"2. 'Sharing' is a cutesy word for distributing. You are no different from the music store, except that the artist gets zero compensation from you."
Then track down the band's management and write a check to them directly for 10 cents a song. After all, that's about as much as most bands hope to recupe from the RIAA labels.
"Depending on your P2P client, it is possible to prevent uploading, or at least stop uploading by removing the file from the P2P system as soon as it's downloaded - of course, in some cases this will render individual P2P networks unusable if too many people do it, but some, like Emule/Edonkey, have the ability to upload while downloading..."
And that is how people are getting caught. Generally, to download a bunch of music (or any other files), it is usually best to save that for late at night, leave the computer on, and go to bed. Unfortunately, some P2P programs (and users) are too dumb to set their defaults to send the downloaded file to a non-shared file folder to keep it invisible from other downloaders. The freebie version of Kazaa fits this description perfectly.
Besides, what P2P client is still secure? As reported on Slashdot about a month ago, people were receiving notices from Comcast about illegal file trading through Bit Torrent. What's left, WASTE?
"I feel sorry for this John Doe character, he's always getting picked on."
No doubt. Especially after the Fox Television Network cancelled his show a couple of years ago. But then again, he's the "big bad" in the upcoming "Blade - Trinity" (aka Blade III) so I guess he's bounced back.
"There's little evidence that Hitler was interested in the occult (but there is a lot for Himmler), and it's been fairly well established that the whole occult-Nazi thing is way overblown (yes, I KNOW about the Thule Society, but it was only important in the early days)."
Really? The Thule (pronounced "Too-lay" which the movie *Hellboy* got wrong by pronouncing it "Thool") Society shaped Nazi propaganda and their background beliefs. If occultism wasn't important to the Nazi leadership, they could've at any time changed their logo and the German flag from the Swastika back to the Imperial flag, but they didn't. Hitler committed suicide on the highest of *Satantic* "holidays," val purdis (sic) day. I'd say that's pretty occultist if you ask me. Granted, our Congressional Medal of Honor is an off-set pentagram, so I guess who are we to judge others about State sponsored occultism...:)
"I read a good sci-fi book entitled "Operation Overlord" that addressed just this idea. Nazi-dominated 1970s-US sends covert force back in time (which, due to quantum mechanics puts them in a parallel universe -- one way trip) to help out the Allies. It's a really good WWII novel with a sci-fi twist, and has cameos by Isaac Asimov and Einstein:-)."
Don't you mean "The Proteus Operation" published circa 1996? Operation Overlord was the name for the Normandy campaign, but thanks for the info because I ran a Google Search on that term and found the book in question...:)
"I think a great movie, if not series, would be all about the Borg. How the first nanobytes took control of the first specieis (species 001) and how the collective was created. No Federeation, no Vulcans, etc.. just BORG."
Wowsers. You must be a fan of the Star Wars Holiday Special; a good 30 minutes of poorly designed Wookie costumes, along with grunting and yelping without any subtitles.
And if you want to see how the Borg developed, you might sign up for a Netflix account and rent all the Doctor Who DVDs featuring the CYBERMEN, the original Borg!:)
"The problem is with the writing, not the franchise. Its just not interesting anymore - and this latest travesty (Enterprise) is just adding insult to injury. Blue alien nazis? Someone get these clowns outta here:)"
And I should point out that if anything, this is an homage to the classic Doctor Who episodes that made up "The War Games." Come to think of it, Voyager has already referenced it. Anything "original" Trek idea since TNG has come from Doctor Who...
"The problem is with the writing, not the franchise. Its just not interesting anymore - and this latest travesty (Enterprise) is just adding insult to injury. Blue alien nazis? Someone get these clowns outta here:)"
What's wrong with that? Many people have written that Hitler claimed that he himself was receiving orders from "The Old Ones." And then we have the social anomaly with the Third Reich. Many people speculate that such totalitarian societies should not produce such brilliant scientific breakthroughs (in terms of weaponry for them) as the Nazis did. Look at their helmets from that era and then look at what the US military uses today. Look at the B2 and look back to the Nazi flying wing designs. The Panzer tanks, the V1 and V2 rockets, jet fighters, saucer designed aircraft, and the atom bomb they would've had if their own scientific team didn't sabotage the results. Then you have Hitler's (and many other Nazis) obsession with the occult. So that leads to much speculation for a writer with imagination, with or without a tin foil hat.
"Personally I don't see JMS being able to play ball with Paramount. I think he'd last 3-6 months tops before he blew up at them and walked. He's just not enough of a political animial (his detractors would say he's too much of one) to be able to put up with it."
Please. The man writes *Amazing Spider-Man*. Perhaps you are confusing him with the Asimov (in terms of being a prolific writer) of comics, Brian Michael Bendis...
"During the course of events, it becomes clear that a high-ranking Starfleet official is using the paranoia surronding the possibility of 'changling' terrorist attacks to repeal rights and declare martial law on earth. Seeing it on SpikeTV a month or so ago, it really struck a nerve with the current state of affairs and the 'Patriot' Act."
What's funny is Lucas has crammed that into the Prequels. Of course, most viewers have been asleep so they didn't notice the parallels between modern events and a Senator in a galaxy far far away with grand ambitions manufacturing a war to get himself made absolute dictator. Had Lucas not plotted this out back in the 70s (and of course, had events not happened like this in historical Germany or Rome) then I'd say he has become rather subversive in his middle age, kinda like the John Carpenter of old...
"Well seeing as you can already run a full Linux distro on the XBox, i assume FF will run..."
I wasn't going that route. I meant as a native Xbox application. The Xbox's operating system is a modified version of Windows2000, afterall. FireFox would just need to get around the encryption problem. That's the angle I was going for...
"Hmmm...I really wonder how Microsoft will respond to the recent movement in the browser market. Of course they are still market leaders on the desktop but have you ever used their stripped down version of IE on a PocketPC? It's just a joke!"
I would seriously laugh if FireFox was ported to the PocketPC and SmartPhone platforms - and I'll laugh even harder if it already exists.
What I'm really surprised over is that there hasn't been any news about hacking FireFox onto a modded Xbox. Now that would be uber cool.
Nokia is simply keeping its options open for its phones. They didn't want to back just one browser (Opera) only to possibly see it be run out of business and then Nokia would've been left with no viable option. Strengthening Mozilla helps them not only on the phone platform but it also aggrivates Microsoft in its home industry. Smart move, Nokia. Now work on getting the radiation levels lowered on your products...
"Oh no! Mozilla versus Opera, on/. that is almost as bad as Galdalf versus Arthur Dent or Apple versus Linux!"
What are you talking about? Arthur Dent would crush Gandalf with his, uhm, no, not with his logical skills. Maybe matching up Galdalf vs. Marvin the Paranoid Android would be a better cage match.
And no Linux vendor makes as pretty of hardware as Apple, so there's no comparison. Maybe so after Alienware puts out a distribution...
"In fact, many times rumors have speculated about EA not really liking any of the console holders, and have patiently been sitting back and waiting for their chance to pull a Sony (enter the market and take it over)."
That rumor is long dead. That was pre-3D0, meaning, pre 1993. Trip Hawkins, the founder of EA, left the company and took programmers with him. They set about to create the 3D0 game system. Hawkins promised to dazzle everyone, and the $700 machine got shown up by the cartridge based $250 Atari Jaguar. The only thing the machine ushered in was the Naughty Dog company which later helped Sony (and is owned by them now).
"(Forgive me, I'm still a secret Dreamcast partisan, and every time I see the PS2 botch something graphically the DC doesn't I am once again amazed at the design of the PS2; by all rights its quality should be uniformly better than the DC but it isn't... amazing.)"
Yeah, I know how you feel. I'm an Atari 7800 partisan. Every time I think about Double Dragon being single player on the NES and dual on the 7800 like the arcade, I chuckle. That a machine designed to debut in early 1984 but was delayed until 1986 was graphically more powerful than what hit the streets in 1985 makes me chuckle.
And then of course, there's the Atari Lynx which had features to it back in 1989 that Nintendo has yet to include on the GameBoy circa 2004. And that makes me cry.
"I'm not sure what it is, but choosing the G5 for the XBox2 means a lot of MS code is going to be ported over to PowerPC. Maybe I'll be able to run Longhorn on my Powerbook.;-)"
Somehow, to me, that seems like voting to infect ones-self with the Ebola virus just because they can...
"The Dreamcast bombed because sega screwed all their customers beforehand with their last 3 systems. Customers had no confidence in the Sega the company, and showed them that by not buying the dreamcast which was actually a pretty good system."
Sega Master System. Sega Genesis. Sega Genesis + CD-Rom drive. Sega 32X adapter. Sega Saturn. Sega Dreamcast.
Not to mention the Sega Game Gear and the Sega Nomad.
"One serious danger in consoles is that if the product doesn't match up well against rivals then the manufacturer is stuck with it until the next generation. This isn't the case in the software world where Microsoft lives. Software is often rushed to market and then patched and upgraded "in place" while the consumer is using it. The early adopters suffer but that hasn't cooled the purchase of fresh new products, thus the practice continues. Microsoft could emulate this approach in the game console space by building a system that can be upgraded via software."
What do you think Xbox Live is? Granted, Microsoft's policy is against enabling this on games which don't offer native gaming support for Xbox Live. But this isn't just indicative of Microsoft, its also of Sony and its licensees. I seem to recall that the Matrix game had a bug in it for all the platforms. And come to think of it, Mission Impossible on the Atari 7800 had a fatal flaw in the ending that prohibited the player from beating the game.
"This has always been a tough issue in my mind. If you take a look at the Atari Jaguar, the failure was from more than one angle, and they bet the company on it which is why Atari went under (at least the Atari we used to know). The first problem is that it was sufficiently more complex than most of the systems out there. It felt like the games developers didn't know how to extract the power out of the system. This could be due to Atari not providing good dev systems and docs, or it could be due to inexperience with the hardware, DSP's and moto 68K's and such. More or less the result was a really terrible selection of games with the exception of a few VERY special titles (Jeff Minter is a god). The other aspect I was talking about is Atari's marketing campaign was pretty crappy. They just didn't have enough cash reserves to handle something like this. I heard they only had something like $50mil to bet on the jag. The games coming out for the Jag now are amazing, they really show the power of the system. We really could have used them 10 years ago;-) The Jaguar games actually CAN have good frame rates and graphics together unlike Trevor McSuckass or Checkered Flag."
The Jaguar failed for two reasons. The first is that Sony bought up a lot of developers (Psygnosis, for example, a big supporter of the Atari ST computer line in Europe) who would've supported the machine, and bribed others (such as UbiSoft) from releasing games on the system, or held up release dates (RainMan). The second was that the Jaguar launched without a CD-Rom built in. Now it is true the Jaguar would've retailed for $500 at its initial release date had the CD-Rom been included, but the benefit would've been all the titles on CD-Rom and the entire customer base all on that platform instead of split between cartridge and CD-Rom. This doomed the Jaguar when Sony released the Playstation at a competitive price just short of 2 years later. The Jag with CD would've been the same price as the Playstation, with loyal developers, and a large library.
The Jag's hardware was powerful enough to run arcade machines. Atari and Atari Games developed the "CoJag" architecture which powered Area51. It had more memory and a Motorola 68020 at the heart of the unit instead of the 68000.
I have no comprehension as to why "Checkered Flag" was so bad. For Rebellion Software to crank out the impressive "Alien vs. Predator" and to release "Flag" as a follow-up can only be explained from the conspiracy angle.
And this is from a Jaguar early adopter and former Atari shareholder.
The 3D0 and the CD-i both failed because they equally sucked. The Commodore CD32 was nice thanks to its Amiga origins.
"The dreamcast got trashed by two things, in my opinion. The first one, which is more or less provable, is Sony's announcement of PS2 specs. They made it look like the PS2 would put the DC down like a dog. Fact is, while the PS2 has greater capabilities than the DC, they are seldom used to their full extent because of the difficulty of developing for the system to that extent. Anyone who can write C can write a PS2 game, but to really use the hardware takes talent. I firmly believe that the second factor was piracy, it was just too easy to copy Dreamcast games. Sega brought out a system with no meaningful copy protection just at the time when it became trivial to download ISOs from the internet, with predictable results."
The Dreamcast failed for a variety of reasons. However, it is chief to remember that the Dreamcast was essentially the Xbox v. 1.0. Many people forget this crucial fact.
The pact with the demon Sega signed up for was the condition that the Dreamcast's operating system would be Microsoft's WindowsCE. Then, behind the scenes, Microsoft manipulated Sega into cancelling its contract with 3dfx to provide the graphics chipset (which became the Voodoo3) in order to use NEC's PowerVR chipset (which was a complete failure in the PC market). NEC had pressured Microsoft into orchestrating the deal considering NEC (at the time) was a major PC vendor and customer of the Windows operating system via Packard Bell. Sega breached their contract with 3dfx (not to mention the fact they were a large shareholder of 3dfx) which cost them a major lawsuit.
Now add to all of that the number of consumers who waited for the PS2 and you can see why the machine failed. But do remember that it was a cheap way for Microsoft to rid itself of a future competitor of console hardware and learn how to work the industry.
"It'd say backwards compatiblity for PS2 was overrated. I never owned a PS1 and after buying a PS2 i think I bought maybe 1 or 2 PS1 games...After a month or 2 I was playing nothing but PS2 games."
Backwards compatibility keeps existing customers from jumping platforms. Let's go back to the oldest example of system platform hopping after the company behind the original console skipped on the feature:
Atari's 5200. The 5200 Super System was not compatible with the Atari 2600. Major mistake. Coleco jumped on this and "released" an Atari 2600 *adapter* that allowed the ColecoVision to play Atari 2600 games. 2600 owners then rationalized they could always play their 2600 games on the ColecoVision then and jumped to that platform. Consumers who didn't have a 2600 but had plenty of friends who did also bought the ColecoVision knowing they could have compatibility with an adapter. Atari then rushed out a 2600 adapter for the 5200, and behind-the-scenes commissioned the development of the Atari 7800 which was compatible with the 2600. Although Atari then was sold off by Warners and the machine didn't hit the market until 1986 instead of 1984, and thus ensured Nintendo's success in the US.
Next, we go to the Nintendo SNES. The "Super Nintendo" 16 bit system was not backwards compatible with the NES. This "betrayal" turned off a lot of the NES faithful and they jumped (mainly) to the Sega Genesis instead of buying the SNES. Since this time, Nintendo has not had a lock on the industry as it enjoyed in the late 80s when it was a monopoly.
Next, we move to Sony. The Playstation became a defacto industry standard, just as the NES and the 2600 had been before it. Sony made sure the PS2 was backwards compatible because they wanted their existing customer base to move up to the PS2 and not defect to Microsoft's upcoming Xbox. Had the PS2 not been backwards compatible with the PS1, there's no telling what would've happened in the industry. We might have ended up with the Xbox and the Gamecube tied for 1st place in America.
"Even if you have a killer app like Halo, it's still not enough. Remember Soul Calibur?"
And Atari (for the Jaguar) had "Alien vs. Predator" long before the PC version debuted, not to mention "Tempest 2000" and the best non-PC version of "Doom." That didn't stop Sony from taking over the market with the original Playstation. Granted, Sony did some great things like pay UbiSoft so that they wouldn't release the cartridge (Jaguar) version of Rayman until the Playstation version debuted a full 6 months after it was done, paid UbiSoft off not to make a version of it available on the Jaguar CD-Rom, etc. etc. etc. You know, business behavior typical of Microsoft.
"You forgot the Sega Mega Drive (CD-ROM) which had only six games ever (all of which were crap) and was sold as an add-on for the Genesis at well over $200. Overpriced and overrated..."
Don't forget Sega's 32X. That was Sega of America's baby. Sega of Japan completely ignored it.
Slashdot Mirror
"2. 'Sharing' is a cutesy word for distributing. You are no different from the music store, except that the artist gets zero compensation from you."
Then track down the band's management and write a check to them directly for 10 cents a song. After all, that's about as much as most bands hope to recupe from the RIAA labels.
"Depending on your P2P client, it is possible to prevent uploading, or at least stop uploading by removing the file from the P2P system as soon as it's downloaded - of course, in some cases this will render individual P2P networks unusable if too many people do it, but some, like Emule/Edonkey, have the ability to upload while downloading..."
And that is how people are getting caught. Generally, to download a bunch of music (or any other files), it is usually best to save that for late at night, leave the computer on, and go to bed. Unfortunately, some P2P programs (and users) are too dumb to set their defaults to send the downloaded file to a non-shared file folder to keep it invisible from other downloaders. The freebie version of Kazaa fits this description perfectly.
Besides, what P2P client is still secure? As reported on Slashdot about a month ago, people were receiving notices from Comcast about illegal file trading through Bit Torrent. What's left, WASTE?
"I feel sorry for this John Doe character, he's always getting picked on."
No doubt. Especially after the Fox Television Network cancelled his show a couple of years ago. But then again, he's the "big bad" in the upcoming "Blade - Trinity" (aka Blade III) so I guess he's bounced back.
"There's little evidence that Hitler was interested in the occult (but there is a lot for Himmler), and it's been fairly well established that the whole occult-Nazi thing is way overblown (yes, I KNOW about the Thule Society, but it was only important in the early days)."
:)
Really? The Thule (pronounced "Too-lay" which the movie *Hellboy* got wrong by pronouncing it "Thool") Society shaped Nazi propaganda and their background beliefs. If occultism wasn't important to the Nazi leadership, they could've at any time changed their logo and the German flag from the Swastika back to the Imperial flag, but they didn't. Hitler committed suicide on the highest of *Satantic* "holidays," val purdis (sic) day. I'd say that's pretty occultist if you ask me. Granted, our Congressional Medal of Honor is an off-set pentagram, so I guess who are we to judge others about State sponsored occultism...
"I read a good sci-fi book entitled "Operation Overlord" that addressed just this idea. Nazi-dominated 1970s-US sends covert force back in time (which, due to quantum mechanics puts them in a parallel universe -- one way trip) to help out the Allies. It's a really good WWII novel with a sci-fi twist, and has cameos by Isaac Asimov and Einstein :-)."
:)
Don't you mean "The Proteus Operation" published circa 1996? Operation Overlord was the name for the Normandy campaign, but thanks for the info because I ran a Google Search on that term and found the book in question...
"I think a great movie, if not series, would be all about the Borg. How the first nanobytes took control of the first specieis (species 001) and how the collective was created. No Federeation, no Vulcans, etc.. just BORG."
:)
Wowsers. You must be a fan of the Star Wars Holiday Special; a good 30 minutes of poorly designed Wookie costumes, along with grunting and yelping without any subtitles.
And if you want to see how the Borg developed, you might sign up for a Netflix account and rent all the Doctor Who DVDs featuring the CYBERMEN, the original Borg!
"The problem is with the writing, not the franchise. Its just not interesting anymore - and this latest travesty (Enterprise) is just adding insult to injury. Blue alien nazis? Someone get these clowns outta here :)"
And I should point out that if anything, this is an homage to the classic Doctor Who episodes that made up "The War Games." Come to think of it, Voyager has already referenced it. Anything "original" Trek idea since TNG has come from Doctor Who...
"The problem is with the writing, not the franchise. Its just not interesting anymore - and this latest travesty (Enterprise) is just adding insult to injury. Blue alien nazis? Someone get these clowns outta here :)"
What's wrong with that? Many people have written that Hitler claimed that he himself was receiving orders from "The Old Ones." And then we have the social anomaly with the Third Reich. Many people speculate that such totalitarian societies should not produce such brilliant scientific breakthroughs (in terms of weaponry for them) as the Nazis did. Look at their helmets from that era and then look at what the US military uses today. Look at the B2 and look back to the Nazi flying wing designs. The Panzer tanks, the V1 and V2 rockets, jet fighters, saucer designed aircraft, and the atom bomb they would've had if their own scientific team didn't sabotage the results. Then you have Hitler's (and many other Nazis) obsession with the occult. So that leads to much speculation for a writer with imagination, with or without a tin foil hat.
"Personally I don't see JMS being able to play ball with Paramount. I think he'd last 3-6 months tops before he blew up at them and walked. He's just not enough of a political animial (his detractors would say he's too much of one) to be able to put up with it."
Please. The man writes *Amazing Spider-Man*. Perhaps you are confusing him with the Asimov (in terms of being a prolific writer) of comics, Brian Michael Bendis...
"During the course of events, it becomes clear that a high-ranking Starfleet official is using the paranoia surronding the possibility of 'changling' terrorist attacks to repeal rights and declare martial law on earth. Seeing it on SpikeTV a month or so ago, it really struck a nerve with the current state of affairs and the 'Patriot' Act."
What's funny is Lucas has crammed that into the Prequels. Of course, most viewers have been asleep so they didn't notice the parallels between modern events and a Senator in a galaxy far far away with grand ambitions manufacturing a war to get himself made absolute dictator. Had Lucas not plotted this out back in the 70s (and of course, had events not happened like this in historical Germany or Rome) then I'd say he has become rather subversive in his middle age, kinda like the John Carpenter of old...
DRM is one thing; installing spyware is quite another. Sounds like its time for a class action suit against EMI over this.
"Well seeing as you can already run a full Linux distro on the XBox, i assume FF will run..."
I wasn't going that route. I meant as a native Xbox application. The Xbox's operating system is a modified version of Windows2000, afterall. FireFox would just need to get around the encryption problem. That's the angle I was going for...
"Hmmm...I really wonder how Microsoft will respond to the recent movement in the browser market. Of course they are still market leaders on the desktop but have you ever used their stripped down version of IE on a PocketPC? It's just a joke!"
I would seriously laugh if FireFox was ported to the PocketPC and SmartPhone platforms - and I'll laugh even harder if it already exists.
What I'm really surprised over is that there hasn't been any news about hacking FireFox onto a modded Xbox. Now that would be uber cool.
Nokia is simply keeping its options open for its phones. They didn't want to back just one browser (Opera) only to possibly see it be run out of business and then Nokia would've been left with no viable option. Strengthening Mozilla helps them not only on the phone platform but it also aggrivates Microsoft in its home industry. Smart move, Nokia. Now work on getting the radiation levels lowered on your products...
"Oh no! Mozilla versus Opera, on /. that is almost as bad as Galdalf versus Arthur Dent or Apple versus Linux!"
What are you talking about? Arthur Dent would crush Gandalf with his, uhm, no, not with his logical skills. Maybe matching up Galdalf vs. Marvin the Paranoid Android would be a better cage match.
And no Linux vendor makes as pretty of hardware as Apple, so there's no comparison. Maybe so after Alienware puts out a distribution...
"In fact, many times rumors have speculated about EA not really liking any of the console holders, and have patiently been sitting back and waiting for their chance to pull a Sony (enter the market and take it over)."
That rumor is long dead. That was pre-3D0, meaning, pre 1993. Trip Hawkins, the founder of EA, left the company and took programmers with him. They set about to create the 3D0 game system. Hawkins promised to dazzle everyone, and the $700 machine got shown up by the cartridge based $250 Atari Jaguar. The only thing the machine ushered in was the Naughty Dog company which later helped Sony (and is owned by them now).
"(Forgive me, I'm still a secret Dreamcast partisan, and every time I see the PS2 botch something graphically the DC doesn't I am once again amazed at the design of the PS2; by all rights its quality should be uniformly better than the DC but it isn't... amazing.)"
Yeah, I know how you feel. I'm an Atari 7800 partisan. Every time I think about Double Dragon being single player on the NES and dual on the 7800 like the arcade, I chuckle. That a machine designed to debut in early 1984 but was delayed until 1986 was graphically more powerful than what hit the streets in 1985 makes me chuckle.
And then of course, there's the Atari Lynx which had features to it back in 1989 that Nintendo has yet to include on the GameBoy circa 2004. And that makes me cry.
"I'm not sure what it is, but choosing the G5 for the XBox2 means a lot of MS code is going to be ported over to PowerPC. Maybe I'll be able to run Longhorn on my Powerbook. ;-)"
Somehow, to me, that seems like voting to infect ones-self with the Ebola virus just because they can...
"The Dreamcast bombed because sega screwed all their customers beforehand with their last 3 systems. Customers had no confidence in the Sega the company, and showed them that by not buying the dreamcast which was actually a pretty good system."
Sega Master System. Sega Genesis. Sega Genesis + CD-Rom drive. Sega 32X adapter. Sega Saturn. Sega Dreamcast.
Not to mention the Sega Game Gear and the Sega Nomad.
"One serious danger in consoles is that if the product doesn't match up well against rivals then the manufacturer is stuck with it until the next generation. This isn't the case in the software world where Microsoft lives. Software is often rushed to market and then patched and upgraded "in place" while the consumer is using it. The early adopters suffer but that hasn't cooled the purchase of fresh new products, thus the practice continues. Microsoft could emulate this approach in the game console space by building a system that can be upgraded via software."
What do you think Xbox Live is? Granted, Microsoft's policy is against enabling this on games which don't offer native gaming support for Xbox Live. But this isn't just indicative of Microsoft, its also of Sony and its licensees. I seem to recall that the Matrix game had a bug in it for all the platforms. And come to think of it, Mission Impossible on the Atari 7800 had a fatal flaw in the ending that prohibited the player from beating the game.
"This has always been a tough issue in my mind. If you take a look at the Atari Jaguar, the failure was from more than one angle, and they bet the company on it which is why Atari went under (at least the Atari we used to know). The first problem is that it was sufficiently more complex than most of the systems out there. It felt like the games developers didn't know how to extract the power out of the system. This could be due to Atari not providing good dev systems and docs, or it could be due to inexperience with the hardware, DSP's and moto 68K's and such. More or less the result was a really terrible selection of games with the exception of a few VERY special titles (Jeff Minter is a god). The other aspect I was talking about is Atari's marketing campaign was pretty crappy. They just didn't have enough cash reserves to handle something like this. I heard they only had something like $50mil to bet on the jag. The games coming out for the Jag now are amazing, they really show the power of the system. We really could have used them 10 years ago ;-) The Jaguar games actually CAN have good frame rates and graphics together unlike Trevor McSuckass or Checkered Flag."
The Jaguar failed for two reasons. The first is that Sony bought up a lot of developers (Psygnosis, for example, a big supporter of the Atari ST computer line in Europe) who would've supported the machine, and bribed others (such as UbiSoft) from releasing games on the system, or held up release dates (RainMan). The second was that the Jaguar launched without a CD-Rom built in. Now it is true the Jaguar would've retailed for $500 at its initial release date had the CD-Rom been included, but the benefit would've been all the titles on CD-Rom and the entire customer base all on that platform instead of split between cartridge and CD-Rom. This doomed the Jaguar when Sony released the Playstation at a competitive price just short of 2 years later. The Jag with CD would've been the same price as the Playstation, with loyal developers, and a large library.
The Jag's hardware was powerful enough to run arcade machines. Atari and Atari Games developed the "CoJag" architecture which powered Area51. It had more memory and a Motorola 68020 at the heart of the unit instead of the 68000.
I have no comprehension as to why "Checkered Flag" was so bad. For Rebellion Software to crank out the impressive "Alien vs. Predator" and to release "Flag" as a follow-up can only be explained from the conspiracy angle.
And this is from a Jaguar early adopter and former Atari shareholder.
The 3D0 and the CD-i both failed because they equally sucked. The Commodore CD32 was nice thanks to its Amiga origins.
"The dreamcast got trashed by two things, in my opinion. The first one, which is more or less provable, is Sony's announcement of PS2 specs. They made it look like the PS2 would put the DC down like a dog. Fact is, while the PS2 has greater capabilities than the DC, they are seldom used to their full extent because of the difficulty of developing for the system to that extent. Anyone who can write C can write a PS2 game, but to really use the hardware takes talent. I firmly believe that the second factor was piracy, it was just too easy to copy Dreamcast games. Sega brought out a system with no meaningful copy protection just at the time when it became trivial to download ISOs from the internet, with predictable results."
The Dreamcast failed for a variety of reasons. However, it is chief to remember that the Dreamcast was essentially the Xbox v. 1.0. Many people forget this crucial fact.
The pact with the demon Sega signed up for was the condition that the Dreamcast's operating system would be Microsoft's WindowsCE. Then, behind the scenes, Microsoft manipulated Sega into cancelling its contract with 3dfx to provide the graphics chipset (which became the Voodoo3) in order to use NEC's PowerVR chipset (which was a complete failure in the PC market). NEC had pressured Microsoft into orchestrating the deal considering NEC (at the time) was a major PC vendor and customer of the Windows operating system via Packard Bell. Sega breached their contract with 3dfx (not to mention the fact they were a large shareholder of 3dfx) which cost them a major lawsuit.
Now add to all of that the number of consumers who waited for the PS2 and you can see why the machine failed. But do remember that it was a cheap way for Microsoft to rid itself of a future competitor of console hardware and learn how to work the industry.
"It'd say backwards compatiblity for PS2 was overrated. I never owned a PS1 and after buying a PS2 i think I bought maybe 1 or 2 PS1 games...After a month or 2 I was playing nothing but PS2 games."
Backwards compatibility keeps existing customers from jumping platforms. Let's go back to the oldest example of system platform hopping after the company behind the original console skipped on the feature:
Atari's 5200. The 5200 Super System was not compatible with the Atari 2600. Major mistake. Coleco jumped on this and "released" an Atari 2600 *adapter* that allowed the ColecoVision to play Atari 2600 games. 2600 owners then rationalized they could always play their 2600 games on the ColecoVision then and jumped to that platform. Consumers who didn't have a 2600 but had plenty of friends who did also bought the ColecoVision knowing they could have compatibility with an adapter. Atari then rushed out a 2600 adapter for the 5200, and behind-the-scenes commissioned the development of the Atari 7800 which was compatible with the 2600. Although Atari then was sold off by Warners and the machine didn't hit the market until 1986 instead of 1984, and thus ensured Nintendo's success in the US.
Next, we go to the Nintendo SNES. The "Super Nintendo" 16 bit system was not backwards compatible with the NES. This "betrayal" turned off a lot of the NES faithful and they jumped (mainly) to the Sega Genesis instead of buying the SNES. Since this time, Nintendo has not had a lock on the industry as it enjoyed in the late 80s when it was a monopoly.
Next, we move to Sony. The Playstation became a defacto industry standard, just as the NES and the 2600 had been before it. Sony made sure the PS2 was backwards compatible because they wanted their existing customer base to move up to the PS2 and not defect to Microsoft's upcoming Xbox. Had the PS2 not been backwards compatible with the PS1, there's no telling what would've happened in the industry. We might have ended up with the Xbox and the Gamecube tied for 1st place in America.
"Even if you have a killer app like Halo, it's still not enough. Remember Soul Calibur?"
And Atari (for the Jaguar) had "Alien vs. Predator" long before the PC version debuted, not to mention "Tempest 2000" and the best non-PC version of "Doom." That didn't stop Sony from taking over the market with the original Playstation. Granted, Sony did some great things like pay UbiSoft so that they wouldn't release the cartridge (Jaguar) version of Rayman until the Playstation version debuted a full 6 months after it was done, paid UbiSoft off not to make a version of it available on the Jaguar CD-Rom, etc. etc. etc. You know, business behavior typical of Microsoft.
"You forgot the Sega Mega Drive (CD-ROM) which had only six games ever (all of which were crap) and was sold as an add-on for the Genesis at well over $200. Overpriced and overrated..."
Don't forget Sega's 32X. That was Sega of America's baby. Sega of Japan completely ignored it.