And, of course, they have a program you can add to Windows (but can't ship with Windows for antitrust reasons (thanks Symantec!)) called Microsoft Security Essentials to actually help protect against user stupidity,
No, because practically all iOS games are between 0.99 and 15.00 and practically all Nintendo games start at 25.00 while having the same audience and technically comparable features and power. We don't expect handhelds to run Far Cry 2 at 120fps so that's not really an issue.
The DSi and 3DS both have online game stores that sell games for anywhere from $2 to $15.
The Wii targeted simpler games for simpler people; that's why it sold. Remember, it used to be at a $300 price point when it FIRST came out, and it sold millions of consoles by word of mouth in it's first weeks.
Actually, not if you're talking USD. It was $250 USD at launch (the same price the 3DS launched at) and was the first Nintendo system to launch at more than $200 USD.
When the Wii launched, it had two consoles to compete with.
The incumbent was the Xbox 360, launched a year earlier. While considerably more powerful than the Wii, it had a higher price tag ($400 at the time, as I recall). It had already started to sell to the "hardcore" gamers.
The other newcomer was the PlayStation 3. While more powerful than the Wii, it had a much higher price ($500 20GB and $600 60GB models) and was much harder to develop games for. Sony appeared to be betting a lot on the PS2's reputation here.
Here's the thing: At launch, Nintendo managed to successfully target two audiences at once. The first was Nintendo's traditional market, which tends to be the younger generation and parents. The second was the casual market, with Wii Sports and the like. The price point worked for both of these markets.
To this day, Nintendo still makes games aimed at the younger generation. The thing is that the Casual market has moved away from the Wii. While the motion controls were an interesting concept at first, interest in them has waned. Which makes it all the more amusing that Sony came out with the Move and Microsoft came out with the Kinect.
The only reason that the Wii is still the top selling console is because the Xbox 360 is, and always has been, selling terribly in Japan/Asia. Incidentally, the Xbox 360 is selling almost as well in two of the major regions (North America and Europe) as the Wii is in all three.
Nintendo released a new handheld that has the following "features:"
1. A much lower battery life than its predecessors ( I believe the numbers are half the DSi XL battery life and one-quarter the DS Lite battery life.) 2. A gimicky feature that something like 10% of the people in the world can't see (myself included). 3. An $80 system price increase. ($250 versus the DSi XL's $170 and DS Lite's $120) 4. Game prices increased $5-10.
and most importantly
5. No "killer app" so to speak.
No, seriously, Nintendo's flagship 3DS title is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. If that name sounds familiar to you, it's because Nintendo originally released it 13 years ago for the Nintendo 64.
there is nothing you can do on a typewriter that you can't do more easily otherwise
How about fill out any arbitrary pre-printed forms you happen to be given, or print on loose 1-inch by 2-inch hanging-file-folder tags? A typewriter can do those easily, but how would you do either one with any other kind of printer?
They still make pre-printed forms that aren't available as PDF forms?
GoodSNES (and all the other Good* sets) are shit. I'd recommend No-Intro sets if you can find them
I was referring to the program GoodSNES, not some torrent set.
I prefer to download my roms one by one so I don't have a shitload of stuff I'll never play sitting there. Then I scan them with GoodSNES (and the other GoodTools) to see if they're a known bad rom, "fixed," or "hacked" in some way.
There's also an issue of people hacking roms themselves to get them to work with zsnes. Many of the huge torrented libraries you find on the net in fact include such versions of games.
That's funny, because there are tools like GoodSNES that have lists that say which roms have been modified by checking their SHA-1 signatures against a known good database. Roms that are known good are marked with [!], ones that are known to have been "fixed" for emulators are marked with [f], ones that are known to have other hacks applied are marked with [h]. I forget how fan translations are marked.
The only game that's not a known good in my SNES collection is Terranigma. That has the previously mentioned speed hack applied because Enix had the nasty habit of slowing emulation down when porting games to PAL territories... and the only English version of Terranigma is the UK release (Terranigma was available in Japan and Europe, but not North America).
If Apple were to attempt to block this in the US, one of the precedents that could come up in the case would be Apple Computer, Inc v. Microsoft Corporation, a look and feel case that Apple lost.
They mean 15 years ago *on mobile devices*. Things like the old Snake game that came on every black-and-white cell phone those days. Things like the Game Boy Color, at best.
"If you look over the last 15 years, we've gone from really noddy 2D games like the stuff you used to see on your telly back when I was a kid playing Pong on these little Atari machines, and now you can take a platform like the Galaxy S II and you can play some really complicated mobile games on it," enthused Ian Smythe, the director of marketing for ARM's Media Processing Division and the man tasked with getting Mali into the hands of the company's licensees.
That's funny, I could have sworn 15 years ago we were playing Super Mario 64 and Battle Arena Toshinden 2, with Final Fantasy VII, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night all announced as coming out the next year.
Anyway, the important thing that this article wants to ignore is that Intel, AMD, nVidia, and IBM are not going to stand still while ARM improves.
They can compare ARM systems to consoles all they want. Like it or not, the current game consoles are all using hardware designs that are nearing a decade old now. The rumors about the Wii U's specs aren't helping, as the rumors so far only peg it as being equal in performance to the Xbox 360 and PS3.
Only if you used Adobe's PDF reader. Given its security track record, you'd have to be crazy to do so. On OS X, the default PDF reader is Preview, which ships with the OS. On *NIX, there's typically some xpdf derivative like Evince. Windows is the only platform where the majority of users put up with Adobe Reader for PDFs.
...and here's where the "monopoly" card bites Microsoft. They can't include a (different) PDF reader with the OS, because if they did, Adobe would sue them for anti-competitive behavior.
Hell, the threat of anti-competitive lawsuits from Symantec keep Microsoft from shipping their own (already written) anti-virus with the OS!
Java runs on lots of things, but thats not my point. Will every Java application run on all JVMs? No.
Take Azureus for example - built in Java, but separate downloads for OSX and Windows. And thats all too common in the Java world...
That's because Azureus/Vuze uses SWT, a GUI library developed by IBM that isn't shipped with Java. Because it interfaces with the OS's GUI drawing toolkit, it has a separate version for each OS.
They could have a common download, plus let you download SWT separately, but at a guess they don't (azureus.sourceforge.net is blocked where I work so I can't check).
On a GUI App I was working on in a previous employer I asked the.NET C# guys how to disable/hide a UI element. I was met with incredulous stares and a 'you don't want to do that' response. As far as I could tell there was NO WAY to enable/disable/hide a UI element without writing my own from scratch.
Unless you were using some weird non-standard GUI layer, I'd fire those devs.
The standard WinForms controls all have.Visible and.Enabled properties. And always have, since.NET 1.0.
Can you bundle your app into a single file, and run it by double-clicking it, on any one of a dozen platforms?
No, and nothing like this exists anywhere else either. Technically, the closest thing to what you're describing that exists would be the OSX Universal binary, which runs on x86 and PowerPC.
With everything else, there's going to be a native executable involved somewhere, be it a Java JVM or web browser, which you appear to realize as per your next point:
Are your runtime requirements available on ALL of the commonly available platforms, so people don't have to change their platform to run your code?
I've never really tried Mono, but I understand it has very good.NET support these days:
The easiest way to describe what Mono currently supports is: Everything in.NET 4.0 except WPF, EntityFramework and WF, limited WCF.
Mono runs on OSX, Linux, and the BSDs. And even on Windows.
Absolutely correct, visitors != users. TFA jumps back and forth between the two terms, but the visitors # has to be incorrect - if they have 25M visitors and 20M+ accounts, that means less than 5M other people in the whole world have visited G+ this month without an account. Clearly wrong. Hell I count for 5 visitors myself and 1 account, having accessed G+ from 5 different IP's. Ironic though - without FB, Twitter, and the like, G+ wouldn't have the medium to spread as fast as it is spreading.
Except that comScore Media Matrix, the ultimate source for all this, measures the number of visitors to a site.
Nope, it's 25 million registered users not just visitors. The visitor count sounds like it's quite significantly higher but I haven't seen any specific numbers.
...and the source you linked to cites Reuters, and Reuters says users in the title and visitors in the body.
Slashdot Mirror
And, of course, they have a program you can add to Windows (but can't ship with Windows for antitrust reasons (thanks Symantec!)) called Microsoft Security Essentials to actually help protect against user stupidity,
3. An $80 system price increase. ($250 versus the DSi XL's $170 and DS Lite's $120)
It's $170 as of tomorrow. Target and Wal-Mart are already selling it for that price today.
Yes, happened is past tense. This is a list of things they did wrong.
Even with this price drop, that only fixes one of the five problems I outlined, and even then, you may see the DSi XL drop in price as well.
No, because practically all iOS games are between 0.99 and 15.00 and practically all Nintendo games start at 25.00 while having the same audience and technically comparable features and power. We don't expect handhelds to run Far Cry 2 at 120fps so that's not really an issue.
The DSi and 3DS both have online game stores that sell games for anywhere from $2 to $15.
The Wii targeted simpler games for simpler people; that's why it sold. Remember, it used to be at a $300 price point when it FIRST came out, and it sold millions of consoles by word of mouth in it's first weeks.
Actually, not if you're talking USD. It was $250 USD at launch (the same price the 3DS launched at) and was the first Nintendo system to launch at more than $200 USD.
When the Wii launched, it had two consoles to compete with.
The incumbent was the Xbox 360, launched a year earlier. While considerably more powerful than the Wii, it had a higher price tag ($400 at the time, as I recall). It had already started to sell to the "hardcore" gamers.
The other newcomer was the PlayStation 3. While more powerful than the Wii, it had a much higher price ($500 20GB and $600 60GB models) and was much harder to develop games for. Sony appeared to be betting a lot on the PS2's reputation here.
Here's the thing: At launch, Nintendo managed to successfully target two audiences at once. The first was Nintendo's traditional market, which tends to be the younger generation and parents. The second was the casual market, with Wii Sports and the like. The price point worked for both of these markets.
To this day, Nintendo still makes games aimed at the younger generation. The thing is that the Casual market has moved away from the Wii. While the motion controls were an interesting concept at first, interest in them has waned. Which makes it all the more amusing that Sony came out with the Move and Microsoft came out with the Kinect.
The only reason that the Wii is still the top selling console is because the Xbox 360 is, and always has been, selling terribly in Japan/Asia. Incidentally, the Xbox 360 is selling almost as well in two of the major regions (North America and Europe) as the Wii is in all three.
But frankly even FPS games do not HAVE to have hardware buttons...
No, but one thing that makes an FPS ridiculously better is a mouse.
Nintendo released a new handheld that has the following "features:"
1. A much lower battery life than its predecessors ( I believe the numbers are half the DSi XL battery life and one-quarter the DS Lite battery life.)
2. A gimicky feature that something like 10% of the people in the world can't see (myself included).
3. An $80 system price increase. ($250 versus the DSi XL's $170 and DS Lite's $120)
4. Game prices increased $5-10.
and most importantly
5. No "killer app" so to speak.
No, seriously, Nintendo's flagship 3DS title is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. If that name sounds familiar to you, it's because Nintendo originally released it 13 years ago for the Nintendo 64.
there is nothing you can do on a typewriter that you can't do more easily otherwise
How about fill out any arbitrary pre-printed forms you happen to be given, or print on loose 1-inch by 2-inch hanging-file-folder tags? A typewriter can do those easily, but how would you do either one with any other kind of printer?
They still make pre-printed forms that aren't available as PDF forms?
Google has not released much if any of their failed projects.
They claim to be here, but we should wait and see since their track record on promises is pretty dismal.
No, they could release it as "Honeycomb Open Source."
Oh wait, they already have!
GoodSNES (and all the other Good* sets) are shit. I'd recommend No-Intro sets if you can find them
I was referring to the program GoodSNES, not some torrent set.
I prefer to download my roms one by one so I don't have a shitload of stuff I'll never play sitting there. Then I scan them with GoodSNES (and the other GoodTools) to see if they're a known bad rom, "fixed," or "hacked" in some way.
To play rare or impossible to find titles, just download the ROMs
Which publishers offer such lawful downloads?
Have you ever heard of the Wii Virtual Console?
There's a list of publishers that use it somewhere, I'm sure.
There's also an issue of people hacking roms themselves to get them to work with zsnes. Many of the huge torrented libraries you find on the net in fact include such versions of games.
That's funny, because there are tools like GoodSNES that have lists that say which roms have been modified by checking their SHA-1 signatures against a known good database. Roms that are known good are marked with [!], ones that are known to have been "fixed" for emulators are marked with [f], ones that are known to have other hacks applied are marked with [h]. I forget how fan translations are marked.
The only game that's not a known good in my SNES collection is Terranigma. That has the previously mentioned speed hack applied because Enix had the nasty habit of slowing emulation down when porting games to PAL territories... and the only English version of Terranigma is the UK release (Terranigma was available in Japan and Europe, but not North America).
The real question is: When will we have a JavaScript emulator ?
It's called the Opera browser. It's runs JavaScript but it's not quite the real thing.
Internet Explorer's JScript would be a better example.
I find it amusing that the EU blocked this.
If Apple were to attempt to block this in the US, one of the precedents that could come up in the case would be Apple Computer, Inc v. Microsoft Corporation, a look and feel case that Apple lost.
If you think "rounded corners on a tablet" is "ripping off Apple's ideas", I know this company called Xerox I'd like to introduce you to.
And Xerox copied... oh wait, they didn't copy anyone. Oh, the irony.
They mean 15 years ago *on mobile devices*. Things like the old Snake game that came on every black-and-white cell phone those days. Things like the Game Boy Color, at best.
Oh. Wait, phones had screens 15 years ago?
"If you look over the last 15 years, we've gone from really noddy 2D games like the stuff you used to see on your telly back when I was a kid playing Pong on these little Atari machines, and now you can take a platform like the Galaxy S II and you can play some really complicated mobile games on it," enthused Ian Smythe, the director of marketing for ARM's Media Processing Division and the man tasked with getting Mali into the hands of the company's licensees.
That's funny, I could have sworn 15 years ago we were playing Super Mario 64 and Battle Arena Toshinden 2, with Final Fantasy VII, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night all announced as coming out the next year.
Anyway, the important thing that this article wants to ignore is that Intel, AMD, nVidia, and IBM are not going to stand still while ARM improves.
They can compare ARM systems to consoles all they want. Like it or not, the current game consoles are all using hardware designs that are nearing a decade old now. The rumors about the Wii U's specs aren't helping, as the rumors so far only peg it as being equal in performance to the Xbox 360 and PS3.
The patent system is supposed to be used so a new device has maybe a handful of patents in it.
Why? Because you said so?
No, because we're talking about patents in the US, and, by constitutional decree, they're only supposed to cover Discoveries.
So, what you're saying is that Android 2.x is open source and Android 3.x isn't? Got it.
Only if you used Adobe's PDF reader. Given its security track record, you'd have to be crazy to do so. On OS X, the default PDF reader is Preview, which ships with the OS. On *NIX, there's typically some xpdf derivative like Evince. Windows is the only platform where the majority of users put up with Adobe Reader for PDFs.
...and here's where the "monopoly" card bites Microsoft. They can't include a (different) PDF reader with the OS, because if they did, Adobe would sue them for anti-competitive behavior.
Hell, the threat of anti-competitive lawsuits from Symantec keep Microsoft from shipping their own (already written) anti-virus with the OS!
Java runs on lots of things, but thats not my point. Will every Java application run on all JVMs? No.
Take Azureus for example - built in Java, but separate downloads for OSX and Windows. And thats all too common in the Java world...
That's because Azureus/Vuze uses SWT, a GUI library developed by IBM that isn't shipped with Java. Because it interfaces with the OS's GUI drawing toolkit, it has a separate version for each OS.
They could have a common download, plus let you download SWT separately, but at a guess they don't (azureus.sourceforge.net is blocked where I work so I can't check).
That entirely depends on how well the GPLv2 protects you from their patents.
Oh, and you can't use the name Java because Sun has it trademarked.
Oh, and no clue what'll happen related to trademarks if you continue to use the word "java" in the various namespaces in the language.
On a GUI App I was working on in a previous employer I asked the .NET C# guys how to disable/hide a UI element. I was met with incredulous stares and a 'you don't want to do that' response. As far as I could tell there was NO WAY to enable/disable/hide a UI element without writing my own from scratch.
Unless you were using some weird non-standard GUI layer, I'd fire those devs.
The standard WinForms controls all have .Visible and .Enabled properties. And always have, since .NET 1.0.
They're named .IsEnabled and .Visibility in the newer WPF graphics layer.
I COULD NOT FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO IT!
And they would have shown up in the Visual Studio property editor, so I'd have to fire you as well.
Can you bundle your app into a single file, and run it by double-clicking it, on any one of a dozen platforms?
No, and nothing like this exists anywhere else either. Technically, the closest thing to what you're describing that exists would be the OSX Universal binary, which runs on x86 and PowerPC.
With everything else, there's going to be a native executable involved somewhere, be it a Java JVM or web browser, which you appear to realize as per your next point:
Are your runtime requirements available on ALL of the commonly available platforms, so people don't have to change their platform to run your code?
I've never really tried Mono, but I understand it has very good .NET support these days:
The easiest way to describe what Mono currently supports is: .NET 4.0 except WPF, EntityFramework and WF, limited WCF.
Everything in
Mono runs on OSX, Linux, and the BSDs. And even on Windows.
Absolutely correct, visitors != users. TFA jumps back and forth between the two terms, but the visitors # has to be incorrect - if they have 25M visitors and 20M+ accounts, that means less than 5M other people in the whole world have visited G+ this month without an account. Clearly wrong. Hell I count for 5 visitors myself and 1 account, having accessed G+ from 5 different IP's. Ironic though - without FB, Twitter, and the like, G+ wouldn't have the medium to spread as fast as it is spreading.
Except that comScore Media Matrix, the ultimate source for all this, measures the number of visitors to a site.
So no, visitors is right, users is wrong.
Nope, it's 25 million registered users not just visitors. The visitor count sounds like it's quite significantly higher but I haven't seen any specific numbers.
...and the source you linked to cites Reuters, and Reuters says users in the title and visitors in the body.