If pr0n is da crack, then Firefox must be da pipe! With its tabbed browsing, popup blocking, and image scaling, its the perfect tool for some serious cyber bukkake! Uh, at least that's what some guy in a dark alley told me! Yeah...
It's too bad GT4 is going to miss XMas, but Need For Speed Underground 2 and Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition should clean up quite nicely in its stead. Both of these have borrowed a big page from the Gran Turismo book in terms of allowing a maddening level of customization through aftermarket auto parts. This is definitely going to take some who would have been buying GT4. Not only that, NFS and MC3 both have online play.
GT4 will still do well whenever it comes out, but they are definitely going to lose some sales compared to what they might have had. Man I hate being right sometimes!
Here in Chicago, I've been getting on average a couple of unsolicited recruiting calls per week for the last few months. So maybe the IT job market here is starting to get better.
That's a sweet lookin phone, but I think DoCoMo's primary motivation is to keep the cost of the phone down. Using Linux goes a long way towards lowering the cost, which means mo money for DoCoMo! It also means they have a very flexible platform on which to base future phones. If you make your money selling OS licenses for low end devices like cell phones, cameras, and PDAs, Linux is going to make your life a living hell!
W00T! Time travel in my own lifetime! I think it's going to be a lot of fun reading those old papers and getting a flavor for life during those times. This is also going to be a great resource for historians and geneaologists.
Heh, I'm all for autodriven cars...as long as it's the other guy! As for me, I'll continue driving myself around. Why? It's more fun for me that way!;)
Seriously, the best solution to our traffic problems has already been mentioned, public transit. If we'd ever get the public mass transit religion, the toll authorities would go broke...heyyyy...
Well, putting out bogus copies of pirated materials is nothing new, but this is a bit risky. On the one hand, they may net a few would be pirates, but on the other hand they risk alienating a lot of people who just don't know any better. And in the end, those professional pirates who'll be out selling the bogus copies to the unsuspecting will still have their money and are unlikely to be caught.
I guess it's official, Linux is a real threat to Microsoft's OS dominance. Now that Balmer seems to be going out of his way to put Linux in the limelight, everyone who's been on the fence to this point should take a look and see what all of the fuss is about. Here's a link to the Knoppix to help if anyone wants to try before they buy! The Slackware based Slax is worth a look too.
Balmer's attacks certainly mean that the threat on the server is real, but it may also speak to what MS projects on the desktop. No, Linux isn't likely to take the desktop in the US, but MS is probably projecting lowered sales of Windows there too. Why? Because the PC market is reaching saturation with today's machines more than powerful enough to meet the needs of most, which means fewer new PCs will be sold. Most sales of Windows are in new PC bundles. PCs also face competition from other increasingly capable consumer electronics like cell phones, music players, and handheld game consoles. These competing devices are less expensive than a PC and much easier to use. All of this means eroding sales of Windows over the next few years. Microsoft may have been holding out hope that the growing PC market in Asian might rescue Windows, but the Chinese-Korean-Japanese joint Linux venture threatens to close that door. So Balmer is probably getting a little desperate. Personally, I think if Microsoft is to survive, it'll be Bill Gates who figures out what they need to do. I think that in the end Microsoft will have to learn to play nice with Linux just as Sun seems to be doing now.
I sure hope the lone coder is not dead yet! After being downsized/outsourced, whatever, a few years back, I decided to hang my own shingle. Haven't made any money yet, but I'm having a pretty good time and I have a pretty good day job now too. There's still room for the lone coder, but you have to be truly innovative which is a lot of work! But if you come up with that one great idea or different take on things, then the little guy can really clean up. Well that's my dream at least! Of course, right now I'd settle for beer money.;)
But like they always say, don't quit your day job!
Hmm, so much for the land of the free and home of the brave I guess. I can only wonder what we'll see once the new Congress is sworn in. On the other hand there may be some good in this. If the regulations and govt intrusions become onerous enough, maybe people will watch less TV and do something more worthwhile, like getting the government the f*** out of our living rooms and bedrooms!
This kind of copyright legislation is a good example of big money corporate muscle setting the agenda. I suspect the new Congress will make it even easier for them to get what they want. Yeah, this sort of thing has happened before, but in the past at least it wasn't so brazenly obvious that the strings were being pulled.
Releasing Solaris for free and open sourcing it, though the exact license is undetermined, is probably a good move for Sun. Solaris will probably not overtake Linux anytime soon, but being available for free should keep developers interested. And generally, it's better to have more choices than less. For a lot of people being able to choose Solaris will be a good thing. This won't make Sun a lot of money, but it should bring goodwill, which interestingly enough, is worth something in the shareholder's report.
All of this hype is just getting me high! Given that you can't play the game until the 16th because of the online activation, the broken date doesn't cost Valve anything. Now there will be yet another story in the mainstream media about Half Life 2, and if the story about the fired EB employee is true, then they may even get a little TV time. All of this marketing without spending a dime!
Now, I don't have any proof that this is all intentional, and it probably isn't. But the guys at Valve must be pretty happy with all of the attention. In our strange twisted world, I could see a class action lawsuit on behalf of HL2 pirates demanding a piece of the profits for all of the free publicity and promotion they've been doing!
I can see it now. Marvels lawyers all sign up for CoH so they can fly around in the game looking for alleged IP infringers. Hmmm, I wonder what super heroes they would create?
Depending on how EA responds to the expected lawsuits, this may well reveal the software giant to be a house of cards. Firing a few employees here and there may not do much, but an all out open revolt could bring EA to its knees. Massive outsourcing of projects would be very difficult given the nature of the business, and the game designers may not go along with it either. Imagine EA becoming the poster child for exploited third world labor, high tech or not!
I played with these every chance I got when I was a kid. And now my own kids can make literally anything out of legos. Currently their favorite creations are Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails!
I know I'm a little late to this party, but this surely is a recipe for failure! Multiple versions of the Xbox! That's crazy, and the one thing that can almost certainly guarantee disaster. This can only confuse consumers and developers.
Developers will end up developing for the lowest common denominator and the high end Xboxes will end up sitting on the store shelves gathering dust. Sony has just got to love the way Microsoft is determined to shoot itself in the foot!
It is easy to gather from this story that EA doesn't have much respect for its software engineers. But why? Unfortunately, it's no big surprise that a huge corporation has trouble respecting its workers, but here on/. we'd like to think that software engineers, specifically game programmers are special. I mean really, these people's sweat and creativity has made billions of dollars for EA, so why aren't they treated like kings and queens?
I would speculate that despite all of the success, programmers are still a part of a generally despised class, that of geeks and nerds. Yes some of these people have become famous and made a lot of money, but so have a lot of lawyers and we know how popular that class is! Heck it may well be that the CEOs, Directors, and Managers are the same people who used to beat the nerds up and steal their lunch money in grade school. Why expect them to treat the nerd class any differently now, especially when there are even cheaper nerds overseas who'll take the abuse for a lot less money?
Heh! Complaints about paying for Xbox Live and the right to mod aside, I suspect that the easiest way around the problem is to buy another unmodded (nonmodded??) Xbox! I'm sure Microsoft won't mind at all.;) Now I know the people here on/. don't want to put any more money in MS's coffers, but remember, MS loses money on every Xbox sold. So if you really hate MS, buy more Xboxes!
OMG! This Gizmondo _is_ an Xbox Portable, if not in name, at least in spirit. Here we have essentially a Pocket PC device running the Pocket PC OS (yeah yeah, Windows CE) built for gaming. Games were being written for Pocket PCs anyway, now developers can probably port many of those games to the Gizmondo with relative ease. This is an analogous situation to the N-Gage with respect to cell phone gaming, but without the side-talking!
Will it be successful? Hmm, now that Microsoft has entered the fray, that lends Gizmondo some serious street cred with the development community. And MS gets a chance to test the portable market place a bit without the nasty losses console makers have to take on hardware sales. Heck, they even get royalties since the Gizmondo uses a Windows OS. This should be interesting.
Well actually, Meijer is a fairly big chain in these parts, so they'll probably just get a slap on the wrist, if that. This assumes that this wasn't some prearranged test marketing scheme.
I like new hardware as much as the next guy, but I still don't see what the killer app of the second screen is/will be! Project Rub sounds interesting in a salacious sort of way, but no way is that title coming to the U.S.! In the short run, it seems that the DS will be a more expensive way to run your SP games. Right now I'd say that the wireless connectivity offers more compelling gameplay possibilities than the second display.
The only other issue I'll raise is the potential awkwardness of games that use a stylus. How are you supposed to operate the D pad while scribbling with the stylus? Maybe this is a dumb question, but I just don't see it yet. You can put it down on a table top, but it really looks like it was designed to be held with both hands.
If AOL is smart, they'll figure out a way to package their Disneyland of services along with DSL or Cable hookups. While many here on/. make fun of AOL users, the fact of the matter is that the service really is very easy to use for most people. Most ordinary people would be hopelessly lost on the internet without something like AOL. Not only that, AOL can be very useful to the rest of us by minimizing the likelihood of viruses or worms spreading via their customers. So what am I saying? I'm saying that we really need AOL to get their act together to keep their current customer base from running rampant on the net!
I've seen ads for AOL high speed which I think can work with an existing broadband installation. But they need to go farther than that and offer the complete, one big box, solution. Otherwise they will continue to lose customers as broadband enters more homes. I think Time-Warner has the assets to make this all happen, they just need to muster the will power and a plan. AOL made its money by being easy for Joe User to install and use. They need to do the same in the broadband age.
Sorry folks, but all of the technical merits aside, Apple isn't likely to port or widely fund the port of games to MacOS X. Why? Because the future gaming platforms are not the Mac or PC, the market has already spoken very loudly on that matter. Like them or not, the living room games consoles are where most people are going to do their gaming. This means that that is where the money is and is going to be.
Yes, games will continue to be made for desktop computers, but the sales of those games are dwarfed even by the sales of mediocre console games, to say nothing of the megahits like Mario, GTA, Halo, or the Final Fantasy series of RPGs. So the profitability of porting games to the Mac is highly questionable. They'd likely make more money by getting cozy with Microsoft on the Xbox development front, though I don't know exactly how Apple is involved with the G5 based Xbox 2 development kits, if at all.
I like Apple. I like MacOS X, and will probably buy an iBook someday. But porting games to the Mac is probably not something that would be good for their long term health. People aren't buying Macs because it is a great gaming platform. People are buying Macs because they are easier to use than Windows PCs in many cases, and are stylish and cool. Being a niche player is fine, as long as it's profitable!
Congrats to Firefox on the $250K! This is the stuff that sends ripples through the market and makes the CEOs stop and take notice. You don't just raise a quarter million dollars in less than two weeks unless you have something seriously good, or illegal!;-) Anyone in the browser or browser add-on business is going to have to take notice of this because it is real. Browser stats from various web sites are nice, and so are download stats. But at the end of the day, money talks louder than all of that, and $250K is some pretty loud speech!
The XGS might be a pretty good teaching tool. I could see building a community college or high school video game programming course around the platform. Another good way to promote the platform would be through development contests perhaps sponsored by the likes of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Of the three, Microsoft might be the most enthusiastic since the dev kit runs under Windows. Also MS would probably love to be able to identify and secure new talent quickly. I think Sony's Net Yaroze program actually did turn up a few gems.
The main problem I see right now is whether or not there is enough of a market for XGS to be profitable at all. The hardcore hobbyist development market already has a variety of kits for developing on the Dreamcast, modded Xboxes, and I think all of the earlier generation consoles and even handhelds. And the kits and tools come at little or no cost. The only things that generally cost money are mod chips and cables. So I don't think the XGS would be that attractive to anyone who is already in the homebrew game.
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If pr0n is da crack, then Firefox must be da pipe! With its tabbed browsing, popup blocking, and image scaling, its the perfect tool for some serious cyber bukkake! Uh, at least that's what some guy in a dark alley told me! Yeah...
It's too bad GT4 is going to miss XMas, but Need For Speed Underground 2 and Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition should clean up quite nicely in its stead. Both of these have borrowed a big page from the Gran Turismo book in terms of allowing a maddening level of customization through aftermarket auto parts. This is definitely going to take some who would have been buying GT4. Not only that, NFS and MC3 both have online play.
GT4 will still do well whenever it comes out, but they are definitely going to lose some sales compared to what they might have had. Man I hate being right sometimes!
Here in Chicago, I've been getting on average a couple of unsolicited recruiting calls per week for the last few months. So maybe the IT job market here is starting to get better.
That's a sweet lookin phone, but I think DoCoMo's primary motivation is to keep the cost of the phone down. Using Linux goes a long way towards lowering the cost, which means mo money for DoCoMo! It also means they have a very flexible platform on which to base future phones. If you make your money selling OS licenses for low end devices like cell phones, cameras, and PDAs, Linux is going to make your life a living hell!
W00T! Time travel in my own lifetime! I think it's going to be a lot of fun reading those old papers and getting a flavor for life during those times. This is also going to be a great resource for historians and geneaologists.
Heh, I'm all for autodriven cars...as long as it's the other guy! As for me, I'll continue driving myself around. Why? It's more fun for me that way! ;)
Seriously, the best solution to our traffic problems has already been mentioned, public transit. If we'd ever get the public mass transit religion, the toll authorities would go broke...heyyyy...
Well, putting out bogus copies of pirated materials is nothing new, but this is a bit risky. On the one hand, they may net a few would be pirates, but on the other hand they risk alienating a lot of people who just don't know any better. And in the end, those professional pirates who'll be out selling the bogus copies to the unsuspecting will still have their money and are unlikely to be caught.
I guess it's official, Linux is a real threat to Microsoft's OS dominance. Now that Balmer seems to be going out of his way to put Linux in the limelight, everyone who's been on the fence to this point should take a look and see what all of the fuss is about. Here's a link to the Knoppix to help if anyone wants to try before they buy! The Slackware based Slax is worth a look too.
Balmer's attacks certainly mean that the threat on the server is real, but it may also speak to what MS projects on the desktop. No, Linux isn't likely to take the desktop in the US, but MS is probably projecting lowered sales of Windows there too. Why? Because the PC market is reaching saturation with today's machines more than powerful enough to meet the needs of most, which means fewer new PCs will be sold. Most sales of Windows are in new PC bundles. PCs also face competition from other increasingly capable consumer electronics like cell phones, music players, and handheld game consoles. These competing devices are less expensive than a PC and much easier to use. All of this means eroding sales of Windows over the next few years. Microsoft may have been holding out hope that the growing PC market in Asian might rescue Windows, but the Chinese-Korean-Japanese joint Linux venture threatens to close that door. So Balmer is probably getting a little desperate. Personally, I think if Microsoft is to survive, it'll be Bill Gates who figures out what they need to do. I think that in the end Microsoft will have to learn to play nice with Linux just as Sun seems to be doing now.
I sure hope the lone coder is not dead yet! After being downsized/outsourced, whatever, a few years back, I decided to hang my own shingle. Haven't made any money yet, but I'm having a pretty good time and I have a pretty good day job now too. There's still room for the lone coder, but you have to be truly innovative which is a lot of work! But if you come up with that one great idea or different take on things, then the little guy can really clean up. Well that's my dream at least! Of course, right now I'd settle for beer money. ;)
But like they always say, don't quit your day job!
Hmm, so much for the land of the free and home of the brave I guess. I can only wonder what we'll see once the new Congress is sworn in. On the other hand there may be some good in this. If the regulations and govt intrusions become onerous enough, maybe people will watch less TV and do something more worthwhile, like getting the government the f*** out of our living rooms and bedrooms!
This kind of copyright legislation is a good example of big money corporate muscle setting the agenda. I suspect the new Congress will make it even easier for them to get what they want. Yeah, this sort of thing has happened before, but in the past at least it wasn't so brazenly obvious that the strings were being pulled.
Releasing Solaris for free and open sourcing it, though the exact license is undetermined, is probably a good move for Sun. Solaris will probably not overtake Linux anytime soon, but being available for free should keep developers interested. And generally, it's better to have more choices than less. For a lot of people being able to choose Solaris will be a good thing. This won't make Sun a lot of money, but it should bring goodwill, which interestingly enough, is worth something in the shareholder's report.
All of this hype is just getting me high! Given that you can't play the game until the 16th because of the online activation, the broken date doesn't cost Valve anything. Now there will be yet another story in the mainstream media about Half Life 2, and if the story about the fired EB employee is true, then they may even get a little TV time. All of this marketing without spending a dime!
Now, I don't have any proof that this is all intentional, and it probably isn't. But the guys at Valve must be pretty happy with all of the attention. In our strange twisted world, I could see a class action lawsuit on behalf of HL2 pirates demanding a piece of the profits for all of the free publicity and promotion they've been doing!
I can see it now. Marvels lawyers all sign up for CoH so they can fly around in the game looking for alleged IP infringers. Hmmm, I wonder what super heroes they would create?
Depending on how EA responds to the expected lawsuits, this may well reveal the software giant to be a house of cards. Firing a few employees here and there may not do much, but an all out open revolt could bring EA to its knees. Massive outsourcing of projects would be very difficult given the nature of the business, and the game designers may not go along with it either. Imagine EA becoming the poster child for exploited third world labor, high tech or not!
I played with these every chance I got when I was a kid. And now my own kids can make literally anything out of legos. Currently their favorite creations are Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails!
I know I'm a little late to this party, but this surely is a recipe for failure! Multiple versions of the Xbox! That's crazy, and the one thing that can almost certainly guarantee disaster. This can only confuse consumers and developers.
Developers will end up developing for the lowest common denominator and the high end Xboxes will end up sitting on the store shelves gathering dust. Sony has just got to love the way Microsoft is determined to shoot itself in the foot!
It is easy to gather from this story that EA doesn't have much respect for its software engineers. But why? Unfortunately, it's no big surprise that a huge corporation has trouble respecting its workers, but here on /. we'd like to think that software engineers, specifically game programmers are special. I mean really, these people's sweat and creativity has made billions of dollars for EA, so why aren't they treated like kings and queens?
I would speculate that despite all of the success, programmers are still a part of a generally despised class, that of geeks and nerds. Yes some of these people have become famous and made a lot of money, but so have a lot of lawyers and we know how popular that class is! Heck it may well be that the CEOs, Directors, and Managers are the same people who used to beat the nerds up and steal their lunch money in grade school. Why expect them to treat the nerd class any differently now, especially when there are even cheaper nerds overseas who'll take the abuse for a lot less money?
Heh! Complaints about paying for Xbox Live and the right to mod aside, I suspect that the easiest way around the problem is to buy another unmodded (nonmodded??) Xbox! I'm sure Microsoft won't mind at all. ;) Now I know the people here on /. don't want to put any more money in MS's coffers, but remember, MS loses money on every Xbox sold. So if you really hate MS, buy more Xboxes!
OMG! This Gizmondo _is_ an Xbox Portable, if not in name, at least in spirit. Here we have essentially a Pocket PC device running the Pocket PC OS (yeah yeah, Windows CE) built for gaming. Games were being written for Pocket PCs anyway, now developers can probably port many of those games to the Gizmondo with relative ease. This is an analogous situation to the N-Gage with respect to cell phone gaming, but without the side-talking!
Will it be successful? Hmm, now that Microsoft has entered the fray, that lends Gizmondo some serious street cred with the development community. And MS gets a chance to test the portable market place a bit without the nasty losses console makers have to take on hardware sales. Heck, they even get royalties since the Gizmondo uses a Windows OS. This should be interesting.
Well actually, Meijer is a fairly big chain in these parts, so they'll probably just get a slap on the wrist, if that. This assumes that this wasn't some prearranged test marketing scheme.
I like new hardware as much as the next guy, but I still don't see what the killer app of the second screen is/will be! Project Rub sounds interesting in a salacious sort of way, but no way is that title coming to the U.S.! In the short run, it seems that the DS will be a more expensive way to run your SP games. Right now I'd say that the wireless connectivity offers more compelling gameplay possibilities than the second display.
The only other issue I'll raise is the potential awkwardness of games that use a stylus. How are you supposed to operate the D pad while scribbling with the stylus? Maybe this is a dumb question, but I just don't see it yet. You can put it down on a table top, but it really looks like it was designed to be held with both hands.
If AOL is smart, they'll figure out a way to package their Disneyland of services along with DSL or Cable hookups. While many here on /. make fun of AOL users, the fact of the matter is that the service really is very easy to use for most people. Most ordinary people would be hopelessly lost on the internet without something like AOL. Not only that, AOL can be very useful to the rest of us by minimizing the likelihood of viruses or worms spreading via their customers. So what am I saying? I'm saying that we really need AOL to get their act together to keep their current customer base from running rampant on the net!
I've seen ads for AOL high speed which I think can work with an existing broadband installation. But they need to go farther than that and offer the complete, one big box, solution. Otherwise they will continue to lose customers as broadband enters more homes. I think Time-Warner has the assets to make this all happen, they just need to muster the will power and a plan. AOL made its money by being easy for Joe User to install and use. They need to do the same in the broadband age.
Sorry folks, but all of the technical merits aside, Apple isn't likely to port or widely fund the port of games to MacOS X. Why? Because the future gaming platforms are not the Mac or PC, the market has already spoken very loudly on that matter. Like them or not, the living room games consoles are where most people are going to do their gaming. This means that that is where the money is and is going to be.
Yes, games will continue to be made for desktop computers, but the sales of those games are dwarfed even by the sales of mediocre console games, to say nothing of the megahits like Mario, GTA, Halo, or the Final Fantasy series of RPGs. So the profitability of porting games to the Mac is highly questionable. They'd likely make more money by getting cozy with Microsoft on the Xbox development front, though I don't know exactly how Apple is involved with the G5 based Xbox 2 development kits, if at all.
I like Apple. I like MacOS X, and will probably buy an iBook someday. But porting games to the Mac is probably not something that would be good for their long term health. People aren't buying Macs because it is a great gaming platform. People are buying Macs because they are easier to use than Windows PCs in many cases, and are stylish and cool. Being a niche player is fine, as long as it's profitable!
Congrats to Firefox on the $250K! This is the stuff that sends ripples through the market and makes the CEOs stop and take notice. You don't just raise a quarter million dollars in less than two weeks unless you have something seriously good, or illegal!;-) Anyone in the browser or browser add-on business is going to have to take notice of this because it is real. Browser stats from various web sites are nice, and so are download stats. But at the end of the day, money talks louder than all of that, and $250K is some pretty loud speech!
The XGS might be a pretty good teaching tool. I could see building a community college or high school video game programming course around the platform. Another good way to promote the platform would be through development contests perhaps sponsored by the likes of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Of the three, Microsoft might be the most enthusiastic since the dev kit runs under Windows. Also MS would probably love to be able to identify and secure new talent quickly. I think Sony's Net Yaroze program actually did turn up a few gems.
The main problem I see right now is whether or not there is enough of a market for XGS to be profitable at all. The hardcore hobbyist development market already has a variety of kits for developing on the Dreamcast, modded Xboxes, and I think all of the earlier generation consoles and even handhelds. And the kits and tools come at little or no cost. The only things that generally cost money are mod chips and cables. So I don't think the XGS would be that attractive to anyone who is already in the homebrew game.