Two words...Starship Troopers...Others have mentioned hypersonic modelling for artillery shells or rockets, but imagine a platoon of troopers doing a near orbital drop from around 100km up. How'd they get there? Well with the hypersonic suborbital ballistic troop transport of course! Imagine a wing of these getting troops and equipment over any place on the globe in an hour or two.
I'm still mourning Papyrus...It's looking more and more like we'll end up with Electronic Arts and the big Japanese publishers when all of the dust settles. I can't help but wonder what would have happened if VU had decided to innovate and improve the quality of their game development houses rather than closing it all down. There are plenty of "me too" games out there already. I think most gamers are really hungry for something new.
Well, on the one hand, since the U.S. doesn't have a national ID card, does this now make driving mandatory? On the other hand, it should make it easier for cops to get dates....Whoa! Where did that come from?
Seriously, this would seem to necessarily take us one step closer to requiring a national ID card in the most extreme of likely outcomes of the court ruling.
OMG, I love Apple! This is just another really slick promotional campaign that just reiterates the importance of image in selling any product. I mean, given the nature of this latest campaign and past iPod promotions, what does this tell us about Apple's perception of iPod users? Are we all yupperclass, BMW drivin, cool clothes wearin masters of our domains?;-)
Nope, not at all! Heck, I drive a minivan most of the time schleptin kids all over the place! But even for me, the image is pretty cool, even though that was not my reason for getting an iPod. (My reasons had more to do with licensing issues and such...). In any case, stay tuned for the QuickTime movie that is almost certain to come...
Imagine what Straczynski and Zabel could done with it though. There's a lot of life left in the ST franchise.
I'd love to see this! ST just needs good writers and a coherent story arc. Ironically, some have argued that DS9 was so good because it had B5 around as a good competitor.
Hmmm, hadn't thought about pressure from the media companies.. Personally, I don't want all of my entertainment eggs in one basket anyway. I have the same problem as you with multiple consoles all over the place, including an Atari 2600! So I'd like to see a much slimmer XBox too.
At this point I don't care about backwards compatibility. I know some people here have used it, but I think for Sony it was included because it decreased the risk of introducing a new console that was such a technological leap over its predescessor. And because they decided to use a PSOne chip to achieve the compatibility, it was easier for them to include it. Keep in mind that the PSOne was wildly successful and had hundreds of games by the time the PS2 showed up. This is not the case for Microsoft. Microsoft is not the market leader like Sony, so they have no special sway over developers. Sony could count on new development for the PS2, despite the initial difficulty of developing for the new system. Microsoft can't count on this, so backwards compatibility could actually work against them.
In the end, it's all just good marketing. Just like any business, the Army needs to market itself in order to get a steady stream of customers. And let me tell you, they are quite serious about it. The America's Army game is a tool that they use to teach something of the Army way of life. I haven't played the most recent versions of the game, but the last time I played, it didn't seem preachy or anything, so I'm not really sure if it could even be called propaganda. It's basically a FPS that follows Army rules/morals so to speak in mission structure and objectives.
In any case, it is a very good question as to just how many of these side businesses any government agency should be allowed to get into.
Let's face it, a lot of these games are still being bought by parents and grandparents for kids as gifts, bribes, etc... So slashing the price to the impulse buy level of $19.99 will play well with this crowd. And if the quality is up to previous titles, then for once low price won't mean some crappy knockoff of a hit title.
Way to go Sega! I may pick up a copy or two (my nephew would love this...). I hope that if successful, it will put some downward pressure on the prices of new releases. Still, for the amount of entertainment, compared to movies for example, game prices aren't too bad. But I still remember in my younger days, that a new game meant a lot of work and saving, so $19.99 could bring in a lot of new young gamers too.
Well the average Joe User wasn't likely to switch before the SCO debacle anyway. Joe just uses whatever came on the PC. But now it is more likely that in the future Joe will use the Linux that comes on his WalMart PC along with OpenOffice and Firefox or Opera. Why more likely? Only because many basic apps have good viable free alternatives to MS apps. Joe user just wants to do what he wants to do, so if a box with Linux is say $100 cheaper and does what he wants, then he'll probably buy it. The only thing holding him back in the past may have been gaming, but heck, Joe probably does all of his gaming on a console now anyway because they are cheap and easy to use.
So Joe's heard of Linux now, but that doesn't matter. The important guy is Corporate Mike who's trying to cut costs and increase reliability. That's the guy MS is worried about keeping.
I turned my XBox on last night and it works just fine. Admittedly, it has been neglected of late as I've spent a lot of time on my PS2 playing FFXI. That aside, the XBox is not dying yet. Instead, the real threat comes from within Microsoft itself where the company has shown a history of cut and run on anything outside of Windows and Office. It's hard to argue the numbers though, since right now at least PC gaming may make more money for MS than XBox gaming since PC gaming must be driving some PC sales which of course means Windows and Office sales.
But, if they can come up with the games to drive sales in Europe and Japan, then things could turn around dramatically. I think (with no evidence whatsoever) that internal politics may be keeping them from doing what must be done in the way of aquiring local development talent for the overseas markets and of course marketing effectively there. There's no secret to what Sony did to become the dominant player in the console market. Microsoft just has to decide that this is a game they want to win. I think the future of the company depends on this more than they would like to admit given the rise of Linux and OSS solutions on the desktop.
Do the UK police have time for this sort of thing? Is crime really so low that they can chase after motorists when the inevitable false alarms, tampering (accidental and otherwise) take place if the RFID tag system is deployed? I mean really, collecting data is the easy part, but at the end of the day real live humans have to follow up on this "data".
Ugh, can't you just feel Big Brother's breath on the back of your neck? In the end though, I have faith that the Britons won't take this lying down.
This is the coolest thing I've seen all day. I especially like the line about how my mother inlaw could look at this and understand what was going on. To some, this looks silly, but this may be the future of intuitive interfaces for nonintuitive situations. We humans live in a world of 3 physical dimensions (at least that we are generally aware of...) filled with objects of varying familiarity that we learn to interact with. If our computing interfaces become more similar to what we have evolved to understand intuitively, then we can take increasingly complex data sets and tap our full potential for analysis.
Oh well, at the very least it will be even more fun to be a nerd!
That certainly is puzzling to say the least. I wonder if others back at Viacom don't see eye to eye on this. So the CEO has decided to "prove it to them" so to speak. If it all works out after a year or two maybe a sale to Viacom to leverage its resources would be of greater interest. Or heck, maybe the guy just likes games!
Absolutely! One of the coolest things about looking at data in ways that we haven't before, is that sometimes new patterns emerge that lead to a greater understanding of the universe. And it opens the doors of science a little wider too, because who knows, a musically trained person might see the pattern that a physicist or astronomer by training might miss.
As an ex-physicist, I'd say that perhaps your argument is just what the journals are afraid of. Back in grad school, it was pretty obvious that the hottest research was being circulated via preprints and later via the web long before anything showed up in a printed journal. The only thing the journals really have left are their names. They may talk about the value of peer review, but as you point out, none of these reviewers are really paid employees, so they are largely independent of the journals.
In the future, I'd expect to see federations of scientists reviewing and disseminating research results independently of the established journals. For the current gatekeepers, this would be a death knell.
You hit it right on the head! Microsoft simply doesn't care and have little incentive to do much about these problems. It's a real shame too, because in the early days of the browser wars, IE had some really nice hooks in it that were attractive to developers and with competition from Netscape, things stayed pretty fresh IMHO. But once Netscape was dead and the DOJ failed to do its duty, IE just froze including all of the bugs and unfinished stuff in it. I don't think there's been any new work done on IE for the last several years, which of course means that no one really knows what's in there anymore.
This looks really interesting. If it gets the marketing it deserves, it should have a good chance as the US market is slowly getting into games like this. It's a shame what happened to Rez, but since that time I think things have changed somewhat. At the very least, maybe people are finally getting bored with all of the sequels and movie licensed games.
I strongly considered this during my last job search when it became painfully obvious that my PhD was not helping me. The only thing that stopped me from doing it was the fact that I finally got a job in academia where the PhD was a definitive plus.
In fact, in my last resume, I think I put the education at the bottom, choosing to lead with my experiences section. That way if I was lucky enough to get past the keyword screens to a real human being, they would see the PhD last.
Not only that, but this can be good for Microsoft too in the long run because it will force them to compete. Even the best intentioned companies can put out rubbish when they don't have the gun of competition to their heads.
Exactly, the PS2 version of the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI Online pretty much requires a USB keyboard to play. So it may not be so much a matter of replacing keyboards and mice, as much as bundling them with the console once the market demands it.
Actually, the limited resolution of a TV relative to a PC monitor is the real problem. Once HDTV becomes common, this won't be an issue either, some games already support higher resolutions if you have a monitor or HDTV.
I just have a few big questions, not that the bank is likely to answer any of them. I suppose the inevitable lawsuits may flush out some of them though.
1. What OS(s) were they running before this happened?
2. Were they really doing an upgrade or a crossgrade, that is, switching to a new system altogether?
3. Was this being handled by in house IT or was it being outsourced half way around the world?
Stuff like this does not bode well for the future of the XBox. With most XSN titled benched for this year and titles being cancelled left and right along with uncertainty on the specs of the next XBox, one can only wonder if we're seeing a pattern of withdrawal from the field.
Granted, that none of this definitively means XBox is dead, but nothing has happened yet to assure that another XBox is a certainty.
Sadly, data loss is always a risk no matter what you pay. The only thing you can do is take actions to minimize any potential loss. Given that, this really isn't news.
Obligatory/. Fan Service: Oh, but this is Microsoft Hotmail! I'm outraged! Damn EULA!!
Absolutely! If you're going to stay in business, you have to make things as easy for the customer as you can. Somewhere along the line, Microsoft has dropped the ball on this. The average Jane/Joe is not going to move to Linux anytime soon, but if it is too hard and too expensive to upgrade to the latest and greatest release of Windows, MS won't be getting their money either.
When I was writing my PhD thesis, one of my goals was that my mom should be able to read it. Well, I'm not sure if she ever got past the particle physics intro, but the goal of clarity definitely helped me keep it on track. But as most techies here know, the easier you make something for the user on a computer, the more work the programmer has to do to make it so. All of that extra work is expensive! So don't be surprised to see a lot of Microsoft's code work shift to China in a year or two.
You can say that again! But in this particular case, while I'm disappointed, I'm not surprised. And it is probably a good business decision. While I'm sure MS is aching to crack the Japanese market, True Fantasy Online had virtually no chance of success. There's too much strong competition now. Final Fantasy XI Online has been very successful on PC and the PS2 leaving no room for another MMORPG on the console.
Hopefully all of the hard work Level 5 put into the game can be recycled into a decent offline RPG for Japanese XBox users at least. Politics definitely has some part in MS decisions. With respect to the failure of the XBox in Japan, I would say that the biggest problem is that they just haven't made the XBox Japanese enough in that market. It probably isn't easy, but they should at least be able to emulate Sony and Nintendo to get some traction there.
At this point, it wouldn't surprise me if XBox 2 never sees the light of day.
Slashdot Mirror
Two words...Starship Troopers...Others have mentioned hypersonic modelling for artillery shells or rockets, but imagine a platoon of troopers doing a near orbital drop from around 100km up. How'd they get there? Well with the hypersonic suborbital ballistic troop transport of course! Imagine a wing of these getting troops and equipment over any place on the globe in an hour or two.
I'm still mourning Papyrus...It's looking more and more like we'll end up with Electronic Arts and the big Japanese publishers when all of the dust settles. I can't help but wonder what would have happened if VU had decided to innovate and improve the quality of their game development houses rather than closing it all down. There are plenty of "me too" games out there already. I think most gamers are really hungry for something new.
Well, on the one hand, since the U.S. doesn't have a national ID card, does this now make driving mandatory? On the other hand, it should make it easier for cops to get dates....Whoa! Where did that come from?
Seriously, this would seem to necessarily take us one step closer to requiring a national ID card in the most extreme of likely outcomes of the court ruling.
OMG, I love Apple! This is just another really slick promotional campaign that just reiterates the importance of image in selling any product. I mean, given the nature of this latest campaign and past iPod promotions, what does this tell us about Apple's perception of iPod users? Are we all yupperclass, BMW drivin, cool clothes wearin masters of our domains? ;-)
Nope, not at all! Heck, I drive a minivan most of the time schleptin kids all over the place! But even for me, the image is pretty cool, even though that was not my reason for getting an iPod. (My reasons had more to do with licensing issues and such...). In any case, stay tuned for the QuickTime movie that is almost certain to come...
Imagine what Straczynski and Zabel could done with it though. There's a lot of life left in the ST franchise.
I'd love to see this! ST just needs good writers and a coherent story arc. Ironically, some have argued that DS9 was so good because it had B5 around as a good competitor.
Hmmm, hadn't thought about pressure from the media companies.. Personally, I don't want all of my entertainment eggs in one basket anyway. I have the same problem as you with multiple consoles all over the place, including an Atari 2600! So I'd like to see a much slimmer XBox too.
At this point I don't care about backwards compatibility. I know some people here have used it, but I think for Sony it was included because it decreased the risk of introducing a new console that was such a technological leap over its predescessor. And because they decided to use a PSOne chip to achieve the compatibility, it was easier for them to include it. Keep in mind that the PSOne was wildly successful and had hundreds of games by the time the PS2 showed up. This is not the case for Microsoft. Microsoft is not the market leader like Sony, so they have no special sway over developers. Sony could count on new development for the PS2, despite the initial difficulty of developing for the new system. Microsoft can't count on this, so backwards compatibility could actually work against them.
In the end, it's all just good marketing. Just like any business, the Army needs to market itself in order to get a steady stream of customers. And let me tell you, they are quite serious about it. The America's Army game is a tool that they use to teach something of the Army way of life. I haven't played the most recent versions of the game, but the last time I played, it didn't seem preachy or anything, so I'm not really sure if it could even be called propaganda. It's basically a FPS that follows Army rules/morals so to speak in mission structure and objectives.
In any case, it is a very good question as to just how many of these side businesses any government agency should be allowed to get into.
Let's face it, a lot of these games are still being bought by parents and grandparents for kids as gifts, bribes, etc... So slashing the price to the impulse buy level of $19.99 will play well with this crowd. And if the quality is up to previous titles, then for once low price won't mean some crappy knockoff of a hit title.
Way to go Sega! I may pick up a copy or two (my nephew would love this...). I hope that if successful, it will put some downward pressure on the prices of new releases. Still, for the amount of entertainment, compared to movies for example, game prices aren't too bad. But I still remember in my younger days, that a new game meant a lot of work and saving, so $19.99 could bring in a lot of new young gamers too.
Well the average Joe User wasn't likely to switch before the SCO debacle anyway. Joe just uses whatever came on the PC. But now it is more likely that in the future Joe will use the Linux that comes on his WalMart PC along with OpenOffice and Firefox or Opera. Why more likely? Only because many basic apps have good viable free alternatives to MS apps. Joe user just wants to do what he wants to do, so if a box with Linux is say $100 cheaper and does what he wants, then he'll probably buy it. The only thing holding him back in the past may have been gaming, but heck, Joe probably does all of his gaming on a console now anyway because they are cheap and easy to use.
So Joe's heard of Linux now, but that doesn't matter. The important guy is Corporate Mike who's trying to cut costs and increase reliability. That's the guy MS is worried about keeping.
I turned my XBox on last night and it works just fine. Admittedly, it has been neglected of late as I've spent a lot of time on my PS2 playing FFXI. That aside, the XBox is not dying yet. Instead, the real threat comes from within Microsoft itself where the company has shown a history of cut and run on anything outside of Windows and Office. It's hard to argue the numbers though, since right now at least PC gaming may make more money for MS than XBox gaming since PC gaming must be driving some PC sales which of course means Windows and Office sales.
But, if they can come up with the games to drive sales in Europe and Japan, then things could turn around dramatically. I think (with no evidence whatsoever) that internal politics may be keeping them from doing what must be done in the way of aquiring local development talent for the overseas markets and of course marketing effectively there. There's no secret to what Sony did to become the dominant player in the console market. Microsoft just has to decide that this is a game they want to win. I think the future of the company depends on this more than they would like to admit given the rise of Linux and OSS solutions on the desktop.
Do the UK police have time for this sort of thing? Is crime really so low that they can chase after motorists when the inevitable false alarms, tampering (accidental and otherwise) take place if the RFID tag system is deployed? I mean really, collecting data is the easy part, but at the end of the day real live humans have to follow up on this "data".
Ugh, can't you just feel Big Brother's breath on the back of your neck? In the end though, I have faith that the Britons won't take this lying down.
This is the coolest thing I've seen all day. I especially like the line about how my mother inlaw could look at this and understand what was going on. To some, this looks silly, but this may be the future of intuitive interfaces for nonintuitive situations. We humans live in a world of 3 physical dimensions (at least that we are generally aware of...) filled with objects of varying familiarity that we learn to interact with. If our computing interfaces become more similar to what we have evolved to understand intuitively, then we can take increasingly complex data sets and tap our full potential for analysis.
Oh well, at the very least it will be even more fun to be a nerd!
That certainly is puzzling to say the least. I wonder if others back at Viacom don't see eye to eye on this. So the CEO has decided to "prove it to them" so to speak. If it all works out after a year or two maybe a sale to Viacom to leverage its resources would be of greater interest. Or heck, maybe the guy just likes games!
Absolutely! One of the coolest things about looking at data in ways that we haven't before, is that sometimes new patterns emerge that lead to a greater understanding of the universe. And it opens the doors of science a little wider too, because who knows, a musically trained person might see the pattern that a physicist or astronomer by training might miss.
As an ex-physicist, I'd say that perhaps your argument is just what the journals are afraid of. Back in grad school, it was pretty obvious that the hottest research was being circulated via preprints and later via the web long before anything showed up in a printed journal. The only thing the journals really have left are their names. They may talk about the value of peer review, but as you point out, none of these reviewers are really paid employees, so they are largely independent of the journals.
In the future, I'd expect to see federations of scientists reviewing and disseminating research results independently of the established journals. For the current gatekeepers, this would be a death knell.
You hit it right on the head! Microsoft simply doesn't care and have little incentive to do much about these problems. It's a real shame too, because in the early days of the browser wars, IE had some really nice hooks in it that were attractive to developers and with competition from Netscape, things stayed pretty fresh IMHO. But once Netscape was dead and the DOJ failed to do its duty, IE just froze including all of the bugs and unfinished stuff in it. I don't think there's been any new work done on IE for the last several years, which of course means that no one really knows what's in there anymore.
This looks really interesting. If it gets the marketing it deserves, it should have a good chance as the US market is slowly getting into games like this. It's a shame what happened to Rez, but since that time I think things have changed somewhat. At the very least, maybe people are finally getting bored with all of the sequels and movie licensed games.
I strongly considered this during my last job search when it became painfully obvious that my PhD was not helping me. The only thing that stopped me from doing it was the fact that I finally got a job in academia where the PhD was a definitive plus.
In fact, in my last resume, I think I put the education at the bottom, choosing to lead with my experiences section. That way if I was lucky enough to get past the keyword screens to a real human being, they would see the PhD last.
Not only that, but this can be good for Microsoft too in the long run because it will force them to compete. Even the best intentioned companies can put out rubbish when they don't have the gun of competition to their heads.
Exactly, the PS2 version of the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI Online pretty much requires a USB keyboard to play. So it may not be so much a matter of replacing keyboards and mice, as much as bundling them with the console once the market demands it.
Actually, the limited resolution of a TV relative to a PC monitor is the real problem. Once HDTV becomes common, this won't be an issue either, some games already support higher resolutions if you have a monitor or HDTV.
I just have a few big questions, not that the bank is likely to answer any of them. I suppose the inevitable lawsuits may flush out some of them though.
1. What OS(s) were they running before this happened?
2. Were they really doing an upgrade or a crossgrade, that is, switching to a new system altogether?
3. Was this being handled by in house IT or was it being outsourced half way around the world?
Stuff like this does not bode well for the future of the XBox. With most XSN titled benched for this year and titles being cancelled left and right along with uncertainty on the specs of the next XBox, one can only wonder if we're seeing a pattern of withdrawal from the field.
Granted, that none of this definitively means XBox is dead, but nothing has happened yet to assure that another XBox is a certainty.
Sadly, data loss is always a risk no matter what you pay. The only thing you can do is take actions to minimize any potential loss. Given that, this really isn't news.
Obligatory /. Fan Service: Oh, but this is Microsoft Hotmail! I'm outraged! Damn EULA!!
That feels so much better!
Absolutely! If you're going to stay in business, you have to make things as easy for the customer as you can. Somewhere along the line, Microsoft has dropped the ball on this. The average Jane/Joe is not going to move to Linux anytime soon, but if it is too hard and too expensive to upgrade to the latest and greatest release of Windows, MS won't be getting their money either.
When I was writing my PhD thesis, one of my goals was that my mom should be able to read it. Well, I'm not sure if she ever got past the particle physics intro, but the goal of clarity definitely helped me keep it on track. But as most techies here know, the easier you make something for the user on a computer, the more work the programmer has to do to make it so. All of that extra work is expensive! So don't be surprised to see a lot of Microsoft's code work shift to China in a year or two.
You can say that again! But in this particular case, while I'm disappointed, I'm not surprised. And it is probably a good business decision. While I'm sure MS is aching to crack the Japanese market, True Fantasy Online had virtually no chance of success. There's too much strong competition now. Final Fantasy XI Online has been very successful on PC and the PS2 leaving no room for another MMORPG on the console.
Hopefully all of the hard work Level 5 put into the game can be recycled into a decent offline RPG for Japanese XBox users at least. Politics definitely has some part in MS decisions. With respect to the failure of the XBox in Japan, I would say that the biggest problem is that they just haven't made the XBox Japanese enough in that market. It probably isn't easy, but they should at least be able to emulate Sony and Nintendo to get some traction there.
At this point, it wouldn't surprise me if XBox 2 never sees the light of day.