The "buzz" surrounding the Wii has already peaked. By it's very nature, buzz is not something that is sustainable over long periods of time, because it all depends on peoples' emotions and emotions are fickle. It's already been over four months of being sold out. Kids who wanted one for Christmas are still holding the IOUs they got from Santa instead. It is perfectly clear to everybody that the Wii is extremely popular and an unexpected runaway hit. Everyone who could be driven to want one by hype has been. Another month of "Wii still sold out" isn't going to earn them one bit more of "buzz", but it is going to earn them a lot of "irritation" and "loss of interest" and "lost business to other consoles".
If the shortage was all a trick to build buzz, then the time to cash in on that buzz would have been in December or January, opening the flood gates so all the Christmas shoppers could buy it, while the desire, hype, and personal finances were all ideally aligned. Instead this is just opening up a window of opportunity for Microsoft to lower the price on the 360 (which the Elite was in part designed to make room for), and for Jimmy to decide that he'd rather exchange his IOU for an Xbox, rather than having to wait even longer with no game system at all. For people having trouble making rent, the shortage is a perfect reason to put off buying a Wii, or to blow off the purchase all together. In other words, we're talking about lost sales, and lost money. You think that's what Nintendo wants?
The game industry is all about momentum. You might possibly be able to argue it makes sense to limit supply in the short term at console launch to be able to get headlines about your console selling out. But to artificially limit your unit share for months, and stating that this is likely to continue for more months, would be extremely foolish.
"Wii sold out" is old news, the only people who care are the ones who want the Wii, and they're frustrated not "buzzed".
You want to know what would generate buzz? "Total Wii sold outnumbers Xbox 360". That's the headline Nintendo want's to see. Limiting supply only hurts that goal.
Seriously, there's only one word for the idea that Nintendo is intentionally limiting supply of Wii, and it's the same word that would apply to Nintendo were they to actually try that strategy, and it's retarded.
Lastly, I get your reference to SMB3, but so much is different between now and then that there's no way I'm going to list it all. But let me give you the most important: Nintendo is no longer a monopoly. You think they can still pull the same stunts they used to? Well look at all the other crap they used to do that has gone by the wayside. It isn't the 80s anymore. Nintendo knows it. You need to catch up.
There's a saying that goes, "The man with one eye is king in the kingdom of the blind."
I thought it was "In the kingdom of the blind, the man with one eye is totally fucked when the sun sets since the blind don't have lamps". I once even read a short story that explored the idea.
That's my random comment for the day. There's certainly insight to the saying, which like most sayings aren't meant to be taken literally.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know if any of the team members from the original Team Fortress mod are still involved with the project?
I ask because TF was pretty much the greatest mod for Quake (and I must have played hundreds of mods), their follow-on Team Fortress Classic (called such to prevent confusion with TF2 of course) was a great mod as well, and both were free, gifts to mankind as it were. That's a lot of positive karma as far as I'm concerned, even if their great plans for the true sequel didn't pan out.
But if none of them are still on, I'd feel much less bad refering to TF2 as "Team Daikatana" or "Team Fortress Forever".:)
Hey, he can take the high road if he wants, but he got a comic out of the "Wii = penis" pun.
And one year? For me it's been thirty and I still have yet to grow up and stop laughing at "wee" jokes. Personally the name of the Wii -- which comes complete with a vibrating phalic object you hold in your hand and wave and thrust -- is a major selling point.
Well I'm not the one arguing for impossibility, just that work done isn't a great metric.
And if you open the door to any hypothetical technology that could be invented in hundreds or thousands of years, I'm not sure how you'd ever have potential energy by itself say it was "physically impossible". Maybe more energy than was in the Sun?
Anyway, the space elevator (or space hook or space loop or whatever your variant is) is probably the best "real" technology that could make space accessible. Without it, as long as we are using DeltaV, then it's not impossible but very much impractical which in a lot of ways is worse. Impossible means you don't know how, impractical means you do and it's not worth it.:)
Why does everyone assume this is only for joyrides?
I dunno, because I assume that you don't need a "spaceport" for high-altitude flights that would pretty much be as fast but lower energy cost? I could be completely wrong, and I'd be happy to be completely wrong if it means I could fulfill my wish of seeing earth from space in the mere course of visiting Tokyo or something. Obviously commercial travel would help drive the costs down faster. I just haven't heard any discussion of using the spaceport for travel.
This is minutes from Las Vegas (great place for joyrides, but we are ignoring those), not far from Albuquerque
Uh, this spaceport is in southern NM, between Albuquerque and Las Cruces (closer to the latter if I recall from driving past it, but no it isn't far from Albuquerque). You have to cross the entire state of Arizona to get to Vegas.
If the ratio is so great, how come Branson isn't willing to fund it himself? If it was a good investment, I would be investing with MY cash!
He is investing his cash! Way more than NM is spending. The point is that all else being equal he wouldn't be funding it to be built in New Mexico.
It's not like the proposed Branson build a space port and he said "Hey, neat idea, would you pay me to do it?" Branson wanted to build a space port already, and while shopping around for locations NM said "Hey, we'd chip in if you built it here".
What, precisely, am I asking? Well, what is that minimum amount of work required to move an object from the surface of the Earth to the surface of Mars. Not with the technology we have today - what's the total amount of work done? (It's something on the order of 1.5E10 Joules. A few thousand kilowatt hours.)
Not the right question. The amount of work isn't the issue, it's the amount of energy needed to do that work. Even if you hypothesize some technology whereby the energy spent getting out of earth's gravity well can be recovered dropping into mar's gravity well, you still need to spend the energy to get off earth first, and that's a lot of energy. I mean, if you go to mars, then come back, you've done zero work, but are you suggesting it would take zero energy to do so?
Net change in potential energy isn't a useful metric.
Now obviously airline flights had more immediate utility for a wealthy business man than a simple joy ride into space, though it was a luxury. So let's just assume that space flight doesn't become a commodity like airline tickets are today, but will travel down a somewhat similar cost curve so that it is at least feasible for average people to take as a 'family vacation' or some such.
Besides, if it's not orbital, is it really all that different? SS1 is so far from an orbital spacecraft it's not even funny. Now the Falcon, that's a good private rocket:)
Yeah, I'd say 20km vs 100km is a big difference. But I'll consider the MiG as a backup plan if Virgin Galactic doesn't pan out.:)
And believe me, I'm hoping for orbital. You don't have to tell me SS1 is not even close to orbital. I don't think it's ridiculous to think I may see it by the time I'm 90, though it's of course tremendously less likely than sub-orbital which I'm pretty sure of. Again, it's about backup plans. I'm not the first person to have this dream, but I'm of one of the first generations to actually have a feasible shot at it.
Let's think about how absurd this is: a man worth about $7.8BN (which represents about 11% of New Mexico's GDP) just got one quarter of his spaceport paid for by people who make on average $29-33k, so that people with multi-million-dollar net worths can blast themselves into space?
No... They paid for part of the spaceport so he'd build it where they live and so that those multi-millionaires would come to spend their money where they live. He was going to build it anyway, and he was almost certainly not going to build it in New Mexico without any incentive to do so.
Let me put the numbers in proportion for you: if Branson took one third of his net worth (percentage-wise, not too out of line with what the residents of the county just did for his little corporate venture) and divided it amongst ALL the people of the county, he would effectively raise the median income by 50%.
You're right, it was pretty stupid of the residents not to vote for Branson to give them a 3rd of his net worth.
Or hey, they should have voted to end the Iraq War and have all the defense spending sent to them. Then they'd all be rich and their problems would be over!
How many jobs will this spaceport actually bring in that residents in the county within commuting distance will be qualified for? And don't they realize that the spaceport will bring in a lot of much higher paid people (engineers, technical staff, etc), who will drive property values through the roof as they snap up land for McMansions? Cue the trickle down economics comments.
Yeah, I know, trickle down sucks, but it's what they're dealing with. I'm sure they'd feel so much smarter watching the space port be built somewhere else and having the money of these tourists come in somewhere else while their own economy continues to go down the shitter.
But you know New Mexico is large and sparsely populated. I wouldn't be too concerned about the property values driving out locals. Those engineers will need houses, they'll need food, the rich tourists will need lodging, that's all jobs and money coming into the community.
Is this the best thing for them? Well we'll have to see. It really depends on what happens to Virgin Galactic. If it succeeds, then this little place in New Mexico that you've never heard of before could become a significant tourist destination.
Yes mankind is producing more CO2, but still it's insignificant compared to other natural sources such as volcanoes and vegetative decay. Your views on our industrialization, and the slightly increasing temperature is a loose correlation.
Vegetative decay is a yearly cycle and not a net producer of CO2, unless the vegetation doesn't grow back next year. Clear cutting forrests being a prime example, and an effect of industrialization.
Volcanoes are not a larger source of CO2 than industrial output, and i'd be interested to know your theory of how volcanic activity has dramatically increased in the last 100 years compared to the previous 600,000. That doesn't correlate at all with the ice core data, much less loosely.
The planet is warming up a bit because of increased solar flux, and not man-made CO2. That's what the data says.
Solar flux means the net transfer of solar energy at the earth, and is affected by both the amount of energy received at earth and the amount of energy retained. Increase in solar output by itself can only account for 30% of the measured temperature increase, ergo the remainder is an effect of increased solar energy retention, exactly how the CO2 greenhouse model predicts. That is what the data says.
I assume this is a sub-orbital flight past the boundary of space like Spaceship 1 took, but doing that would still qualify for my life-goal of "see earth from space". I want to do this before I die. Even if I'm 90 and the flight will probably kill me, I'd sign whatever waivers I needed to and take my chances.
I wonder how 200k compares to the cost of airline flights at the birth of commercial aviation after adjusting for inflation? I'm guessing it's still quite a bit more, but maybe not too far? Either way, the point is that it's only a 1-2 orders of magnitude from where many people would be able to do it, including myself. And that makes me very excited.
In my ever-so-humble opinion, pretty much every game which gives you full (or near full, like GTA) camera control does so because the camera behaves completely fucking stupidly.
Which is really funny because GTA has the worst fucking camera behavior I've ever seen. There might be games with worse, but I haven't played them, and they'd basically have to point directly at the ground or the sky the entire time in order to actually show you less than the GTA camera. The fact that the manual camera controls also suck balls just adds insult to injury.
You are going to die eventually. Therefore you should do nothing to stop me from killing you now.
It's a ridiculous argument. The climate is always changing, the fear is that it's going to change very fast, and that it's the result of our actions.
And people living on shorelines has nothing to do with subsidies. Population centers have always formed on shorelines for as long as human civilization has existed. Hint: fishing and shipping. Moving everyone away from shores would be ludicrously more expensive than any emmissions control.
(NOTE: I own a DS, which I love, but I think they should have put one analog stick on it).
I have to admit, I *hate* the non-stylus inputs on the DS. The last couple generations of Nintendo portables have been very cool, but to me have had some extremely odd/stupid choices in terms of inputs.
The "portable N64" (the DS) doesn't have an analog stick! Mario64 and the N64 are what turned the analog stick into the standard for all subsequent (and in the case of the PSX, contemporary!) consoles. But Mario on the DS is a bizatch to control because they left out the most fundamental part of the original console.
Before that the "portable SNES" (the GBA) only has two face buttons, when again the SNES is what made having 4 buttons the standard. At least it has the shoulder buttons which was probably the most significant contribution of the SNES to to gaming input.
Okay, maybe it isn't that odd, and it certainly saves cost. The "portable PS2" has only one analog when it's parent console debuted with two. The Sega "portable Genesis" GameGear had only two buttons when the genesis had 3 (made playing Mortal Kombat a bitch for the 5 minutes the battery lasted). In fact the only handheld I can think of that didn't bastardize it's parent's controls was the original GameBoy, which wasn't actually a "portable NES".
So I guess I can only go back to my original point and say "I hate the non-stylus inputs of the DS, and the inputs of every other handheld except the gameboy".
But the problem is that it's owned by Sony, and Sony has managed to piss off the gaming community to the point where the mere fact that it's owned by Sony is enough to prevent people from buying it.
If the success of the PSP was entirely dependent on sales to people who read slashdot and kotaku, then that in and of itself indicates a deep flaw in its design and strategy.
Nobody else cares about Sony's asshattery. Ask anyone with a Nintendo DS if they bought the DS instead of a PSP because of the rootkit, Sony PR, Lik Sang, etc, and 99/100 will say "Huh?"
The simple fact is that while you may dislike the gameplay on the DS, the vast majority of portable console purchasers disagree with you.
And when you combine two monitors and virtual desktops, what you get is orgasmic bliss!
I put things I commonly need to refer to -- my email client, system monitors, etc etc -- on one screen, stickied. What I'm working on is on the other. If I need to look at two things at once for my work, I put the other on the screen with all the sticky stuff and maximize it. It's fucking sweet.
But I work for an engineering dept, which already has large CAD groups where the benefit of dual screens is already accepted as obvious. My group took longer to get them, but I'm glad we did.
Slashdot Mirror
"Dinosaur fossils? God put those there to test our faith."
"I think God put you here to test my faith, Dude."
I think you misunderstood. It's the sane who will be turning to me in times of madness.
The "buzz" surrounding the Wii has already peaked. By it's very nature, buzz is not something that is sustainable over long periods of time, because it all depends on peoples' emotions and emotions are fickle. It's already been over four months of being sold out. Kids who wanted one for Christmas are still holding the IOUs they got from Santa instead. It is perfectly clear to everybody that the Wii is extremely popular and an unexpected runaway hit. Everyone who could be driven to want one by hype has been. Another month of "Wii still sold out" isn't going to earn them one bit more of "buzz", but it is going to earn them a lot of "irritation" and "loss of interest" and "lost business to other consoles".
If the shortage was all a trick to build buzz, then the time to cash in on that buzz would have been in December or January, opening the flood gates so all the Christmas shoppers could buy it, while the desire, hype, and personal finances were all ideally aligned. Instead this is just opening up a window of opportunity for Microsoft to lower the price on the 360 (which the Elite was in part designed to make room for), and for Jimmy to decide that he'd rather exchange his IOU for an Xbox, rather than having to wait even longer with no game system at all. For people having trouble making rent, the shortage is a perfect reason to put off buying a Wii, or to blow off the purchase all together. In other words, we're talking about lost sales, and lost money. You think that's what Nintendo wants?
The game industry is all about momentum. You might possibly be able to argue it makes sense to limit supply in the short term at console launch to be able to get headlines about your console selling out. But to artificially limit your unit share for months, and stating that this is likely to continue for more months, would be extremely foolish.
"Wii sold out" is old news, the only people who care are the ones who want the Wii, and they're frustrated not "buzzed".
You want to know what would generate buzz? "Total Wii sold outnumbers Xbox 360". That's the headline Nintendo want's to see. Limiting supply only hurts that goal.
Seriously, there's only one word for the idea that Nintendo is intentionally limiting supply of Wii, and it's the same word that would apply to Nintendo were they to actually try that strategy, and it's retarded.
Lastly, I get your reference to SMB3, but so much is different between now and then that there's no way I'm going to list it all. But let me give you the most important: Nintendo is no longer a monopoly. You think they can still pull the same stunts they used to? Well look at all the other crap they used to do that has gone by the wayside. It isn't the 80s anymore. Nintendo knows it. You need to catch up.
Oh, I see.
Well then here's hoping for times of madness, so I can charge ridiculous consulting fees!
There's a saying that goes, "The man with one eye is king in the kingdom of the blind."
I thought it was "In the kingdom of the blind, the man with one eye is totally fucked when the sun sets since the blind don't have lamps". I once even read a short story that explored the idea.
That's my random comment for the day. There's certainly insight to the saying, which like most sayings aren't meant to be taken literally.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know if any of the team members from the original Team Fortress mod are still involved with the project?
:)
I ask because TF was pretty much the greatest mod for Quake (and I must have played hundreds of mods), their follow-on Team Fortress Classic (called such to prevent confusion with TF2 of course) was a great mod as well, and both were free, gifts to mankind as it were. That's a lot of positive karma as far as I'm concerned, even if their great plans for the true sequel didn't pan out.
But if none of them are still on, I'd feel much less bad refering to TF2 as "Team Daikatana" or "Team Fortress Forever".
Hey, he can take the high road if he wants, but he got a comic out of the "Wii = penis" pun.
And one year? For me it's been thirty and I still have yet to grow up and stop laughing at "wee" jokes. Personally the name of the Wii -- which comes complete with a vibrating phalic object you hold in your hand and wave and thrust -- is a major selling point.
So... would you say that this idea is Insanely Great?
Well I'm not the one arguing for impossibility, just that work done isn't a great metric.
:)
And if you open the door to any hypothetical technology that could be invented in hundreds or thousands of years, I'm not sure how you'd ever have potential energy by itself say it was "physically impossible". Maybe more energy than was in the Sun?
Anyway, the space elevator (or space hook or space loop or whatever your variant is) is probably the best "real" technology that could make space accessible. Without it, as long as we are using DeltaV, then it's not impossible but very much impractical which in a lot of ways is worse. Impossible means you don't know how, impractical means you do and it's not worth it.
Why does everyone assume this is only for joyrides?
I dunno, because I assume that you don't need a "spaceport" for high-altitude flights that would pretty much be as fast but lower energy cost? I could be completely wrong, and I'd be happy to be completely wrong if it means I could fulfill my wish of seeing earth from space in the mere course of visiting Tokyo or something. Obviously commercial travel would help drive the costs down faster. I just haven't heard any discussion of using the spaceport for travel.
This is minutes from Las Vegas (great place for joyrides, but we are ignoring those), not far from Albuquerque
Uh, this spaceport is in southern NM, between Albuquerque and Las Cruces (closer to the latter if I recall from driving past it, but no it isn't far from Albuquerque). You have to cross the entire state of Arizona to get to Vegas.
If the ratio is so great, how come Branson isn't willing to fund it himself? If it was a good investment, I would be investing with MY cash!
He is investing his cash! Way more than NM is spending. The point is that all else being equal he wouldn't be funding it to be built in New Mexico.
It's not like the proposed Branson build a space port and he said "Hey, neat idea, would you pay me to do it?" Branson wanted to build a space port already, and while shopping around for locations NM said "Hey, we'd chip in if you built it here".
What, precisely, am I asking? Well, what is that minimum amount of work required to move an object from the surface of the Earth to the surface of Mars. Not with the technology we have today - what's the total amount of work done? (It's something on the order of 1.5E10 Joules. A few thousand kilowatt hours.)
Not the right question. The amount of work isn't the issue, it's the amount of energy needed to do that work. Even if you hypothesize some technology whereby the energy spent getting out of earth's gravity well can be recovered dropping into mar's gravity well, you still need to spend the energy to get off earth first, and that's a lot of energy. I mean, if you go to mars, then come back, you've done zero work, but are you suggesting it would take zero energy to do so?
Net change in potential energy isn't a useful metric.
Ah, thanks for the info.
Now obviously airline flights had more immediate utility for a wealthy business man than a simple joy ride into space, though it was a luxury. So let's just assume that space flight doesn't become a commodity like airline tickets are today, but will travel down a somewhat similar cost curve so that it is at least feasible for average people to take as a 'family vacation' or some such.
You have a lack of imagination, vision, and common sense.
Please get off the internet.
What are you talking about?! He's exactly where he belongs!
Besides, if it's not orbital, is it really all that different? SS1 is so far from an orbital spacecraft it's not even funny. Now the Falcon, that's a good private rocket :)
:)
Yeah, I'd say 20km vs 100km is a big difference. But I'll consider the MiG as a backup plan if Virgin Galactic doesn't pan out.
And believe me, I'm hoping for orbital. You don't have to tell me SS1 is not even close to orbital. I don't think it's ridiculous to think I may see it by the time I'm 90, though it's of course tremendously less likely than sub-orbital which I'm pretty sure of. Again, it's about backup plans. I'm not the first person to have this dream, but I'm of one of the first generations to actually have a feasible shot at it.
Let's think about how absurd this is: a man worth about $7.8BN (which represents about 11% of New Mexico's GDP) just got one quarter of his spaceport paid for by people who make on average $29-33k, so that people with multi-million-dollar net worths can blast themselves into space?
No... They paid for part of the spaceport so he'd build it where they live and so that those multi-millionaires would come to spend their money where they live. He was going to build it anyway, and he was almost certainly not going to build it in New Mexico without any incentive to do so.
Let me put the numbers in proportion for you: if Branson took one third of his net worth (percentage-wise, not too out of line with what the residents of the county just did for his little corporate venture) and divided it amongst ALL the people of the county, he would effectively raise the median income by 50%.
You're right, it was pretty stupid of the residents not to vote for Branson to give them a 3rd of his net worth.
Or hey, they should have voted to end the Iraq War and have all the defense spending sent to them. Then they'd all be rich and their problems would be over!
How many jobs will this spaceport actually bring in that residents in the county within commuting distance will be qualified for? And don't they realize that the spaceport will bring in a lot of much higher paid people (engineers, technical staff, etc), who will drive property values through the roof as they snap up land for McMansions? Cue the trickle down economics comments.
Yeah, I know, trickle down sucks, but it's what they're dealing with. I'm sure they'd feel so much smarter watching the space port be built somewhere else and having the money of these tourists come in somewhere else while their own economy continues to go down the shitter.
But you know New Mexico is large and sparsely populated. I wouldn't be too concerned about the property values driving out locals. Those engineers will need houses, they'll need food, the rich tourists will need lodging, that's all jobs and money coming into the community.
Is this the best thing for them? Well we'll have to see. It really depends on what happens to Virgin Galactic. If it succeeds, then this little place in New Mexico that you've never heard of before could become a significant tourist destination.
Yes mankind is producing more CO2, but still it's insignificant compared to other natural sources such as volcanoes and vegetative decay. Your views on our industrialization, and the slightly increasing temperature is a loose correlation.
Vegetative decay is a yearly cycle and not a net producer of CO2, unless the vegetation doesn't grow back next year. Clear cutting forrests being a prime example, and an effect of industrialization.
Volcanoes are not a larger source of CO2 than industrial output, and i'd be interested to know your theory of how volcanic activity has dramatically increased in the last 100 years compared to the previous 600,000. That doesn't correlate at all with the ice core data, much less loosely.
The planet is warming up a bit because of increased solar flux, and not man-made CO2. That's what the data says.
Solar flux means the net transfer of solar energy at the earth, and is affected by both the amount of energy received at earth and the amount of energy retained. Increase in solar output by itself can only account for 30% of the measured temperature increase, ergo the remainder is an effect of increased solar energy retention, exactly how the CO2 greenhouse model predicts. That is what the data says.
Yeah, why would anyone want to attract wealthy tourists to a place whose economy is otherwise completely stagnant?
Those "SciFi fanboys" were the voters, as in residents. But hey, what would they know?
I assume this is a sub-orbital flight past the boundary of space like Spaceship 1 took, but doing that would still qualify for my life-goal of "see earth from space". I want to do this before I die. Even if I'm 90 and the flight will probably kill me, I'd sign whatever waivers I needed to and take my chances.
I wonder how 200k compares to the cost of airline flights at the birth of commercial aviation after adjusting for inflation? I'm guessing it's still quite a bit more, but maybe not too far? Either way, the point is that it's only a 1-2 orders of magnitude from where many people would be able to do it, including myself. And that makes me very excited.
In my ever-so-humble opinion, pretty much every game which gives you full (or near full, like GTA) camera control does so because the camera behaves completely fucking stupidly.
Which is really funny because GTA has the worst fucking camera behavior I've ever seen. There might be games with worse, but I haven't played them, and they'd basically have to point directly at the ground or the sky the entire time in order to actually show you less than the GTA camera. The fact that the manual camera controls also suck balls just adds insult to injury.
Of course I've hedged my bets by having a Chinese wife ;-)
:)
I may not know Chinese, and I may not know women, but I'm betting she doesn't like you referring to her as your "hedge".
You are going to die eventually. Therefore you should do nothing to stop me from killing you now.
It's a ridiculous argument. The climate is always changing, the fear is that it's going to change very fast, and that it's the result of our actions.
And people living on shorelines has nothing to do with subsidies. Population centers have always formed on shorelines for as long as human civilization has existed. Hint: fishing and shipping. Moving everyone away from shores would be ludicrously more expensive than any emmissions control.
(NOTE: I own a DS, which I love, but I think they should have put one analog stick on it).
I have to admit, I *hate* the non-stylus inputs on the DS. The last couple generations of Nintendo portables have been very cool, but to me have had some extremely odd/stupid choices in terms of inputs.
The "portable N64" (the DS) doesn't have an analog stick! Mario64 and the N64 are what turned the analog stick into the standard for all subsequent (and in the case of the PSX, contemporary!) consoles. But Mario on the DS is a bizatch to control because they left out the most fundamental part of the original console.
Before that the "portable SNES" (the GBA) only has two face buttons, when again the SNES is what made having 4 buttons the standard. At least it has the shoulder buttons which was probably the most significant contribution of the SNES to to gaming input.
Okay, maybe it isn't that odd, and it certainly saves cost. The "portable PS2" has only one analog when it's parent console debuted with two. The Sega "portable Genesis" GameGear had only two buttons when the genesis had 3 (made playing Mortal Kombat a bitch for the 5 minutes the battery lasted). In fact the only handheld I can think of that didn't bastardize it's parent's controls was the original GameBoy, which wasn't actually a "portable NES".
So I guess I can only go back to my original point and say "I hate the non-stylus inputs of the DS, and the inputs of every other handheld except the gameboy".
But the problem is that it's owned by Sony, and Sony has managed to piss off the gaming community to the point where the mere fact that it's owned by Sony is enough to prevent people from buying it.
If the success of the PSP was entirely dependent on sales to people who read slashdot and kotaku, then that in and of itself indicates a deep flaw in its design and strategy.
Nobody else cares about Sony's asshattery. Ask anyone with a Nintendo DS if they bought the DS instead of a PSP because of the rootkit, Sony PR, Lik Sang, etc, and 99/100 will say "Huh?"
The simple fact is that while you may dislike the gameplay on the DS, the vast majority of portable console purchasers disagree with you.
And when you combine two monitors and virtual desktops, what you get is orgasmic bliss!
I put things I commonly need to refer to -- my email client, system monitors, etc etc -- on one screen, stickied. What I'm working on is on the other. If I need to look at two things at once for my work, I put the other on the screen with all the sticky stuff and maximize it. It's fucking sweet.
But I work for an engineering dept, which already has large CAD groups where the benefit of dual screens is already accepted as obvious. My group took longer to get them, but I'm glad we did.