Yes and including the player in every PS3 sold is why they wil win that war pretty handily. If Sony and Microsoft sold the same about of consoles, a 10% adoption rate of the external HD player alone would mean there were still far fewer HD-DVD players.
Clearly this is what Sony intends. However game consoles are not the only front in the format war. Most movie watchers could give a rats ass about games, and most game players could give a rats ass about playing Blu Ray movies on their PS3. The intersection of the two groups that care about both may be large, but that group would not have been large enough to ensure the success of DVD by itself in the PS2 days, and that's with no format war. To put it another way -- if the majority of Blu Ray players in the market are PS3s, then Sony will probably lose the format war.
In the meantime they've discouraged people who only care about games from buying a PS3 due to its high cost, damaging their chances in the console wars.
This is the problem with their strategy -- they're trying to fight two wars at once, and thereby hurting their chances to win them individualy. "Kill two birds with one stone" sounds great until you realize that's actually a lot harder than killing two birds with two stones. Miss, and you've killed neither.
Not to mention all the people confused about you needing HDMI to do 1080p with movies are going to be just as confused when they think about HD on a 360, which doesn't even have ANY models that have an HDMI port at all! That's the format war angle.
If that's a strike against the 360, then it's a strike against the $500 PS3.
You are ignoring my point that there is demand for HD video today that is not being well met, as the cable channels that do offer content are very repetittive. That is where demand will come from even with the PS3 coming into the market at an earlier point
Um, no I'm not. From my last post: Sure, people with HD TVs are looking for content to use with those TVs. Why, given the current situation of near zero marketshare for both formats, would they choose Blu Ray instead of HD-DVD, and thus why would they choose a PS3 instead of a 360?
Sony is trying to use Blu Ray support to win the console war, and the PS3 to win the format war. Unlike last time, when there was no format war going on. This is a huge difference, and unlike your argument which I have addressed, you have not addressed the issue of the format wars at all.
You are really misremembering how big DVD was at that point in time. The market was much larger than Blu-Ray will be by the time the PS3 comes out but the success of DVD was not yet certain when the PS2 arrived - it cemented it.
I don't think so; I'd already had a DVD player for two years, and the DVD section at Best Buy et. al. was already as large as the VHS section. The DVD section at the video store was small, but encompassed all the new releases. The question was not whether DVD would be successful, but how long would the transition take. PS2 helped speed that transition by being a reasonably priced player, but did not change the end result. Nobody said "I was not interested in a DVD player at all, but I can get a playstation that plays them so why not".
Of course this was helped largely by the fact that DVD was the only viable next-gen game in town, and had huge advantages over VHS. It was "Will people use the new handy digital format, or will they stick with VHS"? Not "which of several new formats, whose only improvement is a better picture assuming your TV can show it, will succeed, if any?"
Which goes back to my main point: Sony is counting on PS3 to win the format wars for them, yet is simultaneously counting on Blu Ray support to justify paying $600 for a game console and win the console wars for them. Sure, people with HD TVs are looking for content to use with those TVs. Why, given the current situation of near zero marketshare for both formats, would they choose Blu Ray instead of HD-DVD, and thus why would they choose a PS3 instead of a 360?
The answer goes back to why the PS2 helped DVD sales: It was reasonably priced. If the idea is that people will want to pick up a reasonably priced HD content player that can also play games, then the PS3 does not look good.
Not really, I was a very early adoptor. What I am saying though is that a big part of the reason I bought the PS2 was that I could also use it as a DVD player and thus get two uses out of one box - the same reason I'm buying a PS3. If the PS3 did not have a Blu-Ray player I'd pass and only get the Wii instead of getting both.
I wasn't really so much concerned with you as with the market at large which is by and large not early adopters but which Sony needs in order for PS3 to fulfill it's goal of winning the format wars for them. Yet even as an early adopter of DVD, it was pretty clear that it was DVD that you should adopt early, no? What exactly is it that is driving you to get a Blu Ray player as opposed to an HD-DVD player? What exactly is driving you to get a next-gen format player in the first place?
Irrespective of your motivations, the difference between the PS2 and the PS3 remains: When the PS2 was released, DVD was dominant format and DVD players were in high demand, and thus the "two-for-one" logic applied to the mass market, not just early adopters. Now, Sony wants this "two-for-one" logic to apply to something which is not mass market, they want it to create that market, and this is where their strategy is flawed and will fail.
But what about all the 360 "value pack" sales with prices approaching $1000, and ebay sales for even more?
How many of those value packs were actually sold? More importantly, how many ebay sales?
I hear a lot about ebay auctions going for insane prices, but what kind of volume are we talking about here? Remember, an auction is won by the one person who was willing to pay more than anybody else. I wouldn't consider those ebay auctions significant as indicating what people are willing to pay unless there were tens of thousands of them.
I actually had a DVD player before the PS2, but after I bought it I used it as my only DVD player for a year or so after giving the other DVD player away to family.
Right, you had a DVD player before the PS2. I had a DVD player before the PS2 was released. If I hadn't, I would have considered that when deciding what game system to buy. Yet remember this important fact: You and everyone else wanted something to play DVDs irrespective of the existence of the PS2, because DVDs were already established and extremely popular.
Why, today or this coming November, would you want to buy a Blu Ray player when there isn't actually any Blu Ray content, it isn't clear that Blu Ray is going to beat HD-DVD, and it isn't clear that either next-gen format in practice offers anything that you'll need or want over DVD?
With the PS2, every DVD player sale was a potential PS2 sale. With the PS3, every potential Blu Ray player sale is a potential PS3 sale... and how many Blu Ray players are there? How many sales is this actually going to produce? This is Sony's fundamental problem, that they're trying to drive sales in both directions at once.
Sony's problem is that they're trying to repeat the failed strategy of the PSP: Use a new game console to drive adoption of a new video format, and use the new video format to drive adoption of the new game console.
Haven't they figured out yet that this chicken-and-the-egg scenario doesn't work?
The current marketshare of Blu Ray is effectively zero, so how on earth do they expect desire to play Blu Ray to drive console sales? With their console priced so high, can they really expect the kind of marketshare that would drive Blu Ray adoption?
It's like they think they're re-launching the PS2. It's nothing like the PS2, which people did actually buy thinking that it could be used as a game system and a DVD player for slightly more than the cost of either by itself. The difference being that DVDs were already extremely popular irrespective of the existence of the PS2, so everyone wanted a DVD player anyway. That is not the case today. Not only is Blu Ray only a contender in the ongoing format wars, it isn't clear that either next-gen format is going to take off as very few people see DVDs as inadequate (whereas the advantages of DVD over VHS are many and obvious). The only thing indicating that Blu Ray has a chance is that the PS3 will play it.
So the only hope they have of breaking the chicken-and-egg problem is by driving people to buy their console, and hoping the people with the console then drive Blu Ray adoption. Yet they clearly aren't pricing their console to do that. Whatever small group of people buy PS3s at its current price point are not going to be enough to justify Best Buy filling their shelves with Blu Ray movies. They need to lower the price so that people will buy it.
Yet here we have them telling us that the price is fine because people will want to play Blu Ray discs -- the exact opposite of what will actually work. Which means that at best they are spinning for the sake of their investors and the press, at worst they are deluding themselves. Either way the strategy is not going to work as it is.
Either they lower the price of the console fairly quickly, or both PS3 and Blu Ray will go down as case studies in bad business strategy.
My experience with AV is actually more or less the same as far as win frequency, but it isn't as easy to summarize the strategy mistakes the Alliance makes in two sentences. Also being as huge as it is I don't have that many full games under my belt and am generally less familiar with it. That's why I omitted it, as the problem isn't as simple as "turtling" or "zerging".
Heh, I meant what I said: 25% of all WoW players. Another 25% are human. As in half of all characters in the game are those two races. Gnomes and Dwarves are much lower in population. Overal Alliance outnumbers Horde by 2.6 to one, mostly due to humans and night elves. If you weren't aware, and just assumed that WoW populations were equally distributed, then I can see why you didn't get my point.
As for the controller itself... I'm a little wary of the placement of the analog sticks. I was never a huge fan of the dual-shock-type controller stick setup, so I wonder how well it'll really work for N64 games "reaching" over to use the sticks (and it has nothing to do with hand size, as mine are massive). I think I'd still try and use my GCN controller if possible (that was confirmed a while ago that you can just plug those straight in), small as it is.
As a small-hander, I'll agree that it looks like it may be uncomfortable, in particular because it lacks hand grips.
As long as you've brought up N64 games, I still miss something like the N64 controller. It had the most comfortable hand grips. They were larger farther back and tapered toward the controller so the width of the grip matched the size of your hands. I never heard anyone complain the controller was uncomfortable based on their hand size, large or small (except the C buttons, which I imagine were pretty small for the big-thumbed). Plus it was a lightweight and well balanced controller. One of the little-known pleasures of the N64: Playing Waverace with one hand, so the other is free to hold beer.
The reality is that the Horde players and Alliance players are, on average, equally skilled. The fact that the Horde wins 90% of the time cannot be attributed to skill and must be attributed to simple balance issues. Face it, Shamans are horrendously overpowered. It's not skill, it's not luck, it's bad balance.
It can't be the fault of shamans, because I have the same experience in BGs with no shamans.
Really, my experience across multiple servers and multiple brackets on each is that the alliance is just as good at fighting yet is on average much, much worse at strategizing. The Alliance tends to win individual skirmishes as often as they lose. It's not character balance. If killing the other guy was all it took to win a BG, the record would be close to 50-50. Yet it isn't. The tendency of Alliance to pick strategies that are guaranteed to lose no matter how skillfully they play is striking.
In Warsong Gulch, they will turtle inside their flag room. This makes it hard to take their flag, sure, but eventually it can be taken and in the meantime they have virutally no offense. No offense == no victory.
In Arathi Basin, they will zerg around in a huge mob from node to node. Yes, they can easily take nodes this way, but they can't actually keep any. Just by letting them take the node they're trying for at the moment, and re-taking the node they just left, it's easy to make sure they never get more than two nodes. Taking nodes but never actually holding more than your enemy == no victory.
Sometimes you get a group that is on the whole clueful about strategy and intends to win rather than farm HKs and collect a single token. These are usually also good players, and these are tough fights with or without shamans on the horde side. This is where the 10% comes from.
Do I think this imbalance in ability to strategize stems from the races' "cuteness"? I'm not sure, but it's all I can think of to explain it. 25% of all WoW players are night elves. A large number of them are hunters, and a large number of those are named a derivatve of Legolas. Teenies who are thinking more about how they look like Orlando Bloom than how to win the battle? That's what I'm implying. I shudder to think of what's going to happen now that Horde is going to have blond haired fair-skinned elven hunters.
I don't remember Zelda shooting anything at the end of Ocarina of Time... I do remember her shooting Ganondorf at the end of Wind Waker, and there she was badass. Yeah, Ganon tried to get you in the way of her shots, while you were trying to create an opening for her. That's part of what made it the best end battle of any Zelda I've played (none of the portable ones).
Really, I should load it up again. It's pretty much worth going through the annoying find-the-triforce section just to do that fight again.
I'm very skeptical of this. It would seem to me, at a fundamental level, that a microkernel architecture is simply a heavily reduced kernel with most accepted kernel functions now delegated to external "programs", and a high level of trust is now placed in each and every one of these programs. I can't see how this is good for security.
Well, trust is placed in those user-land programs to perform the task for which they are responsible. Whereas in a monolithic kernel, trust is placed in each subsystem to not only perform the task it is responsible for, but also not to muck with the workings of every other subsystem in the kernel as they all reside in the same address space. Therefore in a microkernel you can have a bug in your network stack without compromising your file system driver or authentication module, while this isn't necessarily true in a macrokernel. Compartmentalization is very good for security.
Which is just one of the reasons Mach is so popular as a research OS, despite never seeing any success in the real world. Compartmentalization also makes the OS easier to maintain, easier to understand, and easier to make modifications for. Plus it's very easy to port to new hardware, if that's required.
In a sense, most OSes are "microkerneled" anyway. Most functionality is implemented by programs running on top of the kernel, which pass messages back and forth between themselves and the kernel. Perhaps my view on this is a little naive, but I don't see too much of a difference between a microkernel module and any other process on the machine.
I think you underestimate the things that are handled by the kernel? Unix uses many user-land services, but also has many services integrated into the kernel. Take the concept of moving functionality into user space to the limit, and you have a microkernel. Your last observation isn't naive, it's correct: a microkernel module isn't necessarily any different than any other process on your machine.
What was the key problem with these kernels? Performance. Mach (one of the more popular research OSes) incurred a huge cost in message passing as every message was checked for validity as it was sent.
I thought the performance problem with Mach was the six context switches necessary to pass a message from an application to a user-space service (like the Unix subsystem).
then why is Kim Jong-Il still in power? Why the paper tiger instead of the guy that has missles capable of reaching the US -- the guy that has nuclear warheads?
Question (probably rhetorical), meet answer. We didn't attack North Korea because North Korea is actually scary. Hell, it's the same reason we haven't done anything to Iran, who is far more scary and far more of a threat to us than Iraq ever was. Not even our delusional administration could convince themselves that invading Iran was a good idea.
No, we invaded Iraq because it wasn't a serious threat. It was a convenient target. Much like the intelligence that said Iraq had WMD -- the surest sign this wasn't true being our willingness to invade -- all of our stated reasons for invading are false.
Dogs are our pets, our slaves, our domesticated kept species. We chip them without their consent because it suits our purposes, and as our pet species they do not have the same rights as us, even if we exercise control over them on behalf of their best interests.
Now you know how the employers who want to put chips into their employees think of their employees.
So he's done a nice job of recognizing that Cloud's dilemna represents what happens when you come to believe your own lies about yourself, how these lies take on a life of their own and gain power over you, and how only by recognizing the lies can you overcome the problems that led you to cover up the truth in the first place. 'A' or 'B' material so far on this work of literary analysis, if we're grading at a high school level.
Thinking that this observation applies to gamers and only gamers? That's a 'D'. From relevent and deep to shallow and stupid in one bad assumption.
Originally the PS1 did not have analog controllers. The Dual Shock came relatively late in the PS1's life. I take it from context that this is the era to which he was referring.
I refuse to buy another console until I can control it using telekinesis.
Anything else is just more of the same.
What do you mean? You already can! Telekinesis is moving things with your mind -- just use it to push the buttons! Actually, I'm really looking forward to the Revolution as a way to practice even finer grained control of my telekinesis to maneuver the controller in 3D space, rather than crassly mashing buttons with bolts of mental force.
Yeah, from that point of view it makes sense. But I think he's not giving Nintendo enough credit -- I believe they are emphasizing the controller's ability to enable good gameplay and design. The controller is the "revolution" in the "Revolution". Otherwise it's just a new console incorporating new silicon advancements following Moore's Law, like the other two.
If you require neither flashier graphics, superior processing power, nor a new look at game input, then you really don't need a new console at all. Which you could argue you don't, if in fact you are one of those who has mastered good gameplay and design. But if you want to create actual change in gaming from the standpoint of hardware, then a game controller is a good way to do it.
Case in point: Would you say that Nintendo abandoned good gameplay and design when they developed the N64 controller? Is a D-Pad all a good game designer ever needs? Or did the addition of the analog stick open up possibilities for good designers that didn't really exist before? From Mario 64 to Super Monkey Ball to Katamari Damacy itself, there are slews of games which were able to do more with an analog stick than they would with a digital one, and have much better gameplay as a result.
I highly doubt Nintendo has de-emphasized gameplay and design. I strongly suspect that Nintendo's game designers want the new controller as much as anyone as a way to realize better gameplay. If Nintendo is mostly talking about the controller, it's because 1) it's the major change the console brings to the table and 2) they probably don't feel they really need to say that they'll put effort into making games that are well designed irrespective of the controller.
It didn't used to be this way. Back when I was the proverbial linux noob, I could count on Linux IRC channels and internet forums to basically be the most helpful places around. Yes, I had to RTFM before I could expect to get any help, but people were also pretty cognizant of when TFM was FU (useless), or when my question clearly went beyond what TFM covered. Compared to my experiences in just about any other venue -- in particular my ill-conceived ventures into gaming forums -- it was pleasant, helpful, and generally convinced me that Linux had some of the best tech support anywhere, for free.
I think a lot of the attitude of the users came from the fact that Linux was hard to use and get running, and nobody got it running without a bit of a struggle on their own part and were thus sympathetic to others. Like you say, we were all newbs once. This is why I'm sympathetic myself to claims of people getting snubbed by Linux forum goers.
Yet I'll admit that I'm also naturally sceptical, call it snobish if you will, just because it seems that half the time the person who is saying they're not getting the help they need is getting the help they need and only some of the responses are "RTFM idiot", or the person doesn't have and doesn't want to get necessary information and refuses to meet anyone halfway. A recent and extreme example was some guy who posted here crying about how he was treated on the Ubuntu forums. Now Ubuntu apparently borked his boot loader, which I have the deepest sympathies for. Yet after browsing the thread he posted to, I found out he was being a dick from the word go. He responded to every offer for help (usually requiring some action on his part, this not being a problem that just fixes itself) with sarcasm and "Why should I be expected to do/know that? Just fix my problem! 'Linux for humans' my ass!" and eventually people tired of this and he got told off, and these posts became his selected samples of why Linux users suck.
Now, for the rest of the people who sincerely wanted help but got the finger instead, I don't know what to say. It didn't used to be that way. Personally I think it's a result of Linux's growing popularity. The user population has grown, so that a previously select population now obeys more general rules of humanity, i.e. most people are cockmongers -- see the afforementioned gaming forums for an example. Linux has gotten much easier to install and use, so some people have no problems at all, and some of these people are cockmongers, and thus they think anyone who did have a problem must be an idiot. Basically, because they never really had to fight their way out of newbie status, they don't have the perspective previous users did, and thus have disdain for any newbie who can't blindly stumble their way through.
Or maybe it's the other way around. The users who used to be helpful, now being innundated with requests for help from the much larger linux community, some of the usual decent kind but of course a good number coming from cockmongers, they've become bitter, jaded, and yes snobish. That'd be a shame. Free software and Linux specifically are scaling wonderfully as a system and development model. Yet it is quite probable that the previously wonderful free support is not scaleable, and the failure mode is apparent snobbery.
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Yes and including the player in every PS3 sold is why they wil win that war pretty handily. If Sony and Microsoft sold the same about of consoles, a 10% adoption rate of the external HD player alone would mean there were still far fewer HD-DVD players.
Clearly this is what Sony intends. However game consoles are not the only front in the format war. Most movie watchers could give a rats ass about games, and most game players could give a rats ass about playing Blu Ray movies on their PS3. The intersection of the two groups that care about both may be large, but that group would not have been large enough to ensure the success of DVD by itself in the PS2 days, and that's with no format war. To put it another way -- if the majority of Blu Ray players in the market are PS3s, then Sony will probably lose the format war.
In the meantime they've discouraged people who only care about games from buying a PS3 due to its high cost, damaging their chances in the console wars.
This is the problem with their strategy -- they're trying to fight two wars at once, and thereby hurting their chances to win them individualy. "Kill two birds with one stone" sounds great until you realize that's actually a lot harder than killing two birds with two stones. Miss, and you've killed neither.
Not to mention all the people confused about you needing HDMI to do 1080p with movies are going to be just as confused when they think about HD on a 360, which doesn't even have ANY models that have an HDMI port at all! That's the format war angle.
If that's a strike against the 360, then it's a strike against the $500 PS3.
You are ignoring my point that there is demand for HD video today that is not being well met, as the cable channels that do offer content are very repetittive. That is where demand will come from even with the PS3 coming into the market at an earlier point
Um, no I'm not. From my last post: Sure, people with HD TVs are looking for content to use with those TVs. Why, given the current situation of near zero marketshare for both formats, would they choose Blu Ray instead of HD-DVD, and thus why would they choose a PS3 instead of a 360?
Sony is trying to use Blu Ray support to win the console war, and the PS3 to win the format war. Unlike last time, when there was no format war going on. This is a huge difference, and unlike your argument which I have addressed, you have not addressed the issue of the format wars at all.
You are really misremembering how big DVD was at that point in time. The market was much larger than Blu-Ray will be by the time the PS3 comes out but the success of DVD was not yet certain when the PS2 arrived - it cemented it.
I don't think so; I'd already had a DVD player for two years, and the DVD section at Best Buy et. al. was already as large as the VHS section. The DVD section at the video store was small, but encompassed all the new releases. The question was not whether DVD would be successful, but how long would the transition take. PS2 helped speed that transition by being a reasonably priced player, but did not change the end result. Nobody said "I was not interested in a DVD player at all, but I can get a playstation that plays them so why not".
Of course this was helped largely by the fact that DVD was the only viable next-gen game in town, and had huge advantages over VHS. It was "Will people use the new handy digital format, or will they stick with VHS"? Not "which of several new formats, whose only improvement is a better picture assuming your TV can show it, will succeed, if any?"
Which goes back to my main point: Sony is counting on PS3 to win the format wars for them, yet is simultaneously counting on Blu Ray support to justify paying $600 for a game console and win the console wars for them. Sure, people with HD TVs are looking for content to use with those TVs. Why, given the current situation of near zero marketshare for both formats, would they choose Blu Ray instead of HD-DVD, and thus why would they choose a PS3 instead of a 360?
The answer goes back to why the PS2 helped DVD sales: It was reasonably priced. If the idea is that people will want to pick up a reasonably priced HD content player that can also play games, then the PS3 does not look good.
It's the right market, you just need to rethink what "first person shooter" means.
Not really, I was a very early adoptor. What I am saying though is that a big part of the reason I bought the PS2 was that I could also use it as a DVD player and thus get two uses out of one box - the same reason I'm buying a PS3. If the PS3 did not have a Blu-Ray player I'd pass and only get the Wii instead of getting both.
I wasn't really so much concerned with you as with the market at large which is by and large not early adopters but which Sony needs in order for PS3 to fulfill it's goal of winning the format wars for them. Yet even as an early adopter of DVD, it was pretty clear that it was DVD that you should adopt early, no? What exactly is it that is driving you to get a Blu Ray player as opposed to an HD-DVD player? What exactly is driving you to get a next-gen format player in the first place?
Irrespective of your motivations, the difference between the PS2 and the PS3 remains: When the PS2 was released, DVD was dominant format and DVD players were in high demand, and thus the "two-for-one" logic applied to the mass market, not just early adopters. Now, Sony wants this "two-for-one" logic to apply to something which is not mass market, they want it to create that market, and this is where their strategy is flawed and will fail.
But what about all the 360 "value pack" sales with prices approaching $1000, and ebay sales for even more?
How many of those value packs were actually sold? More importantly, how many ebay sales?
I hear a lot about ebay auctions going for insane prices, but what kind of volume are we talking about here? Remember, an auction is won by the one person who was willing to pay more than anybody else. I wouldn't consider those ebay auctions significant as indicating what people are willing to pay unless there were tens of thousands of them.
I actually had a DVD player before the PS2, but after I bought it I used it as my only DVD player for a year or so after giving the other DVD player away to family.
Right, you had a DVD player before the PS2. I had a DVD player before the PS2 was released. If I hadn't, I would have considered that when deciding what game system to buy. Yet remember this important fact: You and everyone else wanted something to play DVDs irrespective of the existence of the PS2, because DVDs were already established and extremely popular.
Why, today or this coming November, would you want to buy a Blu Ray player when there isn't actually any Blu Ray content, it isn't clear that Blu Ray is going to beat HD-DVD, and it isn't clear that either next-gen format in practice offers anything that you'll need or want over DVD?
With the PS2, every DVD player sale was a potential PS2 sale. With the PS3, every potential Blu Ray player sale is a potential PS3 sale... and how many Blu Ray players are there? How many sales is this actually going to produce? This is Sony's fundamental problem, that they're trying to drive sales in both directions at once.
Sony's problem is that they're trying to repeat the failed strategy of the PSP: Use a new game console to drive adoption of a new video format, and use the new video format to drive adoption of the new game console.
Haven't they figured out yet that this chicken-and-the-egg scenario doesn't work?
The current marketshare of Blu Ray is effectively zero, so how on earth do they expect desire to play Blu Ray to drive console sales? With their console priced so high, can they really expect the kind of marketshare that would drive Blu Ray adoption?
It's like they think they're re-launching the PS2. It's nothing like the PS2, which people did actually buy thinking that it could be used as a game system and a DVD player for slightly more than the cost of either by itself. The difference being that DVDs were already extremely popular irrespective of the existence of the PS2, so everyone wanted a DVD player anyway. That is not the case today. Not only is Blu Ray only a contender in the ongoing format wars, it isn't clear that either next-gen format is going to take off as very few people see DVDs as inadequate (whereas the advantages of DVD over VHS are many and obvious). The only thing indicating that Blu Ray has a chance is that the PS3 will play it.
So the only hope they have of breaking the chicken-and-egg problem is by driving people to buy their console, and hoping the people with the console then drive Blu Ray adoption. Yet they clearly aren't pricing their console to do that. Whatever small group of people buy PS3s at its current price point are not going to be enough to justify Best Buy filling their shelves with Blu Ray movies. They need to lower the price so that people will buy it.
Yet here we have them telling us that the price is fine because people will want to play Blu Ray discs -- the exact opposite of what will actually work. Which means that at best they are spinning for the sake of their investors and the press, at worst they are deluding themselves. Either way the strategy is not going to work as it is.
Either they lower the price of the console fairly quickly, or both PS3 and Blu Ray will go down as case studies in bad business strategy.
Baidupedia bars users from including any 'malicious evaluation of the current national system'
Malicious evaluation, seditious reasoning and logic, and evil, evil truth-telling.
My experience with AV is actually more or less the same as far as win frequency, but it isn't as easy to summarize the strategy mistakes the Alliance makes in two sentences. Also being as huge as it is I don't have that many full games under my belt and am generally less familiar with it. That's why I omitted it, as the problem isn't as simple as "turtling" or "zerging".
Heh, I meant what I said: 25% of all WoW players. Another 25% are human. As in half of all characters in the game are those two races. Gnomes and Dwarves are much lower in population. Overal Alliance outnumbers Horde by 2.6 to one, mostly due to humans and night elves. If you weren't aware, and just assumed that WoW populations were equally distributed, then I can see why you didn't get my point.
As for the controller itself... I'm a little wary of the placement of the analog sticks. I was never a huge fan of the dual-shock-type controller stick setup, so I wonder how well it'll really work for N64 games "reaching" over to use the sticks (and it has nothing to do with hand size, as mine are massive). I think I'd still try and use my GCN controller if possible (that was confirmed a while ago that you can just plug those straight in), small as it is.
As a small-hander, I'll agree that it looks like it may be uncomfortable, in particular because it lacks hand grips.
As long as you've brought up N64 games, I still miss something like the N64 controller. It had the most comfortable hand grips. They were larger farther back and tapered toward the controller so the width of the grip matched the size of your hands. I never heard anyone complain the controller was uncomfortable based on their hand size, large or small (except the C buttons, which I imagine were pretty small for the big-thumbed). Plus it was a lightweight and well balanced controller. One of the little-known pleasures of the N64: Playing Waverace with one hand, so the other is free to hold beer.
I pray that is true. Everything I've seen about Blood Elves has indicated that they can be hunters.
The reality is that the Horde players and Alliance players are, on average, equally skilled. The fact that the Horde wins 90% of the time cannot be attributed to skill and must be attributed to simple balance issues. Face it, Shamans are horrendously overpowered. It's not skill, it's not luck, it's bad balance.
It can't be the fault of shamans, because I have the same experience in BGs with no shamans.
Really, my experience across multiple servers and multiple brackets on each is that the alliance is just as good at fighting yet is on average much, much worse at strategizing. The Alliance tends to win individual skirmishes as often as they lose. It's not character balance. If killing the other guy was all it took to win a BG, the record would be close to 50-50. Yet it isn't. The tendency of Alliance to pick strategies that are guaranteed to lose no matter how skillfully they play is striking.
In Warsong Gulch, they will turtle inside their flag room. This makes it hard to take their flag, sure, but eventually it can be taken and in the meantime they have virutally no offense. No offense == no victory.
In Arathi Basin, they will zerg around in a huge mob from node to node. Yes, they can easily take nodes this way, but they can't actually keep any. Just by letting them take the node they're trying for at the moment, and re-taking the node they just left, it's easy to make sure they never get more than two nodes. Taking nodes but never actually holding more than your enemy == no victory.
Sometimes you get a group that is on the whole clueful about strategy and intends to win rather than farm HKs and collect a single token. These are usually also good players, and these are tough fights with or without shamans on the horde side. This is where the 10% comes from.
Do I think this imbalance in ability to strategize stems from the races' "cuteness"? I'm not sure, but it's all I can think of to explain it. 25% of all WoW players are night elves. A large number of them are hunters, and a large number of those are named a derivatve of Legolas. Teenies who are thinking more about how they look like Orlando Bloom than how to win the battle? That's what I'm implying. I shudder to think of what's going to happen now that Horde is going to have blond haired fair-skinned elven hunters.
I don't remember Zelda shooting anything at the end of Ocarina of Time... I do remember her shooting Ganondorf at the end of Wind Waker, and there she was badass. Yeah, Ganon tried to get you in the way of her shots, while you were trying to create an opening for her. That's part of what made it the best end battle of any Zelda I've played (none of the portable ones).
Really, I should load it up again. It's pretty much worth going through the annoying find-the-triforce section just to do that fight again.
I'm very skeptical of this. It would seem to me, at a fundamental level, that a microkernel architecture is simply a heavily reduced kernel with most accepted kernel functions now delegated to external "programs", and a high level of trust is now placed in each and every one of these programs. I can't see how this is good for security.
Well, trust is placed in those user-land programs to perform the task for which they are responsible. Whereas in a monolithic kernel, trust is placed in each subsystem to not only perform the task it is responsible for, but also not to muck with the workings of every other subsystem in the kernel as they all reside in the same address space. Therefore in a microkernel you can have a bug in your network stack without compromising your file system driver or authentication module, while this isn't necessarily true in a macrokernel. Compartmentalization is very good for security.
Which is just one of the reasons Mach is so popular as a research OS, despite never seeing any success in the real world. Compartmentalization also makes the OS easier to maintain, easier to understand, and easier to make modifications for. Plus it's very easy to port to new hardware, if that's required.
In a sense, most OSes are "microkerneled" anyway. Most functionality is implemented by programs running on top of the kernel, which pass messages back and forth between themselves and the kernel. Perhaps my view on this is a little naive, but I don't see too much of a difference between a microkernel module and any other process on the machine.
I think you underestimate the things that are handled by the kernel? Unix uses many user-land services, but also has many services integrated into the kernel. Take the concept of moving functionality into user space to the limit, and you have a microkernel. Your last observation isn't naive, it's correct: a microkernel module isn't necessarily any different than any other process on your machine.
What was the key problem with these kernels? Performance. Mach (one of the more popular research OSes) incurred a huge cost in message passing as every message was checked for validity as it was sent.
I thought the performance problem with Mach was the six context switches necessary to pass a message from an application to a user-space service (like the Unix subsystem).
then why is Kim Jong-Il still in power? Why the paper tiger instead of the guy that has missles capable of reaching the US -- the guy that has nuclear warheads?
Question (probably rhetorical), meet answer. We didn't attack North Korea because North Korea is actually scary. Hell, it's the same reason we haven't done anything to Iran, who is far more scary and far more of a threat to us than Iraq ever was. Not even our delusional administration could convince themselves that invading Iran was a good idea.
No, we invaded Iraq because it wasn't a serious threat. It was a convenient target. Much like the intelligence that said Iraq had WMD -- the surest sign this wasn't true being our willingness to invade -- all of our stated reasons for invading are false.
Won't somebody think of the money?!
Dogs are our pets, our slaves, our domesticated kept species. We chip them without their consent because it suits our purposes, and as our pet species they do not have the same rights as us, even if we exercise control over them on behalf of their best interests.
Now you know how the employers who want to put chips into their employees think of their employees.
So he's done a nice job of recognizing that Cloud's dilemna represents what happens when you come to believe your own lies about yourself, how these lies take on a life of their own and gain power over you, and how only by recognizing the lies can you overcome the problems that led you to cover up the truth in the first place. 'A' or 'B' material so far on this work of literary analysis, if we're grading at a high school level.
Thinking that this observation applies to gamers and only gamers? That's a 'D'. From relevent and deep to shallow and stupid in one bad assumption.
Originally the PS1 did not have analog controllers. The Dual Shock came relatively late in the PS1's life. I take it from context that this is the era to which he was referring.
I refuse to buy another console until I can control it using telekinesis.
Anything else is just more of the same.
What do you mean? You already can! Telekinesis is moving things with your mind -- just use it to push the buttons! Actually, I'm really looking forward to the Revolution as a way to practice even finer grained control of my telekinesis to maneuver the controller in 3D space, rather than crassly mashing buttons with bolts of mental force.
Yeah, from that point of view it makes sense. But I think he's not giving Nintendo enough credit -- I believe they are emphasizing the controller's ability to enable good gameplay and design. The controller is the "revolution" in the "Revolution". Otherwise it's just a new console incorporating new silicon advancements following Moore's Law, like the other two.
If you require neither flashier graphics, superior processing power, nor a new look at game input, then you really don't need a new console at all. Which you could argue you don't, if in fact you are one of those who has mastered good gameplay and design. But if you want to create actual change in gaming from the standpoint of hardware, then a game controller is a good way to do it.
Case in point: Would you say that Nintendo abandoned good gameplay and design when they developed the N64 controller? Is a D-Pad all a good game designer ever needs? Or did the addition of the analog stick open up possibilities for good designers that didn't really exist before? From Mario 64 to Super Monkey Ball to Katamari Damacy itself, there are slews of games which were able to do more with an analog stick than they would with a digital one, and have much better gameplay as a result.
I highly doubt Nintendo has de-emphasized gameplay and design. I strongly suspect that Nintendo's game designers want the new controller as much as anyone as a way to realize better gameplay. If Nintendo is mostly talking about the controller, it's because 1) it's the major change the console brings to the table and 2) they probably don't feel they really need to say that they'll put effort into making games that are well designed irrespective of the controller.
It didn't used to be this way. Back when I was the proverbial linux noob, I could count on Linux IRC channels and internet forums to basically be the most helpful places around. Yes, I had to RTFM before I could expect to get any help, but people were also pretty cognizant of when TFM was FU (useless), or when my question clearly went beyond what TFM covered. Compared to my experiences in just about any other venue -- in particular my ill-conceived ventures into gaming forums -- it was pleasant, helpful, and generally convinced me that Linux had some of the best tech support anywhere, for free.
I think a lot of the attitude of the users came from the fact that Linux was hard to use and get running, and nobody got it running without a bit of a struggle on their own part and were thus sympathetic to others. Like you say, we were all newbs once. This is why I'm sympathetic myself to claims of people getting snubbed by Linux forum goers.
Yet I'll admit that I'm also naturally sceptical, call it snobish if you will, just because it seems that half the time the person who is saying they're not getting the help they need is getting the help they need and only some of the responses are "RTFM idiot", or the person doesn't have and doesn't want to get necessary information and refuses to meet anyone halfway. A recent and extreme example was some guy who posted here crying about how he was treated on the Ubuntu forums. Now Ubuntu apparently borked his boot loader, which I have the deepest sympathies for. Yet after browsing the thread he posted to, I found out he was being a dick from the word go. He responded to every offer for help (usually requiring some action on his part, this not being a problem that just fixes itself) with sarcasm and "Why should I be expected to do/know that? Just fix my problem! 'Linux for humans' my ass!" and eventually people tired of this and he got told off, and these posts became his selected samples of why Linux users suck.
Now, for the rest of the people who sincerely wanted help but got the finger instead, I don't know what to say. It didn't used to be that way. Personally I think it's a result of Linux's growing popularity. The user population has grown, so that a previously select population now obeys more general rules of humanity, i.e. most people are cockmongers -- see the afforementioned gaming forums for an example. Linux has gotten much easier to install and use, so some people have no problems at all, and some of these people are cockmongers, and thus they think anyone who did have a problem must be an idiot. Basically, because they never really had to fight their way out of newbie status, they don't have the perspective previous users did, and thus have disdain for any newbie who can't blindly stumble their way through.
Or maybe it's the other way around. The users who used to be helpful, now being innundated with requests for help from the much larger linux community, some of the usual decent kind but of course a good number coming from cockmongers, they've become bitter, jaded, and yes snobish. That'd be a shame. Free software and Linux specifically are scaling wonderfully as a system and development model. Yet it is quite probable that the previously wonderful free support is not scaleable, and the failure mode is apparent snobbery.