Nnnah. Hack value cut by half or more due to using manufacturer-provided toolkit. Hack value is doing stuff on hardware not meant to do this stuff. If there's linux toolkit for Playstation, no, thanks, I'd rather get a PC.
So as usually, the truth is in the middle:P The cost of debugging a 10 years old game with the emulator will certainly not be 1/5 of a new title, but neither it will be 0.01% of the price of the download. Sales of these old games are expected to be lower than the new titles too. Nintendo will be making a good penny on the old games but this is NOT money for free - the actual cost of one download, including preparation of the ROM with betatesting and emulator corrections will not be near the sale price ($4-$8), but neither it will be ($0.01-$0.03) as the OP asserts. 40-80% is to be expected. 99% not. (also note some more obscure titles may require just the same amount if not more work, while producing really low revenue or even loss due to very limited sales...)
Most likely a month or two after release of the system people will find a way to upload pirated ROMs to Wii, making the service only a source for rare games you can't find ROMs for. But then this still builds the console user base, and encourages you to buy "native" Wii games.
The costs of these games for Wii was non-zero. Costs of developing the base emulator aside, each of the games had to be betatested and the emulator patched in case bugs were found. If you seen how emulation goes, each game has a ton of exceptions which are included in a mile-long.ini file which gets loaded with the ROM. Still, the file doesn't fix them all, and the games suffer some glitches. If Nintendo is to emulate old consoles using a new emulator, they must test, fix, modify, test again all the ages old code. It's not just "dump ROM into upload dir, slap on a price and index entry, make free for upload." It's a pretty complicated process of betatesting and adjusting the emulator to fix bugs that show up.
I'm just not as drawn to their products as I am to PC and X-Box (possibly PS3).
PC is a league of their own. You either play games that are 8 years old, or invest at least $1000 up front to be able to play the newest ones. Sure it's upgradable, it knows lots of tricks and can do more than XBOX360 and PS3 taken together.
PS3 and XBOX360 both run on sequels, remakes, more of the same, with better graphics. No innovation, nothing new. Out of 10 XBOX titles scheduled for release date, 9 were sequels. Sony doesn't plan any non-sequel non-exclusive content for PS3. You're going to spend lots of money and get nothing new in exchange. Just refreshes, remakes - BORING stuff.
Nintendo is currently the only one to include actual qualitative difference, not just quantitative. Instead of more polygons, higher CPU speed, higher framerate, more storage on media, higher resolution - nothing new, just more of the old - Nintendo introduces completely new concepts. New, different kinds of gameplay. New, different controller. New game genres!
It's not just an incremental change like others. It really is a revolution.
That would be a bad marketing move. I couldn't care less about the sports game, I hate sports games. And in this case I'll be perfectly satisfied with one controller - I might get the "classic" one too to play classic games. Now if they bundled another wiimote, I'd likely just sell it. I really don't want and don't need it. Overbundling is bad - price rises and user gets lots of junk they don't want.
I wonder what kind of text entry device/feature would it have. Opera + Java + Mindterm and you have a decent text terminal. Or java VNC client and you have a graphical terminal. (but likely the keyboard will be about the same as name entry in nintendo games, suuuucks!)
Still, imagine the total jawdrop of your friends as you start playing PC games on your WII (in fact on the remote PC, importing the display). Just for nerd points, worth it.
You carry it with yourself at all times, on your keychain for example. And in the morning when you fumble for your memory desperately, you check your pockets and here it is, this little gizmo, with a promising-looking button labelled "restore memory". Zip! and here you are... fumbling for a button labelled "erase memory":)
run virus scan, run rootkit scan, run malware scan BEFORE installing.
If I know a thing or two about these problems, these steps happen transparently thanks to virus scanner running in the background. The moment I click on the program, the antivirus will abort execution and display a warning if the program is a trojan. OTOH if I have no clue, my computer is already infested with enough spyware from porn webpages and "freeware".
Some people said in the comments "piracy will always exist as long as there's money in it" or such. Yeah. likely. But there's another important reason for piracy: CONVENIENCE.
Count steps, cost in time and effort, behind purchasing a legal piece of software, and obtaining it from illegal source.
Legal, downloadable: - Find website. - Access "shopping part" - Dig through marketing junk, looking for "buy" - Enter full billing information, usually involving grandmother's dogs name and shoe sizes of all children. - Agree to terms and conditions. - Click "download". - Open mailer, download mail, read serial. - Install.
Legal, purchasable online, boxed: - First, as above, till terms and conditions. - Click "buy" - Wait a week. - Go to the post office to pick it, the box didn't find in mail. It's a single CD but packed in box that could hold 300 of them and won't fit in your mailbox. - Rip through 5 to 8 layers of packaging. - Insert the CD. - During installation, retype the 30-character serial from the box.
Legal, purchasable at shop. - Instead of going to post office, go to a local computer shop. Or 10 if the package isn't so common. - Follow steps from above, till installation. - Register online for update (the version purchased is a year old) - Update to newest version using online updater.
Illegal: - Launch your favourite P2P program. - Type program name, Click "download" on the list. - Relax as it downloads. - Unzip. - Click "serial.txt", copy the serial. - Install.
Legal install, from the moment you start to want given program to the moment you have it running, rarely lasts less than a hour, often more than a week. Following the illegal way can often accomplish the task in 3-5 mins.
Of course. The bottle-opener and USB memory are totally separate devices simply attached to each other, without any influence on each other.
Now if there was a bottle opener and USB memory that automatically backs up YOUR physical memory to the drive when the bottle opener is used, allowing to restore it once the effects of the contents of the bottle expire, that would be useful.
The problem is these intimidated or stereotypically reacting people are exactly the ones who have no multicultural background. A group of punks in a multiracial gang will call each other Nigga, and none of them will take an offense about that - and once a white guy gets called that way, it results in a pretty comical effect. The most likely to be aggressive, the most stereotypical just make fun of the stereotype.
Now move it to an office with multiracial employees. Suddenly the in-joke becomes an offense.
Very rare occurance of stereotypes - okay, the problems are rare. Somewhat common occurance of stereotypes - bad. Atmosphere gets nervous. Very common occurance of stereotype - okay, everyone can see the stereotype is dumb and nobody takes it seriously anymore.
Currently may work for any multi-core console. Splitting tasks between 3 cores of XBOX360 seems like a plausible strategy. Exploiting 8 "satellite" cores of Cell for varied serializable tasks would likely make sense too.
Heh. If you haven't noticed how this works: It's not gaining 15 pounds of muscle tissue mass. There's exactly as many muscle fibers in each muscle, and the state is temporary. You simply pump muscles with high-energy mix of nutrients. They sure profit from nutrient being stored locally and will be more efficient than normally, plus this may be a great opportunity for actual muscle-building exercise, but essentially the method doesn't add a gram of muscle tissue, and once the nutrient is depleted, your muscles look just like before.
This would mean this trick doesn't really build muscle tissue. It just pumps currently available muscles with easy to absorb "fuel", allowing for temporary strength and stamina boost. But after some time - a few days maybe - the stored extra nutrient gets depleted and muscles return to previous state?
Gummibear juice more than radioactive spider bite...
One reasonable option for use of 3 or any odd number of CPUs is when you use 2^n + 1 - 2^n CPUs for the paralellized application, 1 for OS, demons and all the overhead. If you split the task in half, you'd like both halves to end at the same time. It won't happen if one of the CPUs gets additional work from other sources. So keep 2^n "workhorse" CPUs and one "manager" to coordinate them, provide interface, perform the load ballancing and all the other tasks other than the computation itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Who'd think... A link to Al Jazeera in a tech article on Slashdot, and on topic, not a troll...
Nnnah. Hack value cut by half or more due to using manufacturer-provided toolkit. Hack value is doing stuff on hardware not meant to do this stuff. If there's linux toolkit for Playstation, no, thanks, I'd rather get a PC.
Sure, but know what's my opinion about DNF?
Do you remember Daikatana?
Likely this exploit would be achieved by some proxy firewall, a man in the middle attack - and the same firewall could block unwanted updates.
because sequels shouldn't exceed 50% of available merchandize.
So as usually, the truth is in the middle :P
The cost of debugging a 10 years old game with the emulator will certainly not be 1/5 of a new title, but neither it will be 0.01% of the price of the download. Sales of these old games are expected to be lower than the new titles too. Nintendo will be making a good penny on the old games but this is NOT money for free - the actual cost of one download, including preparation of the ROM with betatesting and emulator corrections will not be near the sale price ($4-$8), but neither it will be ($0.01-$0.03) as the OP asserts. 40-80% is to be expected. 99% not.
(also note some more obscure titles may require just the same amount if not more work, while producing really low revenue or even loss due to very limited sales...)
Most likely a month or two after release of the system people will find a way to upload pirated ROMs to Wii, making the service only a source for rare games you can't find ROMs for. But then this still builds the console user base, and encourages you to buy "native" Wii games.
The costs of these games for Wii was non-zero. Costs of developing the base emulator aside, each of the games had to be betatested and the emulator patched in case bugs were found. If you seen how emulation goes, each game has a ton of exceptions which are included in a mile-long .ini file which gets loaded with the ROM. Still, the file doesn't fix them all, and the games suffer some glitches. If Nintendo is to emulate old consoles using a new emulator, they must test, fix, modify, test again all the ages old code. It's not just "dump ROM into upload dir, slap on a price and index entry, make free for upload." It's a pretty complicated process of betatesting and adjusting the emulator to fix bugs that show up.
For me it's a problem - Wii with -a- game, not with -the- game. I hate sports games. I'd gladly get something else instead, or have my $50 back.
I'm just not as drawn to their products as I am to PC and X-Box (possibly PS3).
PC is a league of their own. You either play games that are 8 years old, or invest at least $1000 up front to be able to play the newest ones. Sure it's upgradable, it knows lots of tricks and can do more than XBOX360 and PS3 taken together.
PS3 and XBOX360 both run on sequels, remakes, more of the same, with better graphics. No innovation, nothing new. Out of 10 XBOX titles scheduled for release date, 9 were sequels. Sony doesn't plan any non-sequel non-exclusive content for PS3. You're going to spend lots of money and get nothing new in exchange. Just refreshes, remakes - BORING stuff.
Nintendo is currently the only one to include actual qualitative difference, not just quantitative. Instead of more polygons, higher CPU speed, higher framerate, more storage on media, higher resolution - nothing new, just more of the old - Nintendo introduces completely new concepts. New, different kinds of gameplay. New, different controller. New game genres!
It's not just an incremental change like others. It really is a revolution.
That would be a bad marketing move.
I couldn't care less about the sports game, I hate sports games. And in this case I'll be perfectly satisfied with one controller - I might get the "classic" one too to play classic games. Now if they bundled another wiimote, I'd likely just sell it. I really don't want and don't need it. Overbundling is bad - price rises and user gets lots of junk they don't want.
I wonder what kind of text entry device/feature would it have.
Opera + Java + Mindterm and you have a decent text terminal. Or java VNC client and you have a graphical terminal. (but likely the keyboard will be about the same as name entry in nintendo games, suuuucks!)
Still, imagine the total jawdrop of your friends as you start playing PC games on your WII (in fact on the remote PC, importing the display). Just for nerd points, worth it.
You carry it with yourself at all times, on your keychain for example. And in the morning when you fumble for your memory desperately, you check your pockets and here it is, this little gizmo, with a promising-looking button labelled "restore memory". Zip! and here you are... fumbling for a button labelled "erase memory" :)
If the title meant ALL TIMES, then yes, chess or some card game would likely win. Same as Bible is the ultimate bestseller of all times.
run virus scan, run rootkit scan, run malware scan BEFORE installing.
If I know a thing or two about these problems, these steps happen transparently thanks to virus scanner running in the background. The moment I click on the program, the antivirus will abort execution and display a warning if the program is a trojan.
OTOH if I have no clue, my computer is already infested with enough spyware from porn webpages and "freeware".
Some people said in the comments "piracy will always exist as long as there's money in it" or such. Yeah. likely. But there's another important reason for piracy: CONVENIENCE.
Count steps, cost in time and effort, behind purchasing a legal piece of software, and obtaining it from illegal source.
Legal, downloadable:
- Find website.
- Access "shopping part"
- Dig through marketing junk, looking for "buy"
- Enter full billing information, usually involving grandmother's dogs name and shoe sizes of all children.
- Agree to terms and conditions.
- Click "download".
- Open mailer, download mail, read serial.
- Install.
Legal, purchasable online, boxed:
- First, as above, till terms and conditions.
- Click "buy"
- Wait a week.
- Go to the post office to pick it, the box didn't find in mail. It's a single CD but packed in box that could hold 300 of them and won't fit in your mailbox.
- Rip through 5 to 8 layers of packaging.
- Insert the CD.
- During installation, retype the 30-character serial from the box.
Legal, purchasable at shop.
- Instead of going to post office, go to a local computer shop. Or 10 if the package isn't so common.
- Follow steps from above, till installation.
- Register online for update (the version purchased is a year old)
- Update to newest version using online updater.
Illegal:
- Launch your favourite P2P program.
- Type program name, Click "download" on the list.
- Relax as it downloads.
- Unzip.
- Click "serial.txt", copy the serial.
- Install.
Legal install, from the moment you start to want given program to the moment you have it running, rarely lasts less than a hour, often more than a week. Following the illegal way can often accomplish the task in 3-5 mins.
I bet there is such an extension but I'd rather not clutter the GUI any more. :)
Up-Left-Up mouse gesture in MozGest fulfills the function well enough
No, RIAA is not Skynet, that's for sure. RIAA is equally evil, but vastly more incompetent.
Of course. The bottle-opener and USB memory are totally separate devices simply attached to each other, without any influence on each other.
Now if there was a bottle opener and USB memory that automatically backs up YOUR physical memory to the drive when the bottle opener is used, allowing to restore it once the effects of the contents of the bottle expire, that would be useful.
The problem is these intimidated or stereotypically reacting people are exactly the ones who have no multicultural background. A group of punks in a multiracial gang will call each other Nigga, and none of them will take an offense about that - and once a white guy gets called that way, it results in a pretty comical effect. The most likely to be aggressive, the most stereotypical just make fun of the stereotype.
Now move it to an office with multiracial employees. Suddenly the in-joke becomes an offense.
Very rare occurance of stereotypes - okay, the problems are rare.
Somewhat common occurance of stereotypes - bad. Atmosphere gets nervous.
Very common occurance of stereotype - okay, everyone can see the stereotype is dumb and nobody takes it seriously anymore.
Currently may work for any multi-core console. Splitting tasks between 3 cores of XBOX360 seems like a plausible strategy. Exploiting 8 "satellite" cores of Cell for varied serializable tasks would likely make sense too.
Heh. If you haven't noticed how this works: It's not gaining 15 pounds of muscle tissue mass. There's exactly as many muscle fibers in each muscle, and the state is temporary. You simply pump muscles with high-energy mix of nutrients. They sure profit from nutrient being stored locally and will be more efficient than normally, plus this may be a great opportunity for actual muscle-building exercise, but essentially the method doesn't add a gram of muscle tissue, and once the nutrient is depleted, your muscles look just like before.
From zero to superhero, and back.
This would mean this trick doesn't really build muscle tissue. It just pumps currently available muscles with easy to absorb "fuel", allowing for temporary strength and stamina boost. But after some time - a few days maybe - the stored extra nutrient gets depleted and muscles return to previous state?
Gummibear juice more than radioactive spider bite...
Why from all the superheros did you choose to be the Juggernaut, bitch?
One reasonable option for use of 3 or any odd number of CPUs is when you use 2^n + 1 - 2^n CPUs for the paralellized application, 1 for OS, demons and all the overhead. If you split the task in half, you'd like both halves to end at the same time. It won't happen if one of the CPUs gets additional work from other sources. So keep 2^n "workhorse" CPUs and one "manager" to coordinate them, provide interface, perform the load ballancing and all the other tasks other than the computation itself.