"THe nthey buy on an insecure scam server, content in their ignorance that they have successfully puchased their Bush'04 t-shirt!"
Given the fact that the average income of a voter for Bush is significantly higher than the average income of a voter for a democrat [based on the previous presidential election] and the fact that those who earn more income are smarter than those who do not, I would say that those who would be fooled by such a scam are much more likely to be buying a "No War In Iraq" bumper sticker or something equally stupid.:P
"The article focuses on a programming error that resulted in 28 Panamanian cancer patients receiving many times an expected lethal dose of radiation."
Receiving many times an expected lethal dose? So the dose was expected to be lethal and the software multiplied it? So we're upset that the software used too much radiation rather than delivering a lethal amount?
"You have to enter your internet settings seperately for each game"
Wrong. The disc that comes with the network adapter saves all connection settings to the memory card when you set it up. Have you actually played a PS2 online game?
"there's no cross-game invitation or buddy system etc."
Wrong again. EA Sports games include a buddy system and cross-game invitation. You noted that you need different user accounts for different publishers. You should realize that there is integration of user accounts and buddy systems within a publishers set of games.
"Compare that to the integration and relative simplicity of XBox Live."
Compare that to the price. I get all the online coddling I need from Sony for $0.00. Yeah, it's a free-for-all, just like PC gaming, which is fine by me. Playing games on the Internet with my PC has never been especially challenging, certainly not so challenging that I need to pay money for someone to handle some of the details of it. But I guess there's a market for people who need a little extra help.;-)
"I already have a DVD player, and so do many people."
But they're not talking about the present. The quote was in regards to the initial release of the Gamecube. Over the course of the Gamecube's lifetime, the price of DVD players has dropped significantly. Not having DVD playback available at the time of release probably did hurt sales of the Gamecube. Consider that DVD player market penetration was not as high as it currently is and also consider that both the PS2 and XBox could play DVDs and you can see that it will influence sales. I don't know if I agree with the statement that it had a tremendous effect.
You might also note that to many people a $200 device competing with a device at $150 where one plays DVDs and one does not, if these people don't own DVD players and, at the time, the average cost of a DVD player was probably around $100, for a low grade model, is significant.
Okay, so let's say you put away $10 or $20 each week for the entire year. So you have enough money to comfortably buy 10 games in one month. Who has time to play those 10 games? I know that I got 3 games over the holiday season and I have yet to play 1 of them for more than two hours total and haven't even opened up another. It's not just a matter of economics - there's only so much time in the day. Hell, I'm still playing games I bought a year ago.
" I doubt its anything to get excited about, Nintendo already said games with better gfx isnt the future."
So because Nintendo said it, it's got to be true? Here's something to consider: PS3 games, for the most part, will look better than PS2 games. Shocker huh? I think you misread that interview. The point isn't that graphics technology isn't improving, the point is that in order to impress and entice gamers, there are going to have to be improvements in other aspects of a game, rather than just graphics. You should have linked to the interview where you believe someone at Nintendo said that graphics don't matter.
"i really dont think shiney bump mapping does a whole lot for me."
Hey, I bet you can pick up an old Atari at a garage sale soon. Enjoy!
"Add to that the fact that sony is always on the bottom in the grapics department makes me wonder why they dont try and make the psp a communal device like the big N wants to."
Sony is always on the bottom? I guess you're basing this on the PS1 and PS2. I don't think two consoles - I'm not even going to discuss whether both of these are in fact, on the bottom - makes a performance indicator.
"I like sony, my MD works great."
Isn't it nice to like multi-national corporations? I'll ask Sony in study hall if he likes you too. Ooooh, I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about you two going steady.
"I just wonder whether the PSP is something that will ever have any must have games (Halo, Mario Kart, Goldeneye, HL type stuff)."
I'm guessing that Sony hopes so. Please don't post here anymore.
Funny, I judge games based on their individual merit. You seem to be proposing judging games based solely on past precedence. So that once a series has a single bad game, the series must be abandoned. I think this is a rather silly stance to take, especially with high turnaround rates at development houses and the fact that different games in the same series are often done by different development studios.
If a new Mortal Kombat came out and every review you read of it said it was a great game, on caliber with Soul Caliber, etc., you still would say, "Well, MK4 was bad so I won't buy this"??
Here's something to chew on. I didn't enjoy Quake I but Quake II is one of my favorite games of all time. If I had followed your logic, I never would have played Quake II.
No, we should judge games not based on previous games in the series but rather on the actual game and how satisfying it is. That's why I would consider buying a Mortal Kombat game and that's also why when a Mario game is released, I don't automatically say, "I'll take it!"
Just a word to the wise, the deadline for submission to this contest is February 29th. Clearly it's possible to write this type of script in a short period of time but for hobby-type programming contents, perhaps it would be more worthwhile to get this contest posted a bit before the deadline?
I'm not impressed by the interface redesigns. Part of the reason why I like google is that it isn't cluttered with useless information. There's an input field and the ability to submit my query. That's all I need from google. The artists who offered their ideas for a redesign seem to have made cluttered screens that, may be nice to look at, would introduce longer waiting times - and really, when I use google, I'm not going to google.com in order to see google, I'm going to see the pages that are of interest to me from my search query.
The problem that I have with micropayments is that if I am going to go to the trouble of handing out a credit card number to an online retailer, I have to see a real benefit or need for it to happen. Micropayments for a game on some website would be a great impulse buy if you had a means to deliver the spare change in your pocket to the retailer. As it stands, the consumer has to give out their credit card data to yet another website in order to make a payment of a quarter? Services like paypal might help allieviate this problem but I still am not convinced that it works well.
I suppose I need to get a change slot installed in my home so I can send my quarters down the pipe and have them pop out at pop-cap games.
"Because of the increased risk of birth defects, which imposes costs on society, and because some of those
unions (e.g. parent/child) involve potentially exploitive relationships in which freedom of choice is not
clear. Neither is there a body of data indicating that such relationships are likely to be stable."
So what about a man marrying his brother? There's no risk of birth defects since they're both male and the relationship is not exploitive. Furthermore, marriage licenses aren't given out to only people who seem to have stable relationships. So if you allow "gay marriages", why wouldn't a man be able to marry his brother?
There are plenty of cell phones out there with a minimal feature set as you desire. So if a company can add in another feature that very few people need and make a profit from people who want it, why do you care?
Let the market dictate what sells - not some demand that phones remain phones and nothing more.
"Notch down the graphics and the engine just a little bit, and you'll save HUGE amounts of money."
No you won't. The graphics are handled client side. That spider that you attack - all the textures and whatnot for it are all coming from the data on your machine. And doesn't that seem to make sense? Why would a game developer transmit that data?
In fact, the actual game development can be made back fairly quickly. For example, take your average game that is not an MMO experience - it retails for $US 50, right? Well - companies are able to make a profit on these games and they don't have the benefit of a subscription model to offset development costs. Your average MMO game does tend to drop in price more quickly than a non-MMO game BUT the fact is that a lot of the development costs can be taken care of by the initial offering of the game to the consumer. By making a game less cutting edge and spending less time and money on the graphics technology, you'll attract fewer gamers. With fewer games subscribed to your service, the actual per user costs of service and server maintenance go up because you lose bulk discounts and whatnot.
Finally, people with a slow computer probably aren't the target demographic for a MMO game. A game where there is a monthly subscription fee is going to appeal to people who really enjoy games. People who really enjoy games typically spend a lot of money on having good rigs and therefore your statement that there are customers waiting to flock, I believe, is not correct.
"It was the first console with "real" 3D hardware (after the Nintendo 64)"
So it was the first after the first? Wouldn't that be the second?
And I don't quite understand how you define real 3D hardware. I would consider the PSX to have real 3D hardware but I guess to you, it had imaginary 3D hardware. That 3D hardware, the imaginary stuff, was pretty decent at the time. Even the first generation games like Jumping Flash had some pretty decent 3D aspects to it. But the thing with imaginary 3D hardware is that you're not limited by any constraints so the sky is really the limit. I don't know why every company doesn't go with imaginary 3D hardware.
Yeah, I'm joking here. But come on, what is real 3D hardware? I assume the AC is referring to real 3D hardware as being able to handle some X number of polygons per second or some such nonsense but making arbitrary high water marks like that where you distinguish between real 3D hardware and toy 3D hardware is silly. I can understand a phrase like "dedicated 3D hardware" but not "real 3D hardware."
the poster asks for a console to play around with for various "NET-RELATED THINGS"; if you can find a Dreamcast broadband adapter for under $100, you're finding it cheap.
Come on...net-related things...it's right there in that guy's post. Read all of the posts you reply to and then reply.
Well, first off - the person I was replying to was not concerned about price but merely selection. Now let's move on to the rest of your inane comment.
Free shipping on orders over $25? Yeah, that's true...although, you [being a fucking moron] might want to read the fine print: "FREE Super Saver Shipping excludes toys, apparel, video games and accessories, baby products, certain oversize items, Target products, Marshall Field's products, e-books and e-documents, software downloads, music downloads, gift certificates, Target GiftCards, Marshall Field's GiftCards, items from the Toys & Games store, Baby store, Marketplace..."
Ah yes, another moron who shoots off at the mouth and doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Go rot.
One factor to consider [but I don't neccescarily agree with the original claim that online gaming is a must have] is that the number of console owners playing online is small in comparison to installed user base, I would wager that the types of gamers who do take part in online play are the prime customer - the ones who play a lot of games and are willing to spend a lot of money on games every month. By attracting the hardcore gamer with an online experience, games released for an online-capable console will sell at a more rapid rate. Basically, what I'm getting at is that online gamers buy more games so you want them to buy your console.
"People are saying how cool this is but multidisplay gaming was being done on my Mac Quadra 840av back in 1989 or 1990 with an application galled Hornet by Graphic Simulations."
So your point is that because it has been done before, it's no longer cool?
I don't think the articles point is that this is some major innovation that's never been thought of before. Games that take advantage of multiple displays are few and far between. We can go make through the history of games on the PC and Mac and pick out a handful of them and show how knowledgeable we all are [as you seem to have chosen to do] but what purpose does that serve? The article isn't saying this is a new thing - it's saying it is an underused thing. Furthermore, it's a chicken before the egg situation because developers aren't going to support it until they know people are using multiple displays and people aren't going to use multiple displays until games take advantage of them. So yes, you were able to cite a game from the past that took advantage of this. Congratulations.
"PC gamers tend to have longer-attention spans than console gamers and stick to usually at most 4 online games at any give point."
It's fun to make statements and not back them up with any type of polling or real data.
I think you just pulled this "fact" out of your ass based on your own personal experience - and basing statistics off of your own personal experience is a sure way to create a meaningless stat.
I think you missed the entire point. And it's not even as though you had to read the article. The write-up did a nice job of summarizing the reason why people should care about the loss of a human language. Human language structure can give insight into the structure of created languages that may work better for certain tasks.
And to correct you, the computer does not "care" about anything. Zeroes and ones are what a processor interprets in order to execute an instruction but there's no reason you could not move to a 0,1 and 2 numbering system. Maybe the introduction to computer science class that you're taking hasn't covered this idea yet.
Language design benefits from having many different languages to examine. That's what this article is about. Take your binary elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Have a good day!
You might also note that to many people a $200 device competing with a device at $150 where one plays DVDs and one does not, if these people don't own DVD players and, at the time, the average cost of a DVD player was probably around $100, for a low grade model, is significant.
Okay, so let's say you put away $10 or $20 each week for the entire year. So you have enough money to comfortably buy 10 games in one month. Who has time to play those 10 games? I know that I got 3 games over the holiday season and I have yet to play 1 of them for more than two hours total and haven't even opened up another. It's not just a matter of economics - there's only so much time in the day. Hell, I'm still playing games I bought a year ago.
If a new Mortal Kombat came out and every review you read of it said it was a great game, on caliber with Soul Caliber, etc., you still would say, "Well, MK4 was bad so I won't buy this"??
Here's something to chew on. I didn't enjoy Quake I but Quake II is one of my favorite games of all time. If I had followed your logic, I never would have played Quake II.
No, we should judge games not based on previous games in the series but rather on the actual game and how satisfying it is. That's why I would consider buying a Mortal Kombat game and that's also why when a Mario game is released, I don't automatically say, "I'll take it!"
Just a word to the wise, the deadline for submission to this contest is February 29th. Clearly it's possible to write this type of script in a short period of time but for hobby-type programming contents, perhaps it would be more worthwhile to get this contest posted a bit before the deadline?
I'm not impressed by the interface redesigns. Part of the reason why I like google is that it isn't cluttered with useless information. There's an input field and the ability to submit my query. That's all I need from google. The artists who offered their ideas for a redesign seem to have made cluttered screens that, may be nice to look at, would introduce longer waiting times - and really, when I use google, I'm not going to google.com in order to see google, I'm going to see the pages that are of interest to me from my search query.
I suppose I need to get a change slot installed in my home so I can send my quarters down the pipe and have them pop out at pop-cap games.
A recent Slashdot article covered this topic.
Let the market dictate what sells - not some demand that phones remain phones and nothing more.
Because that's not what the settlement was.
In fact, the actual game development can be made back fairly quickly. For example, take your average game that is not an MMO experience - it retails for $US 50, right? Well - companies are able to make a profit on these games and they don't have the benefit of a subscription model to offset development costs. Your average MMO game does tend to drop in price more quickly than a non-MMO game BUT the fact is that a lot of the development costs can be taken care of by the initial offering of the game to the consumer. By making a game less cutting edge and spending less time and money on the graphics technology, you'll attract fewer gamers. With fewer games subscribed to your service, the actual per user costs of service and server maintenance go up because you lose bulk discounts and whatnot.
Finally, people with a slow computer probably aren't the target demographic for a MMO game. A game where there is a monthly subscription fee is going to appeal to people who really enjoy games. People who really enjoy games typically spend a lot of money on having good rigs and therefore your statement that there are customers waiting to flock, I believe, is not correct.
And I don't quite understand how you define real 3D hardware. I would consider the PSX to have real 3D hardware but I guess to you, it had imaginary 3D hardware. That 3D hardware, the imaginary stuff, was pretty decent at the time. Even the first generation games like Jumping Flash had some pretty decent 3D aspects to it. But the thing with imaginary 3D hardware is that you're not limited by any constraints so the sky is really the limit. I don't know why every company doesn't go with imaginary 3D hardware.
Yeah, I'm joking here. But come on, what is real 3D hardware? I assume the AC is referring to real 3D hardware as being able to handle some X number of polygons per second or some such nonsense but making arbitrary high water marks like that where you distinguish between real 3D hardware and toy 3D hardware is silly. I can understand a phrase like "dedicated 3D hardware" but not "real 3D hardware."
the poster asks for a console to play around with for various "NET-RELATED THINGS"; if you can find a Dreamcast broadband adapter for under $100, you're finding it cheap.
Come on...net-related things...it's right there in that guy's post. Read all of the posts you reply to and then reply.
Free shipping on orders over $25? Yeah, that's true...although, you [being a fucking moron] might want to read the fine print: "FREE Super Saver Shipping excludes toys, apparel, video games and accessories, baby products, certain oversize items, Target products, Marshall Field's products, e-books and e-documents, software downloads, music downloads, gift certificates, Target GiftCards, Marshall Field's GiftCards, items from the Toys & Games store, Baby store, Marketplace..."
Ah yes, another moron who shoots off at the mouth and doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Go rot.
Here's an introduction for idiots: hopefully it won't go over your head.
One factor to consider [but I don't neccescarily agree with the original claim that online gaming is a must have] is that the number of console owners playing online is small in comparison to installed user base, I would wager that the types of gamers who do take part in online play are the prime customer - the ones who play a lot of games and are willing to spend a lot of money on games every month. By attracting the hardcore gamer with an online experience, games released for an online-capable console will sell at a more rapid rate. Basically, what I'm getting at is that online gamers buy more games so you want them to buy your console.
Large selection, free shipping from time to time, timely service.
I don't think the articles point is that this is some major innovation that's never been thought of before. Games that take advantage of multiple displays are few and far between. We can go make through the history of games on the PC and Mac and pick out a handful of them and show how knowledgeable we all are [as you seem to have chosen to do] but what purpose does that serve? The article isn't saying this is a new thing - it's saying it is an underused thing. Furthermore, it's a chicken before the egg situation because developers aren't going to support it until they know people are using multiple displays and people aren't going to use multiple displays until games take advantage of them. So yes, you were able to cite a game from the past that took advantage of this. Congratulations.
I think you just pulled this "fact" out of your ass based on your own personal experience - and basing statistics off of your own personal experience is a sure way to create a meaningless stat.
And to correct you, the computer does not "care" about anything. Zeroes and ones are what a processor interprets in order to execute an instruction but there's no reason you could not move to a 0,1 and 2 numbering system. Maybe the introduction to computer science class that you're taking hasn't covered this idea yet.
Language design benefits from having many different languages to examine. That's what this article is about. Take your binary elsewhere.