Love it or hate it, Tray and Play is actually a good idea. As others have already mentioned, it effectively turns the PC into a console with the same ease of use. And it should also stem some of the piracy headache on the PC, at least the casual pirates. If Microsoft can pull this off, then they are freakin' geniuses! Why? Because there are so many PC configurations out there, that getting this to work on most of them will be a real challenge, not to mention defeating various hacks. But heck, if they can get Tray and Play to work on the Best Buy and WalMart PCs that people are buying these days, then that may be good enough. Will this save PC gaming? I don't know. PC gaming will never die, but this could actually make casual players think of the PC again instead of just consoles. And anything that helps PC sales can only help Microsoft. From a development point of view, Tray and Play looks more like a way to make Xbox to PC ports easier.
Re:Back on topic; They leave because they're smart
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 1
Absolutely! Why stay on a career path that has little upside in these days of overseas outsourcing? IMHO, women tend to be smarter than men when it comes to quality of life issues. So if the environment of IT is also uninviting and insecure, leaving is one smart response. Personally, I'd love to see women stay in IT and for US IT to flourish once more, but it's a new world now and a new game.
It's good to see that something is happening at EA on the recently publicized employment issues there. And while their announcement has the flavor of unhappy grumbling, it nonetheless must create some ripples across the industry because of EA's size and influence. Maybe this means that the games industry is starting to grow up and take some responsibility for how their employees are treated. It's a bit ironic though that EA makes reference to the very entrepreneural spirit that their flurry of buyouts and exclusive deals seem to be trying to stamp out! That may not be their intent (yeah, right...), but large monopolistic bodies do tend to discourage the creation of competitive startups.
Seriously, I can stop anytime I want! But that's the problem! I sometimes go days and weeks without playing FFIX which means that my characters are not exactly 1337. Oh, I enjoy the game but I'm always getting interrupted by trivial matters like kids asking to the fed, clothed, bathed, given an education... Once the kids are done, then my wife wants things like conversation, affection, love. Man! With all of these distractions, I hardly have time to level up my characters these days at all! Now with an addiction, I could shut all of that out and have a Samurai Monk in no time, or at least it will seem like no time. What? I've got to work too!? See no time no time!
Intuit pretty much owns the the tax software market these days. But if your taxes are not too complicated, I think the IRS has some ways to file online or via telephone. It's not OS but it does get the job done.
It'll be interesting to see what effect this NGJ has on the gaming media and media in general. There are clearly some talented people out there who we might never have heard from previously. Of course, there's a lot of junk too! In any case, here's a tool I whipped up using Yahoo's Search API for doing video game news searches which NGJs might find useful. I built it to help me find interesting things to write about and to help see developing patterns or trends.
Interestingly enough, N-Gage might be a collatoral beneficiary of the coming PSP vs DS war. Why? Because Sony and Nintendo are going to focus the public's attention on mobile/wireless gaming like never before. That means that the casual gamer is going to be thinking about it a little more than usual. So how does N-Gage benefit from this? They benefit the same way that Xbox and Game Cube benefit from PS2 shortages. There won't be enough PSPs and DSs to go around when things really heat up, but people are always buying cell phones. The casual gamer probably already has some cell phone games. When he can't get a PSP or DS, he may opt for an N-Gage. Nokia may not move a lot of consoles this way, but since the casual gamer may not appreciate the differences and wants a phone anyway, N-Gage may do okay.
Actually Katamari Damacy gets a rating all its own as it is quite disturbing! A lot of fun, but definitely disturbing!
It will be interesting to see if any games in current release rated as T are retroactively rated to E10+ if appropriate. Obviously, this has serious marketing implications of the sort that drove the PG-13 movie rating's creation. The E10+ rating should result in a little upward tick in revenues as the group of "acceptable" games grows.
As hard as it will be, I'm going to be sitting on my hands for this one. I want to see how many of them break in the first batch and I also want to see how the software market develops for the PSP before committing any cash. Oh and let's not forget about the hacks that will develop! Hopefully it won't be too hard to get some homebrew software running on the PSP.
Wow! I guess this means the video games generation is coming of age. It's quite a pleasure seeing the art form that is video games flourishing and taking its place alongside other art forms. I wonder if the Renaissance felt a little like this, except for electricity and indoor plumbing.
In other news, EA announced its immediate intention to buy the remaining 80% of Ubisoft shares that it does not currently own. EA cited prurient business interests for its decision and denied any intention of monopolizing video game sports titles with the acquisition of Ubisoft. The Guillemot brothers could not be reached for comment.
This is why competition is good! I always like trying out new things, and the competition between Yahoo! and Google seems to be giving rise to some new toys for me to play with. So I'll definitely be taking a look at the Yahoo! Search APIs. One thing I love about the release of APIs like this is that it allows you to build the site/tools that you want. So if you hate Yahoo!'s homepage, etc.., this is a chance to build something better. And everyone wins!
I don't think that the lessons that Sega learned when you fill the channel with too many different kinds of hardware will be lost on Nintendo. If Nintendo does release a new GBA, it will most likely be an update along the lines of Sony's redesigned PS2. They add some things that people have wanted, like a standard headphone jack and take away things that no one uses or that cause problems. If a new GBA comes out, expect it to be harder or impossible to play pirated games and don't be surprised if GB Color compatibility is finally dropped. Finally, a newly tweaked GBA would probably be prettier (slimmer?), and perhaps cheaper for Nintendo to manufacture. If you see the SPs drop to $59 before the holiday season, then a redesigned GBA may well be around the corner coming out at $79.
There's probably nothing to get excited about here. The Costa Ricans aren't any stupider than anyone else in the world. The local phone monopoly just wants to get some attention, which will set the stage for whatever deal finally comes out of the governing process. Very likely VoIP won't be criminalized in Costa Rica. It will probably have fees attached to it. The only question will be how much these fees are likely to be. I would guess they will be high enough to protect the phone monopoly. Just the usual politics...
Jokes about handholding aside, there are some intriguing possibilities here. Could this be the sort of MMORPG we might eventually see released by Nintendo, the kinder, gentler MMORPG? And the idea of having individual GCs act as mini-servers opens up possibilities if you throw in a wireless adapter and DS support. Imagine a bunch of these set up in your typical college dorm! With enough nodes you've essentially set up a local virtual neighborhood.
I had tickets to that concert which I'd bought as soon as they went on sale. I'd planned for every contingency...except one. My son got sick and I had to miss the concert. Akkk! So thanks for posting this first hand account of the concert! I hope that some DVD or CD releases of the concert series in the U.S. will be available in the future. Thanks again!
What Dvorak describes is too much work. Microsoft doesn't need to kill Linux to maintain dominance at all. In short all they really have to do is create their own Linux distribution, just like anyone else can, and then port Office to it. All of this can be done without violating the GPL or open sourcing Office. Office is the real source of MS power after all, people need Windows to run Office.
Even if the MS Linux distribution were no better than any other, people would still buy it and/or support contracts preferentially over any other. Most people always play it safe. MS could still support Windows if they wanted to, or they could gradually phase it out. If they play nice, they could cut their development costs by leveraging the vast open source development community. So far, IBM has been able to embrace Linux and open source without killing their business, I think Microsoft can do the same. Developers didn't abandon Linux when IBM and Novell joined the party and I doubt they will if Microsoft joined in too. Indeed, a lot of Windows developers would be pulled along too. The question is whether Microsoft is brave enough to let go of the Windows security blanket.
And welcome to the Missing the Point Club! As a black person myself, I think I know a bit about standing up for what you believe in. I do that everyday. As for Webzen, the character does look too much like Link. Ever seen the Sho Yu Weenie episode of Harvey Birdman?
Geez! The guy in the picture looks just like Link! Why don't they just make the default hero a spunky little Black kid, then Nintendo won't have anything to complain about. Seriously though, given the stink Marvel is raising over the ability of players in City of Heroes to clone (to some extent) Marvel characters in appearance, Webzen might consider getting this settled quickly.
Given that Microsoft must already know the danger of splintering the market by offering the HD as an add on, I would say that it's just a marketing hedge. They don't want to really support a hard drive at all and probably won't develop any games that would require such an add on. For end users the Xbox hard drive was great, no memory cards to buy and a really hackable games console. For MS, this was a big headache! The HD coupled with its PC-based hardware and development model made Xbox piracy relatively easy and hacked Xboxes running Linux are a pure loss on the books for Microsoft. And I can't think of a single game on the Xbox that really could only be done with a built in hard drive. The only game that would have really required the HD is the now cancelled MMORPG, True Fantasy Online. And since the Xbox runs a distant 2nd (or 3rd) to the PS2, supporting the Xbox HD beyond simple game saves means not being able to port to the other consoles easily, though usually the porting went in the other direction.
As much as the hardcore love having a built in hard drive, for Microsoft it's probably been a real pain. More common broadband and flash memory drives in excess of 1GB will make the need for multigigabyte internal hard drive less and less. Not having the hard drive will make it easier for MS to reduce piracy and royalty stealing Xbox hacks. The nonPC-based architecture will help this too. And I suspect that memory cards are always sold at a profit. Ultimately, I think this is their true intention. Anything else you hear about built in hard drives from this point on is just marketing hype. A HD compatible bay is just a bullet point now, nothing developers will be encouraged to support.
First, as some others have said, the Nintendo buyout speculation is probably just smoke drifting off the top of Hawkins' head. But it is certainly not impossible. A lot of unlikely things would have to happen first. For one, Nintendo is facing a significant threat in the form of the Sony PSP which could, despite its technical drawback re battery life, eat into the profits that Game Boy dominance has brought Nintendo for many years. If Sony took say 25% to 40% of the handheld market from Nintendo, that would hurt. The next thing that would have to happen is that Microsoft learns from its mistakes and gains significant marketshare in Japan with Xbox 2. If Microsoft were to make those gains at the expense of Nintendo, then 5 years from now, we could see a Nintendo that was in danger of losing money. And what would make them sell out to a non-Japanese company like Microsoft? Perhaps anger and hatred of Sony. Remember, the original Playstation project was a Sony made CD addon to the SNES, which Nintendo decided to scrap. Sony went on to release the project as the standalone Playstation and the rest is history. Nintendo has been losing marketshare ever since. So it probably would not be a big stretch to say that Sony and Nintendo are not the greatest of pals.
This is all highly speculative and improbable. Nintendo still has a chance to turn things around and get more third party developers onboard. And of course, they still have those great franchises, Mario, Zelda, etc... But it will not be easy. If they have another goof up like sticking with cartridges too long, then Microsoft may find itself with another campus in Redmond. If Mario comes to MS, then Clippy may be out of a job too!
Actually, Netflix did rent Adult DVDs in their early years, then quietly dropped it around the time they began to get more press. They never had anything hard core, just stuff along the lines of Girls Gone Wild. I guess you'd call it blue. Some of the Japanese idol stuff was rather interesting, they even had some hentai...or so I heard...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Love it or hate it, Tray and Play is actually a good idea. As others have already mentioned, it effectively turns the PC into a console with the same ease of use. And it should also stem some of the piracy headache on the PC, at least the casual pirates. If Microsoft can pull this off, then they are freakin' geniuses! Why? Because there are so many PC configurations out there, that getting this to work on most of them will be a real challenge, not to mention defeating various hacks. But heck, if they can get Tray and Play to work on the Best Buy and WalMart PCs that people are buying these days, then that may be good enough. Will this save PC gaming? I don't know. PC gaming will never die, but this could actually make casual players think of the PC again instead of just consoles. And anything that helps PC sales can only help Microsoft. From a development point of view, Tray and Play looks more like a way to make Xbox to PC ports easier.
Absolutely! Why stay on a career path that has little upside in these days of overseas outsourcing? IMHO, women tend to be smarter than men when it comes to quality of life issues. So if the environment of IT is also uninviting and insecure, leaving is one smart response. Personally, I'd love to see women stay in IT and for US IT to flourish once more, but it's a new world now and a new game.
It's good to see that something is happening at EA on the recently publicized employment issues there. And while their announcement has the flavor of unhappy grumbling, it nonetheless must create some ripples across the industry because of EA's size and influence. Maybe this means that the games industry is starting to grow up and take some responsibility for how their employees are treated. It's a bit ironic though that EA makes reference to the very entrepreneural spirit that their flurry of buyouts and exclusive deals seem to be trying to stamp out! That may not be their intent (yeah, right...), but large monopolistic bodies do tend to discourage the creation of competitive startups.
Seriously, I can stop anytime I want! But that's the problem! I sometimes go days and weeks without playing FFIX which means that my characters are not exactly 1337. Oh, I enjoy the game but I'm always getting interrupted by trivial matters like kids asking to the fed, clothed, bathed, given an education... Once the kids are done, then my wife wants things like conversation, affection, love. Man! With all of these distractions, I hardly have time to level up my characters these days at all! Now with an addiction, I could shut all of that out and have a Samurai Monk in no time, or at least it will seem like no time. What? I've got to work too!? See no time no time!
Intuit pretty much owns the the tax software market these days. But if your taxes are not too complicated, I think the IRS has some ways to file online or via telephone. It's not OS but it does get the job done.
http://www.irs.gov/
It'll be interesting to see what effect this NGJ has on the gaming media and media in general. There are clearly some talented people out there who we might never have heard from previously. Of course, there's a lot of junk too! In any case, here's a tool I whipped up using Yahoo's Search API for doing video game news searches which NGJs might find useful. I built it to help me find interesting things to write about and to help see developing patterns or trends.
http://www.proliphus.com/yws/peywsnews.php
Ugh, I meant Collateral... May the gods of spelling have mercy!
Interestingly enough, N-Gage might be a collatoral beneficiary of the coming PSP vs DS war. Why? Because Sony and Nintendo are going to focus the public's attention on mobile/wireless gaming like never before. That means that the casual gamer is going to be thinking about it a little more than usual. So how does N-Gage benefit from this? They benefit the same way that Xbox and Game Cube benefit from PS2 shortages. There won't be enough PSPs and DSs to go around when things really heat up, but people are always buying cell phones. The casual gamer probably already has some cell phone games. When he can't get a PSP or DS, he may opt for an N-Gage. Nokia may not move a lot of consoles this way, but since the casual gamer may not appreciate the differences and wants a phone anyway, N-Gage may do okay.
Actually Katamari Damacy gets a rating all its own as it is quite disturbing! A lot of fun, but definitely disturbing!
It will be interesting to see if any games in current release rated as T are retroactively rated to E10+ if appropriate. Obviously, this has serious marketing implications of the sort that drove the PG-13 movie rating's creation. The E10+ rating should result in a little upward tick in revenues as the group of "acceptable" games grows.
As hard as it will be, I'm going to be sitting on my hands for this one. I want to see how many of them break in the first batch and I also want to see how the software market develops for the PSP before committing any cash. Oh and let's not forget about the hacks that will develop! Hopefully it won't be too hard to get some homebrew software running on the PSP.
Wow! I guess this means the video games generation is coming of age. It's quite a pleasure seeing the art form that is video games flourishing and taking its place alongside other art forms. I wonder if the Renaissance felt a little like this, except for electricity and indoor plumbing.
In other news, EA announced its immediate intention to buy the remaining 80% of Ubisoft shares that it does not currently own. EA cited prurient business interests for its decision and denied any intention of monopolizing video game sports titles with the acquisition of Ubisoft. The Guillemot brothers could not be reached for comment.
Uh, yeah...
This is why competition is good! I always like trying out new things, and the competition between Yahoo! and Google seems to be giving rise to some new toys for me to play with. So I'll definitely be taking a look at the Yahoo! Search APIs. One thing I love about the release of APIs like this is that it allows you to build the site/tools that you want. So if you hate Yahoo!'s homepage, etc.., this is a chance to build something better. And everyone wins!
I don't think that the lessons that Sega learned when you fill the channel with too many different kinds of hardware will be lost on Nintendo. If Nintendo does release a new GBA, it will most likely be an update along the lines of Sony's redesigned PS2. They add some things that people have wanted, like a standard headphone jack and take away things that no one uses or that cause problems. If a new GBA comes out, expect it to be harder or impossible to play pirated games and don't be surprised if GB Color compatibility is finally dropped. Finally, a newly tweaked GBA would probably be prettier (slimmer?), and perhaps cheaper for Nintendo to manufacture. If you see the SPs drop to $59 before the holiday season, then a redesigned GBA may well be around the corner coming out at $79.
There's probably nothing to get excited about here. The Costa Ricans aren't any stupider than anyone else in the world. The local phone monopoly just wants to get some attention, which will set the stage for whatever deal finally comes out of the governing process. Very likely VoIP won't be criminalized in Costa Rica. It will probably have fees attached to it. The only question will be how much these fees are likely to be. I would guess they will be high enough to protect the phone monopoly. Just the usual politics...
Jokes about handholding aside, there are some intriguing possibilities here. Could this be the sort of MMORPG we might eventually see released by Nintendo, the kinder, gentler MMORPG? And the idea of having individual GCs act as mini-servers opens up possibilities if you throw in a wireless adapter and DS support. Imagine a bunch of these set up in your typical college dorm! With enough nodes you've essentially set up a local virtual neighborhood.
I had tickets to that concert which I'd bought as soon as they went on sale. I'd planned for every contingency...except one. My son got sick and I had to miss the concert. Akkk! So thanks for posting this first hand account of the concert! I hope that some DVD or CD releases of the concert series in the U.S. will be available in the future. Thanks again!
What Dvorak describes is too much work. Microsoft doesn't need to kill Linux to maintain dominance at all. In short all they really have to do is create their own Linux distribution, just like anyone else can, and then port Office to it. All of this can be done without violating the GPL or open sourcing Office. Office is the real source of MS power after all, people need Windows to run Office.
Even if the MS Linux distribution were no better than any other, people would still buy it and/or support contracts preferentially over any other. Most people always play it safe. MS could still support Windows if they wanted to, or they could gradually phase it out. If they play nice, they could cut their development costs by leveraging the vast open source development community. So far, IBM has been able to embrace Linux and open source without killing their business, I think Microsoft can do the same. Developers didn't abandon Linux when IBM and Novell joined the party and I doubt they will if Microsoft joined in too. Indeed, a lot of Windows developers would be pulled along too. The question is whether Microsoft is brave enough to let go of the Windows security blanket.
And welcome to the Missing the Point Club! As a black person myself, I think I know a bit about standing up for what you believe in. I do that everyday. As for Webzen, the character does look too much like Link. Ever seen the Sho Yu Weenie episode of Harvey Birdman?
Geez! The guy in the picture looks just like Link! Why don't they just make the default hero a spunky little Black kid, then Nintendo won't have anything to complain about. Seriously though, given the stink Marvel is raising over the ability of players in City of Heroes to clone (to some extent) Marvel characters in appearance, Webzen might consider getting this settled quickly.
I guess this means reality shows starring Lara Croft and Paris Hilton! As Quagmire would say, awwww riiiight!
Actually I have. I rented it from Netflix! Guess I'm in trouble now!
Given that Microsoft must already know the danger of splintering the market by offering the HD as an add on, I would say that it's just a marketing hedge. They don't want to really support a hard drive at all and probably won't develop any games that would require such an add on. For end users the Xbox hard drive was great, no memory cards to buy and a really hackable games console. For MS, this was a big headache! The HD coupled with its PC-based hardware and development model made Xbox piracy relatively easy and hacked Xboxes running Linux are a pure loss on the books for Microsoft. And I can't think of a single game on the Xbox that really could only be done with a built in hard drive. The only game that would have really required the HD is the now cancelled MMORPG, True Fantasy Online. And since the Xbox runs a distant 2nd (or 3rd) to the PS2, supporting the Xbox HD beyond simple game saves means not being able to port to the other consoles easily, though usually the porting went in the other direction.
As much as the hardcore love having a built in hard drive, for Microsoft it's probably been a real pain. More common broadband and flash memory drives in excess of 1GB will make the need for multigigabyte internal hard drive less and less. Not having the hard drive will make it easier for MS to reduce piracy and royalty stealing Xbox hacks. The nonPC-based architecture will help this too. And I suspect that memory cards are always sold at a profit. Ultimately, I think this is their true intention. Anything else you hear about built in hard drives from this point on is just marketing hype. A HD compatible bay is just a bullet point now, nothing developers will be encouraged to support.
First, as some others have said, the Nintendo buyout speculation is probably just smoke drifting off the top of Hawkins' head. But it is certainly not impossible. A lot of unlikely things would have to happen first. For one, Nintendo is facing a significant threat in the form of the Sony PSP which could, despite its technical drawback re battery life, eat into the profits that Game Boy dominance has brought Nintendo for many years. If Sony took say 25% to 40% of the handheld market from Nintendo, that would hurt. The next thing that would have to happen is that Microsoft learns from its mistakes and gains significant marketshare in Japan with Xbox 2. If Microsoft were to make those gains at the expense of Nintendo, then 5 years from now, we could see a Nintendo that was in danger of losing money. And what would make them sell out to a non-Japanese company like Microsoft? Perhaps anger and hatred of Sony. Remember, the original Playstation project was a Sony made CD addon to the SNES, which Nintendo decided to scrap. Sony went on to release the project as the standalone Playstation and the rest is history. Nintendo has been losing marketshare ever since. So it probably would not be a big stretch to say that Sony and Nintendo are not the greatest of pals.
This is all highly speculative and improbable. Nintendo still has a chance to turn things around and get more third party developers onboard. And of course, they still have those great franchises, Mario, Zelda, etc... But it will not be easy. If they have another goof up like sticking with cartridges too long, then Microsoft may find itself with another campus in Redmond. If Mario comes to MS, then Clippy may be out of a job too!
Actually, Netflix did rent Adult DVDs in their early years, then quietly dropped it around the time they began to get more press. They never had anything hard core, just stuff along the lines of Girls Gone Wild. I guess you'd call it blue. Some of the Japanese idol stuff was rather interesting, they even had some hentai...or so I heard...;-)