Most old videogame consoles use less than 1 watt on standby, but this seems to be
going away
The PS2 already used 2 watts on standby, and the XBox 360 is following suit. We don't have firm data on the Wii and the PS3, but given the numbers of the PS2 and the Wii Connect24 feature, I'd be surprised if either of the two go back to the 1W barrier
Dude, the US has tens of thousands of nukes. Enough to guarantee that the attacking country would be obliterated, even if they attacked by surprise. If the arsenal was divided by ten, it'd still be overkill.
The rate at the nukes are being disarmed is a joke when you consider how insane the US arsenal is.
That has little to do with HDTV/STV, and a lot to do with the limitations of LCDs. Every slashdot reader knows that running an LCD outside of its native resolution will get you a worse picture. There's HDTVs that still use a cathodic tube, and those have no problem whatsoever displaying a typical NTSC image apropriately.
I don't know the details, but it's pretty obvious that it's doable. Nintendo, for one, has motion sensing and rumble working just fine in the Wii remote.
Sony claims that they'll have 400,000 consoles for the US launch, and 100,000 for the Japanese launch. How in the world are they going to sell the most machines in Japan?
The fact is that Sony is more interested in the American Market. Since Microsoft is doing so poorly in Japan, they really don't need to try too hard to beat them. Nintendo will sink or swim on their own, regardless of what everyone else does.
Sony will ship around half a million million consoles to Japan before the end of the year. Based on Nintendo's claims, they are probably sending about 1 million consoles to Japan before the end of december. It'd take a miracle for the PS3 to lead in any territory. They are just making enough units compared to the competition.
Also, as far as the price cut goes, it'll be less of an issue to their finances because the ratio of core units vs premium consoles is heavily skewed towards the premium ones. Apparently, 80% of the consoles will be premium.
In my experience, the problem is not that the entire internet sales industry has changed: it's just the Honda dealers. In my areas, they have enough demand for everyone, so they won't give you anything that resembles a good price. In some models, they won't even bother stocking or special ordering bare bones vehicles.
Other automakers, including the rest of the japanese, will actually come to you with much better offers. Just a year ago, I got a starting offer for a japanese car that was $4000 under invoice, 8K under MSRP. The honda equivalent was competitively priced if you only compared MSRPs, but they wouldn't go down more than a grand.
Re:still supprised at the $250 price tag.
on
The Wii Takes NYC
·
· Score: 1
You also have to take into account that the Wii comes with IIRC 256 megs of intenal flash memory, so it's a free memory unit right there. How much do those go for in the 360?
Customer shoplifting is a noticeable part of shrinkage, but it's definitely not the only part, and in many retail stores it's not even the major cause. More often than not, employee theft or incompetence will be the cause of shrinkage. Throwing merchandise in the garbage to pick it up later, just taking stuff when the employee leaves the shift, or just forgetting to ring an item are the more common reasons for shrinkage in many US chains. When you add to this all kinds of underhanded tactics to take cash directly from the store, shoplifting becomes the least of your troubles.
I've not looked at the fraud numbers for an electronics chain like CompUSA, so there is a chance that shrinkage had a completely different shape than it does in apparel, groceries or furniture.
The gamespot editor seems to care very little about boardgames. You can call Alhambra many things, but it is NOT a stock market game. Its theme is palace building, and the main mechanics are tile placement and set collection. I mean, in which stock market do you try to arrange your 'shares' to build the largest wall?
Oh, and Alhambra is located in Granada, Spain. Sure, it was built by muslims, but it's not what I'd call arabian.
There are evaluation functions for go. They get better all the time, even though they are not as good as what we had for chess 15 years ago. The problem is that anything that any sophisticated funcion takes thousands of times longer to process than the top chess evaluation functions.
Still, brute-forcing a game like go is possible without an evaluation function. It's just so expensive that, given the current rate of computer progress, it'd probably take over a hundred years to get there.
While a large majority of xbox games go for the realistic look, there are a few good games that don't try to look realistic, like Jet Grind Radio, Panzer Dragoon Orta, or Psychonauts.
Sure, Wii will be a much better bet, but if you still have an xbox lying around, you might as well get some good games until Wii launches.
I thought that the right to comment on pretty much anything was one of the key concepts in modern western civilization. For example, in the US, there's this first amendment thingie that you might have heard about.
Telling anyone that they don't have the right to comment tells us a lot about which kind of person you are: The kind that claims that people can say anything they like, just as long as it's something you agree on.
The Rio Grande edition is printed using the IMO too complicated farmer scoring rules. You'd have better luck playing with the latest german rules that go like this:
Score each field separately. Whoever has the most farmers on each field gets 3 points per city adjacent to the field.
The scores are very similar to what they would be with the scoring system in the English rules, and it's much simpler and quicker.
You could also play one of the many carcassonne variants with simpler scoring systems, like Carcassonne: The city and Carcassone: Hunters and Gatherers. Both of those are IMO much better than the original.
I've had the opposite experience: settlers is harder to grasp, and it's much easier to be completely and utterly doomed to last place before you take your third turn. How is "Be the first to 10" any better than "have the most points possible"?
The reason many players like Settlers over Carcassonne is because it has significantly more player interaction. In many ways, it feels like a better, shorter monopoly. I personally find Settler's trading rather unfulfilling when compared to real trading games, so I'd rather play something like Traders of Genoa if I'm in the mood for a trading game.
Failing to represent the small states? Bah! If the Senate and Congress stay they way they are, the small states still have plenty of representation in Washington.
I think the change would be positive, as it would give the majority of people control of one branch of government, while the majority of states has control of two, leading to a more balanced, less partisan federal government.
Genetic manipulation, both for humans and plants, is not a bad thing on itself. The problem is that, the way current research is being done, very few will actually gain much by it. Just like research in geriatric medicine is wonderfully funded because there are a whole lot of rich seniors that would pay anything to improve their lives, genetic advances wold be marketed for the rich, and would only marginally help the average guy. Genetic engineering in plants is not just done to increase yields: companies like Monsanto make sure that the seeds the farmers buy won't reproduce, so that they have to buy them again next year. How does that kind of research make the plant better?
As far as organic food goes, I tend to buy organic produce, because in the local markets I have access to, the organic product tends to taste better. When fruit grows faster, it matures faster and doesn't get enough sun to get a decent taste. The food companies want to grow a lot of good looking fruit fast: Taste is only secondary. A vine riped tomato will taste significantly sweeter than any that you'll find in your typical supermarket. Anyone can distinguish between a normal banana and an organic banana, just on taste. A piece of meat that was never frozen and doesn't have hormones tastes better than the meat at the supermarket.
I'm sure it would be possible to spend research money on getting better tasting produce, but your average farmer is not paid extra if the food tastes better: he sells it all to a big distributor, that will pay him the same price per pound. The only ones that seem to concentrate on flavor just happen to have the organic label.
It doesn't matter if you claim a policy is reasonable or not. What really matters is what your average user would do when subject to such policy.under a 30-90 day strong password policy, most people end up writing the password down, or changing only 1 character every time, typically a number. If the user is forced to keep track of 3 or 4 passwords this way, you're guaranteed your passwords will be in cubicle walls.
If all you are worried about is external attacks, the fact that 60% of the company's passwords rotate between MonkeyBanana1 and MonkeyBanana80 might not be an issue, but for many IT departments out there, it'll lead to more breaches of security than a once a year password.
bzzz wrong. Console sales do not follow the same sharp sales curves that videogames, movies and cds do. Yo do get a spike at launch day, but that's about it. Take a look at the PS2 install base worldwide:
End of 2000 - 6.4 million End of 2001 - 24.99 million (+19) End of 2002 - 49.59 million (+25) End of 2003 - 69.46 million (+19) End of 2004 - 81.39 million (+12) End of 2005 -101.37 million (+20)
As you can see, sales are not all that different through the console's lifecycle. You see drops when few good games come out, and increases during price drops and major game releases. Just look at the weekly japanese sales at media create and crunch some numbers.
Based on the games that are confirmed for launch, Sony will need magic to have a must-have title, at any price. Most of the PS3 games that looked good came with a 2007 launch date, Heavenly Sword included.
Not unlike the PS2 launch, I don't expect any top quality titles until mid summer.
Consoles can be sold at a loss for a while, but most consoles are not sold at a loss all the time. The Saturn, PS2 and PSP were sold at a loss at launch, but I seriously doubt that the PS2 is being sold at a loss today. The Gamecube was priced over cost at launch, and only was sold at a loss for the first few months after the $150 price drop. One of the main reasons MS is changing processor and video card providers is because their contracts with Nvidia and Intel did not take into account the heavy decrease in manufacturing costs. As far as the 360 is concerned, Microsoft expects to be able to break even soon, if they haven't done so already.
Sure, no company tries to make most of their money on the hardware, but that doesn't mean they'll support a loss over $20 during the middle of a console's lifecycle.
I know a guy that quit 3D Realms a little under a year ago that joined the DNF team when SiN got released. He claims he worked on the game all that time. I won't tell you the horror stories I've heard, but trust me, there was people being paid to work on it.
Let's look at an independent source, like metacritic's DS game ranking. I see a bunch of 3rd party games that scored over 80:
Castlevania DS - Konami Osu Tatakae Ouendan - Inis Meteos - Q Entertainment Tony Hawk - Vicarious Visions Sonic Rush - Sega Trauma Center - Atlus Jump Superstars - Ganbarian Phoenix Wright - Capcom Age of Empires -Digital Eclipse
Not all that bad IMO, given that, IIRC, all of those came out in the last 12 months.
Warcraft, like Dune II, was a RTS game, in which the player mined resources in order to build an army. The difference, however, was in the details. Warcraft was set in the fictional world of Azeroth, a land which borrowed heavily from the fantasy universe created by J.R.R. Tolkien. In Warcraft, a horde of orcs have invaded the world of humans and must be pushed back (by the player) to the world from whence they've come. Or, alternately, the player must guide the invading orcs onward to victory against the hapless, medieval humans.
And for all this years I thought that Warcraft was borrowing heavily from Games Workshop's Warhammer miniatures game. Orcs that are green and pig-like, bearers of shamanistic magic, Dwarves with gunpowder, steam tanks as siege weapons, a race of demons... I guess that the article reporter/blogger knows better.
All you have to do is have a pricing model that allows you to lose the customer. There's plenty of companies that would let you buy the source of their program, but it'll cost you at least 10x the price of a normal enterprise price. You'll also have to sign a contract saying that your company and none of its affiliates will release a competing product to the market for the next 5 to 10 years. Besides, in many cases the only other people that could want to buy your product are your customer's competitors. If they are anything other than a software house, it's highly unlikely that they'd even considering selling your app to their competition.
I have to disagree with your view of large scale projects too: I've worked for a company that sold its products to a big iron industry. Our initial customization charges always started relatively cheap, but once you started relying on our project for your core operations, the prices would start to go up and up. They'd be charged six figures for a change that took 1 programmer 3 hours to code, test, and put on CVS. One specific company ended up spending one billion dollars on product, changes and consulting fees before they decided that they had to pull the plug. They were better off making the program from scratch than buying ours and paying for customizations.
I guess it's likely that what you call large scale is significantly smaller than what I think is large scale. Most Fortune 500 companies have a dev staff just to make those apps that no outside firm can sell to them for the same price. Walmart has programmers. Home Depot has programmers. Nextel has programmers. Citybank has programmers. And if one of those companies is outsourcing a mid sized project to you, I'd not be afraid of them trying to sell your app.
Slashdot Mirror
Most old videogame consoles use less than 1 watt on standby, but this seems to be going away The PS2 already used 2 watts on standby, and the XBox 360 is following suit. We don't have firm data on the Wii and the PS3, but given the numbers of the PS2 and the Wii Connect24 feature, I'd be surprised if either of the two go back to the 1W barrier
Dude, the US has tens of thousands of nukes. Enough to guarantee that the attacking country would be obliterated, even if they attacked by surprise. If the arsenal was divided by ten, it'd still be overkill.
The rate at the nukes are being disarmed is a joke when you consider how insane the US arsenal is.
That has little to do with HDTV/STV, and a lot to do with the limitations of LCDs. Every slashdot reader knows that running an LCD outside of its native resolution will get you a worse picture. There's HDTVs that still use a cathodic tube, and those have no problem whatsoever displaying a typical NTSC image apropriately.
HDTV!=Flat Panel
To me, it reads like Ubi is banking on good sales of the Wii to beat EA, which is pretty much what the article says.
I don't know the details, but it's pretty obvious that it's doable. Nintendo, for one, has motion sensing and rumble working just fine in the Wii remote.
Sony claims that they'll have 400,000 consoles for the US launch, and 100,000 for the Japanese launch. How in the world are they going to sell the most machines in Japan?
The fact is that Sony is more interested in the American Market. Since Microsoft is doing so poorly in Japan, they really don't need to try too hard to beat them. Nintendo will sink or swim on their own, regardless of what everyone else does.
Sony will ship around half a million million consoles to Japan before the end of the year. Based on Nintendo's claims, they are probably sending about 1 million consoles to Japan before the end of december. It'd take a miracle for the PS3 to lead in any territory. They are just making enough units compared to the competition.
Also, as far as the price cut goes, it'll be less of an issue to their finances because the ratio of core units vs premium consoles is heavily skewed towards the premium ones. Apparently, 80% of the consoles will be premium.
In my experience, the problem is not that the entire internet sales industry has changed: it's just the Honda dealers. In my areas, they have enough demand for everyone, so they won't give you anything that resembles a good price. In some models, they won't even bother stocking or special ordering bare bones vehicles. Other automakers, including the rest of the japanese, will actually come to you with much better offers. Just a year ago, I got a starting offer for a japanese car that was $4000 under invoice, 8K under MSRP. The honda equivalent was competitively priced if you only compared MSRPs, but they wouldn't go down more than a grand.
You also have to take into account that the Wii comes with IIRC 256 megs of intenal flash memory, so it's a free memory unit right there. How much do those go for in the 360?
Customer shoplifting is a noticeable part of shrinkage, but it's definitely not the only part, and in many retail stores it's not even the major cause. More often than not, employee theft or incompetence will be the cause of shrinkage. Throwing merchandise in the garbage to pick it up later, just taking stuff when the employee leaves the shift, or just forgetting to ring an item are the more common reasons for shrinkage in many US chains. When you add to this all kinds of underhanded tactics to take cash directly from the store, shoplifting becomes the least of your troubles. I've not looked at the fraud numbers for an electronics chain like CompUSA, so there is a chance that shrinkage had a completely different shape than it does in apparel, groceries or furniture.
The gamespot editor seems to care very little about boardgames. You can call Alhambra many things, but it is NOT a stock market game. Its theme is palace building, and the main mechanics are tile placement and set collection. I mean, in which stock market do you try to arrange your 'shares' to build the largest wall?
Oh, and Alhambra is located in Granada, Spain. Sure, it was built by muslims, but it's not what I'd call arabian.
mmm... no.
There are evaluation functions for go. They get better all the time, even though they are not as good as what we had for chess 15 years ago. The problem is that anything that any sophisticated funcion takes thousands of times longer to process than the top chess evaluation functions.
Still, brute-forcing a game like go is possible without an evaluation function. It's just so expensive that, given the current rate of computer progress, it'd probably take over a hundred years to get there.
While a large majority of xbox games go for the realistic look, there are a few good games that don't try to look realistic, like Jet Grind Radio, Panzer Dragoon Orta, or Psychonauts.
Sure, Wii will be a much better bet, but if you still have an xbox lying around, you might as well get some good games until Wii launches.
I thought that the right to comment on pretty much anything was one of the key concepts in modern western civilization. For example, in the US, there's this first amendment thingie that you might have heard about.
Telling anyone that they don't have the right to comment tells us a lot about which kind of person you are: The kind that claims that people can say anything they like, just as long as it's something you agree on.
The Rio Grande edition is printed using the IMO too complicated farmer scoring rules. You'd have better luck playing with the latest german rules that go like this:
Score each field separately. Whoever has the most farmers on each field gets 3 points per city adjacent to the field.
The scores are very similar to what they would be with the scoring system in the English rules, and it's much simpler and quicker.
You could also play one of the many carcassonne variants with simpler scoring systems, like Carcassonne: The city and Carcassone: Hunters and Gatherers. Both of those are IMO much better than the original.
I've had the opposite experience: settlers is harder to grasp, and it's much easier to be completely and utterly doomed to last place before you take your third turn. How is "Be the first to 10" any better than "have the most points possible"?
The reason many players like Settlers over Carcassonne is because it has significantly more player interaction. In many ways, it feels like a better, shorter monopoly. I personally find Settler's trading rather unfulfilling when compared to real trading games, so I'd rather play something like Traders of Genoa if I'm in the mood for a trading game.
Failing to represent the small states? Bah! If the Senate and Congress stay they way they are, the small states still have plenty of representation in Washington.
I think the change would be positive, as it would give the majority of people control of one branch of government, while the majority of states has control of two, leading to a more balanced, less partisan federal government.
Genetic manipulation, both for humans and plants, is not a bad thing on itself. The problem is that, the way current research is being done, very few will actually gain much by it. Just like research in geriatric medicine is wonderfully funded because there are a whole lot of rich seniors that would pay anything to improve their lives, genetic advances wold be marketed for the rich, and would only marginally help the average guy. Genetic engineering in plants is not just done to increase yields: companies like Monsanto make sure that the seeds the farmers buy won't reproduce, so that they have to buy them again next year. How does that kind of research make the plant better?
As far as organic food goes, I tend to buy organic produce, because in the local markets I have access to, the organic product tends to taste better. When fruit grows faster, it matures faster and doesn't get enough sun to get a decent taste. The food companies want to grow a lot of good looking fruit fast: Taste is only secondary. A vine riped tomato will taste significantly sweeter than any that you'll find in your typical supermarket. Anyone can distinguish between a normal banana and an organic banana, just on taste. A piece of meat that was never frozen and doesn't have hormones tastes better than the meat at the supermarket.
I'm sure it would be possible to spend research money on getting better tasting produce, but your average farmer is not paid extra if the food tastes better: he sells it all to a big distributor, that will pay him the same price per pound. The only ones that seem to concentrate on flavor just happen to have the organic label.
It doesn't matter if you claim a policy is reasonable or not. What really matters is what your average user would do when subject to such policy.under a 30-90 day strong password policy, most people end up writing the password down, or changing only 1 character every time, typically a number. If the user is forced to keep track of 3 or 4 passwords this way, you're guaranteed your passwords will be in cubicle walls.
If all you are worried about is external attacks, the fact that 60% of the company's passwords rotate between MonkeyBanana1 and MonkeyBanana80 might not be an issue, but for many IT departments out there, it'll lead to more breaches of security than a once a year password.
bzzz wrong. Console sales do not follow the same sharp sales curves that videogames, movies and cds do. Yo do get a spike at launch day, but that's about it. Take a look at the PS2 install base worldwide:
End of 2000 - 6.4 million
End of 2001 - 24.99 million (+19)
End of 2002 - 49.59 million (+25)
End of 2003 - 69.46 million (+19)
End of 2004 - 81.39 million (+12)
End of 2005 -101.37 million (+20)
As you can see, sales are not all that different through the console's lifecycle. You see drops when few good games come out, and increases during price drops and major game releases. Just look at the weekly japanese sales at media create and crunch some numbers.
Based on the games that are confirmed for launch, Sony will need magic to have a must-have title, at any price. Most of the PS3 games that looked good came with a 2007 launch date, Heavenly Sword included.
Not unlike the PS2 launch, I don't expect any top quality titles until mid summer.
Consoles can be sold at a loss for a while, but most consoles are not sold at a loss all the time. The Saturn, PS2 and PSP were sold at a loss at launch, but I seriously doubt that the PS2 is being sold at a loss today. The Gamecube was priced over cost at launch, and only was sold at a loss for the first few months after the $150 price drop. One of the main reasons MS is changing processor and video card providers is because their contracts with Nvidia and Intel did not take into account the heavy decrease in manufacturing costs. As far as the 360 is concerned, Microsoft expects to be able to break even soon, if they haven't done so already.
Sure, no company tries to make most of their money on the hardware, but that doesn't mean they'll support a loss over $20 during the middle of a console's lifecycle.
I know a guy that quit 3D Realms a little under a year ago that joined the DNF team when SiN got released. He claims he worked on the game all that time. I won't tell you the horror stories I've heard, but trust me, there was people being paid to work on it.
Let's look at an independent source, like metacritic's DS game ranking. I see a bunch of 3rd party games that scored over 80:
Castlevania DS - Konami
Osu Tatakae Ouendan - Inis
Meteos - Q Entertainment
Tony Hawk - Vicarious Visions
Sonic Rush - Sega
Trauma Center - Atlus
Jump Superstars - Ganbarian
Phoenix Wright - Capcom
Age of Empires -Digital Eclipse
Not all that bad IMO, given that, IIRC, all of those came out in the last 12 months.
All you have to do is have a pricing model that allows you to lose the customer. There's plenty of companies that would let you buy the source of their program, but it'll cost you at least 10x the price of a normal enterprise price. You'll also have to sign a contract saying that your company and none of its affiliates will release a competing product to the market for the next 5 to 10 years. Besides, in many cases the only other people that could want to buy your product are your customer's competitors. If they are anything other than a software house, it's highly unlikely that they'd even considering selling your app to their competition.
I have to disagree with your view of large scale projects too: I've worked for a company that sold its products to a big iron industry. Our initial customization charges always started relatively cheap, but once you started relying on our project for your core operations, the prices would start to go up and up. They'd be charged six figures for a change that took 1 programmer 3 hours to code, test, and put on CVS. One specific company ended up spending one billion dollars on product, changes and consulting fees before they decided that they had to pull the plug. They were better off making the program from scratch than buying ours and paying for customizations.
I guess it's likely that what you call large scale is significantly smaller than what I think is large scale. Most Fortune 500 companies have a dev staff just to make those apps that no outside firm can sell to them for the same price. Walmart has programmers. Home Depot has programmers. Nextel has programmers. Citybank has programmers. And if one of those companies is outsourcing a mid sized project to you, I'd not be afraid of them trying to sell your app.