, who despite what everyone on/. thinks are the people who drive "desktop domination", it makes little to no sense at all.
The unixes expect people to think like them rather than the other way around. I shouldn't have to think like a radio to use one; I shouldn't have to think like a car to use one; I shouldn't have to think like a toilet to use one; and the same holds true for computers. Give me a couple of common interfacing metaphors and I'm off and running. I shouldn't have to care what's going on underneath to perform useful everyday functions. But if i need to do more, it would be great to have that ability.
That's what I like so much about Apple's OSX. Its interface is designed around how people, not computers, think. And you still have the option of digging in underneath the covers to do more detailed things when you need to.
Slashdot Mirror
My gut instinct, or rather hope, is the thing will come with enough mass storage to handle a lot of game saves and fulfill the purpose of the hd in the current xbox as far as streaming and other things are concerned. There are rumors that flash storage will be used, and this kind of makes sense as a smaller, 1-2GB drive in the base unit. That way, you can still use tricks like hd streaming, you can still expect that everyone can save to the HD, you can still (potentially) support backwards compatibility, and you can still expect that everyone can do custom soundtracks (and you have a place built in for settings like live accounts and what not).
Then the HD add-on really only becomes important when you either want to load up a bunch more soundtracks or you want the box to become more of a media server, storing a lot of content or perhaps doing tivo-like stuff. That way, the HD isn't an "option" doomed to failure because of lack of dev support, but actually a real value-add feature that makes you box do entirely new things. Note that both Sony and MS are rabidly pursuing that whole tivo/media center angle in the next generation.
The only question I have about using flash storage in the base unit is the speed of storage. I don't know how fast flash storage is in comparison to a low-end hard drive like the one in the box now. If it's a lot slower, then maybe the base unit is a bit more limited, at least as far as streaming and backwards compatibility are concerned.
um, whose controller cable's are longer than the piss-poor xbox's?
That's right, no one's. They're the longest controller cables on the market.
I'm sure lengthening the controller cables will reduce tangling issues, too.
The ps2 will only support 5.1 in cut scenes. It cannot do 5.1 realtime. That's a fact.
My kids are going to play Halo and Splinter Cell and then go out and beat up your kids.
WHAT?!!??!
I am SO sick of the misguided impression that Nintendo is some saintly group of craftsmen chugging along, doing their work like a bunch of elves cobbling shoes, whose artistry is lost in a world where people buy sweatshop shoes from Southeast Asia.
Nintendo is one of the most mercenary, profit-driven companies out there. Look at their history (including when they were the monopoly and they "owned the market"). Has Sony or MS ever made anything as heinously market-driven and self-serving as "The Wizard"? What about shoving Pokemon down kids throats, and releasing every Pokemon game in 2 different versions, just to get kids to get their parents to by the same game twice? What about the relentless marketing of sequels? What about the fact that Nintendo turned down Sony's original overtures to jointly product a "playstation" because they didn't want to turn over any part of the market? What about the ruthless way they treated third party developers throughout their history, especially when they completely controlled the market?
Please do not confuse the fact that Nintendo is smart enough to realize that good games will encourage loyalty and thus profit with some sort of actual desire to do right by gamers. Also, recognize that Nintendo is lucky enough to employ one of the most brilliant game designers in history (Miyamoto), and that without him, they would have done as well financially but the games would not have been as good.
Nintendo is a ruthless competitor and it backfired on them in the last generation. Now that they're playing catch up, everyone wants to look on them with rose colored glasses and see them as some sort of boutique developer. But they are a console maker through and through, churning out and rehashing crap and playing hardball just like any other company.
If you look at it in the long run, then you can't say that the xbox was a bust. Because they've broken even finally, they've established a brand name, and they have a good foothold in the next generation. Whether they beat Sony is debatable, but they will have a large foothold, and that's a huge market to get into.
So if you were hoping to bash MS with their lack of ability to see the long term (not saying you were!), then it doesn't really work.
Repeat after me: that's a code name for internal use that will never see the light of day.
Just like Fable was Project Ego.
Just like Java was Oak.
Just like every other major project embarked on by a big company has a code name for internal use so people can talk about and refer to their project.
Enough with the Xenon or 360 talk by everyone who thinks they know something the rest of us don't. No one knows what the final retail name will be yet. Even Microsoft doesn't. Anyone who says otherwise is just guessing and has an inflated opinion of his/her "inside knowledge".
When you can remember getting excited about Combat and Air/Sea Battle on the Atari 2600, and when you remember looking forward to Atari Age magazine for info on the new Raiders of the Lost Ark game, then you're an old man.
That's actually not true about the xbox. At the time of xbox launch, the xbox sported an nvidia chipset that was a generation ahead of their most powerful PC card at the time. Although the processor was a mid-to-low range processor compared to PCs at the time, it was the graphics chip that was to handle most of the heavy lifting. Sure, given the memory and the processor, the xbox couldn't pump out frame rates in the 3 figures, but it didn't have to because of the resolution it was targeting. But it could do a lot of really nifty things that were just starting to come into the PC world, like pixel shading. Also, the audio chip in the xbox was far and away better than anything on the market at the time. No PC audio card at the time could do real-time Dolby Digital processing. Xbox could. Of course, that's changed in the interim, but at the time, it really was a good bit ahead of PCs, at the targeted resolutions.
Years ago I was working a job that I had been laid off from, but had a month to go. They were cool about letting me just hang out in the back room and work on the computer. This was before there was much to read on the internet, so I was stuck playing Solitaire on Windows 3.1. I played so much that when I went outside to get lunch or go home, I kept envisioning stacking women in front of men, then men in front of women, to get the whole Jack-Queen-King thing going. Frightening.
As I recall, one of the biggest problems with MS software is their insistence on backward compatibility. WHy do you think Win95 and its devil spawn blew so much? Because they were backwards compatible with DOS.
Um, Tecmo bowl had NFL players and teams. Part of the fun was getting to play as Bo Jackson, who was the fastest player in the game.
Well said. I think a lot of people watch ET and hear about the huge salaries and think, damn, all those actors are overpaid! What they don't realize is that about 1% of all actors make enough from acting to live on.
More to the point, it's not as if acting is the biggest expense on a movie. Most movies, the film stock alone costs more than most of the actors. When a film does have a huge actor salary, it's for a reason. The producers sign Julia Roberts for $20million because they know that her name alone will make them more than that at the box office. So bringing in a whole CGI team to replace the actors doesn't exactly sound like a cost-effective measure to me, since you'd need a few people plus a lot of equipment to do the work of one actor. I'm not even going to get into what acting actually involves and how you can't just program it, because if I have to argue that point with anyone, it's a waste of time.
ihateu
xboxes, not xboxen. Please stop.
The urban dictionary is wrong. xbox is a special kind of box, and the plural for box is "boxes", not "boxen". The use of the word "xboxen" is an irritating attempt by people to be clever. If Microsoft released a new form of hay cart transportation based on the ox, and called it the xb-ox, then its plural would be xboxen.
Awesome point. Great. Way to invalidate anything I said. Selling a few million copies must mean it's a bad game.
If you don't like the game, that's fine, but if you can't understand that others might, and for valid reasons, then I don't know what to say. Enjoy wearing the blinders. I hope your side wins.
Um, that's about as poorly justified a statement as you could possibly make. Do you have some sort of information on Halo demographics that the rest of us don't? That's pure conjecture on your part.
I've been playing FPS games since the first time I got a copy of the three-floppy shareware of Doom back in 93. Sorry, my "street-cred" doesn't reach back the year before to Wolfenstein. I've played them all, from the early doom clones to the later quake clones and so on and so forth. For most of the 90s I was exclusively a pc gamer, since none of the consoles at the time interested me. But this latest generation did, and Halo is by far my favorite game on the consoles.
It's appeal lay in the fact that it does what it does extremely well. It is a very polished game, and plays exceedingly well on xbox. It can appeal to PC gamers and console gamers alike because it's very well done. To claim that only non-pc players would like it, or to imply that it's somehow FPS gaming on training wheels, is simply granting yourself far too much credit as a gamer. As if somehow you know the "real deal" while the rest of the sheep just follow trends. Bullshit. People recognize a good game when they see it, and therein lay its popularity.
And before you spend too much time on your PC gamer high horse, remember that PC games caught on in popularity well after console games (atari, intellivision, and later, nintendo). Any attempt to see PC gaming as a precursor to the more "childish" console gaming just shows a lack of understanding about the history of videogames.
Maybe you didn't think it was a good game, or a good console shooter, but a lot of people did. Hence, its popularity.
A lot of people tend to mistake their own opinion for "the truth". Judging games is about as subjective an activity as could be imagined, so please, recognize that before making blanket statements. "I didn't think it was a good game" is as true a statement as you could make. "Was it a good game? No." is just pissing in the wind.
There's a lot of talk about MS releasing early to gain a foothold. There's a side of this whole thing that makes me think this is a bad move. Besides the fact that a year early release won't necessarily help that much, there's the whole disc format issue. One of the main reasons the PS2 did so well, especially in comparison to the dreamcast, was its incorporation of a DVD drive. As DVD was taking off, PS2 came with one for free. That convinced a lot of people to pick one up when otherwise they might not have.
Now we have the HD format wars brewing. Sony is pushing for BluRay, and all indications are that the PS3 will be using it. There's no word yet on which format (blu ray or HDDVD) the xbox 2 will support, or even if it will support an HD format.
This is going to be a key success factor, IMHO. Now that HD-ready tvs are becoming more widespread, people will start to get eager to use them for things besides games and TV. HD DVD, in some format, will take off, only because people will already have the TVs for it. I don't know if people will be super-eager to buy an HD DVD player right off the bat, but if they can get one for free with a game machine, they'll probably be like that. In fact, my main point is that if one game machine offers an HD DVD player for free and another doesn't, that's a HUGE selling point. Maybe not in 2005 but definitely in 2006 and 2007.
For that reason, I think it's a mistake for MS to release early without either understanding which HD format will succeed or waiting for the drives themselves to come down in price.
True, a lot is learned, but some things are easier to learn than others. That's why common GUI metaphors, despite their shortcomings, are easier to learn than text commands. People have real world experience moving files into folders and into cabinets, so a drag-and-drop UI that works with those as abstractions is not as far removed from their experience as the set of commands necessary to do the equivalent from a terminal window.
Good interface design does not involve bludgeoning users into submission with unintuitive commands until the commands become second nature. It involves working with how people actually learn and how they interact with things. Often, it involves metaphors drawn against experiences or interactions that are already common. These experiences may have been learned rather than intrinsic; as you said, the only instrinsically intuitive interface is the nipple.
The point is that some things are more intuitive than others either because they are common experiences or they are instinctive like nipples. Unix commands are neither to anyone except developers and administrators. They could be learned but because they're not based on anything beyond the actual nuts and bolts of how computers work internally (eg. file system commands based on how a filesystem works rather than how a person might use it), the vast computing majority won't have any common experience with them, and shouldn't have to adapt themselves to them.
Again, you don't have to be a mechanic to drive a car, and you shouldn't have to know how filesystems are structured or other computing internals to use a computer.
No, the proper analogy is you don't need to be a mechanic to drive a car. The operation of a car isn't complex, just the maintenance.
Computers have an advantage over cars in that their maintenance can be automated, allowing most end users the luxury of just working the controls without worrying about the underpinnings. Or at least, that's how it should be. For most, not all, users.
held linux back on the desktop i mean. I would love for Linux to be a viable alternative to linux on the desktop. But it's not there yet. I'm not talking about embedded systems but personal computer use. Server uptime is great but most people aren't running servers. And if they use anything based on a server, it's usually through some sort of front end (like a web page) that hide what the server is doing.
/.ers. Your disdain for them is exactly what I meant by tech elitism. If Linux is going to have a chance on the desktop to give the world another competitor (and in the process improve the overall personal computing experience for everyone), then that kind of bullshit has to be recognized for what it is: snobbery.
Despite what you may think, "your average joe" is the computer market. There are far more of them then there are
My parents can use a radio because radio interface design has evolved to where it's intuitive. Some elements of computer design are evolving that way as well, but linux/unix is as far from the other side of the spectrum as can be imagined. For a developer or admin who is used to it, it makes sense, but even then there was a learning curve somewhere. For the everyday user, who despite what everyone on /. thinks are the people who drive "desktop domination", it makes little to no sense at all.
The unixes expect people to think like them rather than the other way around. I shouldn't have to think like a radio to use one; I shouldn't have to think like a car to use one; I shouldn't have to think like a toilet to use one; and the same holds true for computers. Give me a couple of common interfacing metaphors and I'm off and running. I shouldn't have to care what's going on underneath to perform useful everyday functions. But if i need to do more, it would be great to have that ability.
That's what I like so much about Apple's OSX. Its interface is designed around how people, not computers, think. And you still have the option of digging in underneath the covers to do more detailed things when you need to.