I agree with you wholeheartedly on the hardware probably needing revision and/or fixes. That's how early adopter hardware always is though, its not just Sony. New TVs, new cars, new everything have problems right off the assembly line.
I'm waiting for a few months before picking up a PS3 and with or without games available, it will be a good BluRay player and PC platform for Linux. Each of which is worth more than the asking price. Its only 2/3 the price of a brand new BD player alone for that matter.
So while I understand your hesitancy, the "worth the price" issue is not related to its hardware reliability -- people purchase early adopter hardware all the time that die within 6 months (LCD and plasma TVs when they were first available come to mind).
The original Prince of Persia had beautiful graphics, so did Zelda on the N64. Dig had beautiful graphics, and so does Grandia III. I only played Dig because it looked gorgeous... the plot didn't intrigue me until several hours into the game. Prince of Persia was more famous for its perfect (for the time) animations of human movement than for gameplay. Zelda had intrigue and fun as well as good graphics, and I very much enjoyed the plot of Grandia III as well despite some of its gameplay issues.
Would Burnout 3 or 4 be as much fun without pretty graphics? Maybe, but the incredible collisions and blurring movement are more than half the fun of that game, and I have people travel to my house to play them in PLII surround regularly because it has great sound too.
There's a lot of room for gameplay improvements in games, and a lot of room for graphics improvements as well, and I'm most looking forward to sound improvements what with live dts and DD capabilities on the PS3 (yes, I know the Xbox did DD -- didn't have any games I wanted to listen to).
Yes, I know. Its amazing how cheap it is to get a fully functional 3.2GHz+ home computer that will handle word processing and flash-enabled web browsing with a high end video and sound system for 3D gaming. Not to mention being very quiet and sleek looking, and we all know how cheap quiet is for a HTPC right?
I'm so sick of hearing about the PS3's price. Go buy one and install Linux on it and use it as your silent PC for a while then complain to me about how you paid a miserable $500 for it. When you decide its just barely worth the money for a fast and silent good looking PC, buy a blu-ray movie and watch one of those. If you're not into movies, try playing some PS3 games on it instead, assuming you enjoy video games. When you get bored of those features, just use it to listen to music for a while instead or to browse your photos directly off your camera.
God forbid anyone think about what they're getting for the money.
PS, if you really want a cheap gaming-only type system, the PS2 is about $100 with a memory card and game included these days, less than half the price of a Wii. Or buy a Wii. I don't care. But don't complain that the PS3 is too much money, its damn cheap for what you get -- I know how much it costs to build a decent silent home computer and it won't play games as well as the PS3 does and it doesn't have bluetooth support either.
I'm guessing the game was only designed to be appealing to most people for 15 or 20 minutes, since the comments by the author(s) include ageing gamers not having time to play anymore.
If its fun to play for 20 minutes, and fun again the next day for 20 minutes, and so on, then its doing well.
I have karma to burn; I'm not concerned about your opinion. That said, I thought it was a good post and didn't have moderation points to mod it up. Since I have a +1 karma bonus, I figured I'd re-post it so more people would be able to read it.
I'm on the Google Earth team and yes, this is exactly what happened. The license we have to the imagery forbids us from allowing access from unofficial clients. The data providers take this very seriously indeed and noticed very quickly that such an application was out in the wild.
Fortunately, the Gaia author understood our position and ceased development, for which we are grateful. I think we are going to send him a T-Shirt or something to try and make up for it. It's a small gesture but we don't want him to think badly of us.
I guess some people will see this action as us dumping on the little guy, but it's not that simple. Many Googlers have a background in open source and have been on both sides of the fence. However, the fact remains that this sort of aerial imagery is not only very expensive to produce but also very expensive to manipulate and merge into a unified "Earth". If we allowed open source clients to access the Earth database it would be easier to dump the (unwatermarked) images en-masse and avoid paying the imagery owners for it. Clearly, that's not something anybody wants - satellites don't launch themselves.
Creationists already do this. And the debates are quite entertaining.
Presumptions in science are the problem, not evidence.
For example, what would a global flood do to carbon dating evidence? How precise is carbon dating? How much do we really know about mountains forming? We assume a lot of things about our planet because we live such short lives and our good 'hard' science isn't that old.
PS, I don't believe dinosaurs and humans necessarily lived together, but within a similar frame of history? Quite possibly. Considering how rare fossilized evidence is vis-a-vis the number of a species in history, the lack of such evidence isn't entirely telling.
Also, why is being skeptical and essentially rude to people of opposing beliefs held in such high regard in western civilizations? What's wrong with inclusive thinking and open mindedness with a slant toward evidence instead? You already believe chairs will hold your weight without individual testing, and sometimes you turn out to be wrong. Why not consider how much of your life is based on belief that others knew what they were talking about, and not your own proofs. You don't have time to prove everything you rely on, so pick and choose, and spend some of your life living instead of caring so much.
You need 5 minutes with a good theologian to explain why you have no clue what you're talking about. Half of those are specific to customs of an area (various books in the New Testament were written to specific cities in specific circumstances; Hebrews has a totally different tone being written to Jews than Romans does, for example).
Also, the things done by believers and followers of God's in the old and new testaments are things that happened (that's what inerrancy means), it doesn't mean its good that they happened.
The old testament does say on more than one occasion that God told people to go out and kill other people for being flagrantly disobedient. In the new testament however it is made very clear that the law is a way to explain how completely lost everyone is with God, and that it was always impossible to follow, and that Jesus fulfilled the law in every way for us (thus Paul's rant about "everything is permissible for me but not all things are beneficial".
Both make it very clear that women are equals to men in all areas of life (read "a good wife is hard to find" sometime -- Google it) and that if you own slaves, they are to be treated fairly (and released after x years).
Oh, and find me the "go out and rape women and children" bit... that's entertaining.
My friends ask me all the time "how I do that" in racing games, when I pass them smoothly in a corner or somesuch. Its because I hold those nice analogue sticks half-up, instead of full-up, or maybe 73% up. Using both analogue sticks for steering + throttle/brakes gives much better control in everything from Burnout to Toca.
I could see this on servers and desktops equally, just not on gaming rigs.
The average desktop user is at the point now where they buy a new PC entirely if the old one is too slow in any area. Its not about RAM upgrades or video cards, its about a PC to them, and they buy a whole new one.
On the same note, integrated video is more than enough for most server configurations, and only high-end CAD/visualization workstations and gaming rigs need independent graphics capabilities.
I have 36 processes active on my Windows XP box. Of those, 5 are currently using 1% or more of my CPU time according to task manager, wait, make that 12, no 5 again.
You get my point I hope. Task switching is all well and good, and has made the modern computer much more useful than without it, but in terms of raw desktop performance and responsiveness, taking some of that work and sharing it with a second CPU core can make a significant latency difference. As I'm sure you're already aware, task switching is not the least intensive thing a CPU does and can in fact take quite a number of cycles (compared to its normal activities). Reducing the frequency of task switching therefore also increases potential throughput.
This isn't even getting into my Linux boxes that don't have an anti-virus running in the background and have SMP awareness at the application level in many cases.
Do I think a quad-core is cost effective right now for most desktop users? Of course not. Do I think its a good idea and a better use of your dollars than raw CPU performance? Very much so.
I'd rather have a quad-core 2GHz machine today than a dual-core 4GHz machine or a single-core 8GHz machine even though it wouldn't have the same throughput.
Global warming is like the paleolithic period -- something we've never experienced but assume happened because of the evidences we have, whereas the dinosaur bones would be more comparable to hurricanes (evidence of something that requires study).
So, what do we know about current changes in climate? Almost nothing. How well do we know the history of climate on the planet in the lifetime of humanity alone? Almost nothing. What can we extrapolate? Not much.
There's a lot of good science going on in the field of long-term climate change, but its not well established and nobody should be staking their governments' entire spending patterns on it at this point.
Should we reduce pollution? Definately. Should we be dealing with smog? Of course. Should we get rid of carcinogens? Lets try. How about greenhouse gasses? Sure, but let me see science at the level of the first three first.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't realize that the average long-running PC has a lot of background processes with sporadic activity levels that ruin the performance of your desktop. Having something like BitTorrent running in its own core makes all the difference in the world too.
MSN, BitTorrent, an MP3 player and a web browser all running at once (on top of background services) on a single-core system leads to a lot of task switching that is entirely unnecessary in a multi-core environment. And while throughput may not increase 4x, responsiveness will be very much improved.
I've read this tripe before. Lets pretend you like very game on the GameCube. There's still more games you'd like on the PS2 than for the GameCube. There are 16 thousand total games for the PlayStation2. So some of them suck. Some of the big names one suck. There are a lot of good games for the PS2 however.
If you have a Gamecube and really enjoy it, good, keep enjoying it. Personally, my Gamecube owning friends are jealous of my huge collection of really good games for the PS2 and I don't own anywhere near all the best ones I'd enjoy.
Sony made public statements earlier this year about how hard it was to support some PS2 games because the programmers hadn't followed the actual guidelines from Sony for programming the PS2, instead relying on undocumented behaviors. In those cases, I'm sure, it will turn out they will no longer be emulatable for the near future on the PS3.
No, the crowd who believes in Copyright believes in it as it was designed -- as a way to foster the creation of works with an end result of more public domain works (I'm not making that up either). No, Copyright wasn't established to make people money, it was established to encourage the creation of works, by giving authors a temporary revenue stream from their works.
That same crowd doesn't believe that the indexing of the contents of books and journals in any way harms that revenue stream or that ability to make money selling copies of the works, since Google offers no such copy.
In this case, a third party has taken your work, put his name on it, and sold it to people. In the Google case, they've borrowed your work, read through it, gave it back and told everyone else how to find a copy should they want it. Google is like the maven that tells you about the new book or tv show you haven't heard of yet, not the kid selling free newspapers.
I too found the writing to need a severe overhaul. If this is the level of writing skill the author has, he or she really needs a paid writer. That and an HTML designer. Ouch.
So now you're claiming Sony should sell PS3s the way diamond wholesalers distribute their most precious gems.
You have very limited business foresight if you don't understand that the 50 million or so people Sony will eventually hope to reach with PS3s are its market, not the 500 thousand that will get one on opening days.
You're insane -- you think that Sony should have excluded all their 'real' customers in favor of those rich enough to bid on the units instead? To what end? And for how long? The first thousand? The first million? They'll sell out the first few million units without a single unit being on a shelf for 24 hours straight... this is a police/store/social problem, not a business one.
If you really want to see that envelope pushed, have a go at Magna Carta. Its one of my current favorite storylines and overall RPG games on a console (as opposed to NWN on my PC) and is a lot of fun to play most of the time, but the main character has breasts. Ok ok, he's barrel-chested... they look like breasts on a PS2. Oh, and his butt shows. Yeah, his butt. Luckily, you don't have to look at him most of the game.
As pointed out on the links I referenced, physically mature is not equal to age of majority.
Most girls in north america are now 'womanly' between 13 and 15 years old (that includes breast & hip size according to CNN surveys). With make up and a good hair-do, they look like a young version of an older woman instead of an aged version of a young woman.
PS a lot of celebrities you may know were on magazine covers long before they turned 18, including Britney Spears, Biance and many others.
Re-read your own comment above; it has nothing to do with Novell. It has nothing to do with this agreement. Your complaints are about Microsoft alone.
What Novell has agreed to in no way puts them in a worse position vis-a-vis the GPL unless they make stupid decisions in the future (ditto for all other GPL software distributing companies).
Novell may or may not do something idiotic in the future if and when Microsoft sues someone for infringement, but that hasn't happened yet and won't necessarily ever happen.
How do you know they're 18 exactly? Because the artist puts makeup on them? I know for a fact one of the largest modeling agencies in Ottawa specializes in the 14-16 age group because they have the figure that middle-aged women covet.
Just because you believe those girls to be legal doesn't mean they are, and that's exactly my point. When's the last time you saw an age printed in the corner of the photo (except in a porno)?
"Kay, modeling our new line of masquera turned 15 this may and hopes to be a nurse some day"
Kimora Lee, better known as the wife of music mogul Russell Simmons and the designer of Baby Phat, started her career as a model at the age of 13. Kimora, who is half Korean and half black, was chosen by Karl Lagerfeld himself to grace the Chanel haute couture runway
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I agree with you wholeheartedly on the hardware probably needing revision and/or fixes. That's how early adopter hardware always is though, its not just Sony. New TVs, new cars, new everything have problems right off the assembly line.
I'm waiting for a few months before picking up a PS3 and with or without games available, it will be a good BluRay player and PC platform for Linux. Each of which is worth more than the asking price. Its only 2/3 the price of a brand new BD player alone for that matter.
So while I understand your hesitancy, the "worth the price" issue is not related to its hardware reliability -- people purchase early adopter hardware all the time that die within 6 months (LCD and plasma TVs when they were first available come to mind).
The original Prince of Persia had beautiful graphics, so did Zelda on the N64. Dig had beautiful graphics, and so does Grandia III. I only played Dig because it looked gorgeous ... the plot didn't intrigue me until several hours into the game. Prince of Persia was more famous for its perfect (for the time) animations of human movement than for gameplay. Zelda had intrigue and fun as well as good graphics, and I very much enjoyed the plot of Grandia III as well despite some of its gameplay issues.
Would Burnout 3 or 4 be as much fun without pretty graphics? Maybe, but the incredible collisions and blurring movement are more than half the fun of that game, and I have people travel to my house to play them in PLII surround regularly because it has great sound too.
There's a lot of room for gameplay improvements in games, and a lot of room for graphics improvements as well, and I'm most looking forward to sound improvements what with live dts and DD capabilities on the PS3 (yes, I know the Xbox did DD -- didn't have any games I wanted to listen to).
Yes, I know. Its amazing how cheap it is to get a fully functional 3.2GHz+ home computer that will handle word processing and flash-enabled web browsing with a high end video and sound system for 3D gaming. Not to mention being very quiet and sleek looking, and we all know how cheap quiet is for a HTPC right?
I'm so sick of hearing about the PS3's price. Go buy one and install Linux on it and use it as your silent PC for a while then complain to me about how you paid a miserable $500 for it. When you decide its just barely worth the money for a fast and silent good looking PC, buy a blu-ray movie and watch one of those. If you're not into movies, try playing some PS3 games on it instead, assuming you enjoy video games. When you get bored of those features, just use it to listen to music for a while instead or to browse your photos directly off your camera.
God forbid anyone think about what they're getting for the money.
PS, if you really want a cheap gaming-only type system, the PS2 is about $100 with a memory card and game included these days, less than half the price of a Wii. Or buy a Wii. I don't care. But don't complain that the PS3 is too much money, its damn cheap for what you get -- I know how much it costs to build a decent silent home computer and it won't play games as well as the PS3 does and it doesn't have bluetooth support either.
I'm guessing the game was only designed to be appealing to most people for 15 or 20 minutes, since the comments by the author(s) include ageing gamers not having time to play anymore.
If its fun to play for 20 minutes, and fun again the next day for 20 minutes, and so on, then its doing well.
I have karma to burn; I'm not concerned about your opinion. That said, I thought it was a good post and didn't have moderation points to mod it up. Since I have a +1 karma bonus, I figured I'd re-post it so more people would be able to read it.
Using karma bonus so everyone sees this:
AC (parent) posted:
I'm on the Google Earth team and yes, this is exactly what happened. The license we have to the imagery forbids us from allowing access from unofficial clients. The data providers take this very seriously indeed and noticed very quickly that such an application was out in the wild.
Fortunately, the Gaia author understood our position and ceased development, for which we are grateful. I think we are going to send him a T-Shirt or something to try and make up for it. It's a small gesture but we don't want him to think badly of us.
I guess some people will see this action as us dumping on the little guy, but it's not that simple. Many Googlers have a background in open source and have been on both sides of the fence. However, the fact remains that this sort of aerial imagery is not only very expensive to produce but also very expensive to manipulate and merge into a unified "Earth". If we allowed open source clients to access the Earth database it would be easier to dump the (unwatermarked) images en-masse and avoid paying the imagery owners for it. Clearly, that's not something anybody wants - satellites don't launch themselves.
Creationists already do this. And the debates are quite entertaining.
Presumptions in science are the problem, not evidence.
For example, what would a global flood do to carbon dating evidence? How precise is carbon dating? How much do we really know about mountains forming? We assume a lot of things about our planet because we live such short lives and our good 'hard' science isn't that old.
PS, I don't believe dinosaurs and humans necessarily lived together, but within a similar frame of history? Quite possibly. Considering how rare fossilized evidence is vis-a-vis the number of a species in history, the lack of such evidence isn't entirely telling.
Also, why is being skeptical and essentially rude to people of opposing beliefs held in such high regard in western civilizations? What's wrong with inclusive thinking and open mindedness with a slant toward evidence instead? You already believe chairs will hold your weight without individual testing, and sometimes you turn out to be wrong. Why not consider how much of your life is based on belief that others knew what they were talking about, and not your own proofs. You don't have time to prove everything you rely on, so pick and choose, and spend some of your life living instead of caring so much.
You need 5 minutes with a good theologian to explain why you have no clue what you're talking about. Half of those are specific to customs of an area (various books in the New Testament were written to specific cities in specific circumstances; Hebrews has a totally different tone being written to Jews than Romans does, for example).
... that's entertaining.
Also, the things done by believers and followers of God's in the old and new testaments are things that happened (that's what inerrancy means), it doesn't mean its good that they happened.
The old testament does say on more than one occasion that God told people to go out and kill other people for being flagrantly disobedient. In the new testament however it is made very clear that the law is a way to explain how completely lost everyone is with God, and that it was always impossible to follow, and that Jesus fulfilled the law in every way for us (thus Paul's rant about "everything is permissible for me but not all things are beneficial".
Both make it very clear that women are equals to men in all areas of life (read "a good wife is hard to find" sometime -- Google it) and that if you own slaves, they are to be treated fairly (and released after x years).
Oh, and find me the "go out and rape women and children" bit
Legally, the money from your parents' last yard sale isn't tax-free either. In canada that would go under "other income".
Luckily, the government tends to turn a blind eye to this piece of the market.
My friends ask me all the time "how I do that" in racing games, when I pass them smoothly in a corner or somesuch. Its because I hold those nice analogue sticks half-up, instead of full-up, or maybe 73% up. Using both analogue sticks for steering + throttle/brakes gives much better control in everything from Burnout to Toca.
http://mikebabcock.ca/gaming
I could see this on servers and desktops equally, just not on gaming rigs.
The average desktop user is at the point now where they buy a new PC entirely if the old one is too slow in any area. Its not about RAM upgrades or video cards, its about a PC to them, and they buy a whole new one.
On the same note, integrated video is more than enough for most server configurations, and only high-end CAD/visualization workstations and gaming rigs need independent graphics capabilities.
I have 36 processes active on my Windows XP box. Of those, 5 are currently using 1% or more of my CPU time according to task manager, wait, make that 12, no 5 again.
You get my point I hope. Task switching is all well and good, and has made the modern computer much more useful than without it, but in terms of raw desktop performance and responsiveness, taking some of that work and sharing it with a second CPU core can make a significant latency difference. As I'm sure you're already aware, task switching is not the least intensive thing a CPU does and can in fact take quite a number of cycles (compared to its normal activities). Reducing the frequency of task switching therefore also increases potential throughput.
This isn't even getting into my Linux boxes that don't have an anti-virus running in the background and have SMP awareness at the application level in many cases.
Do I think a quad-core is cost effective right now for most desktop users? Of course not. Do I think its a good idea and a better use of your dollars than raw CPU performance? Very much so.
I'd rather have a quad-core 2GHz machine today than a dual-core 4GHz machine or a single-core 8GHz machine even though it wouldn't have the same throughput.
Global warming is like the paleolithic period -- something we've never experienced but assume happened because of the evidences we have, whereas the dinosaur bones would be more comparable to hurricanes (evidence of something that requires study).
So, what do we know about current changes in climate? Almost nothing. How well do we know the history of climate on the planet in the lifetime of humanity alone? Almost nothing. What can we extrapolate? Not much.
There's a lot of good science going on in the field of long-term climate change, but its not well established and nobody should be staking their governments' entire spending patterns on it at this point.
Should we reduce pollution? Definately. Should we be dealing with smog? Of course. Should we get rid of carcinogens? Lets try. How about greenhouse gasses? Sure, but let me see science at the level of the first three first.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't realize that the average long-running PC has a lot of background processes with sporadic activity levels that ruin the performance of your desktop. Having something like BitTorrent running in its own core makes all the difference in the world too.
MSN, BitTorrent, an MP3 player and a web browser all running at once (on top of background services) on a single-core system leads to a lot of task switching that is entirely unnecessary in a multi-core environment. And while throughput may not increase 4x, responsiveness will be very much improved.
Sorry, didn't you notice? None of these run Windows. But I'm sure a CPU and OS emulator would run just fine.
I've read this tripe before. Lets pretend you like very game on the GameCube. There's still more games you'd like on the PS2 than for the GameCube. There are 16 thousand total games for the PlayStation2. So some of them suck. Some of the big names one suck. There are a lot of good games for the PS2 however.
If you have a Gamecube and really enjoy it, good, keep enjoying it. Personally, my Gamecube owning friends are jealous of my huge collection of really good games for the PS2 and I don't own anywhere near all the best ones I'd enjoy.
Sony made public statements earlier this year about how hard it was to support some PS2 games because the programmers hadn't followed the actual guidelines from Sony for programming the PS2, instead relying on undocumented behaviors. In those cases, I'm sure, it will turn out they will no longer be emulatable for the near future on the PS3.
No, the crowd who believes in Copyright believes in it as it was designed -- as a way to foster the creation of works with an end result of more public domain works (I'm not making that up either). No, Copyright wasn't established to make people money, it was established to encourage the creation of works, by giving authors a temporary revenue stream from their works.
That same crowd doesn't believe that the indexing of the contents of books and journals in any way harms that revenue stream or that ability to make money selling copies of the works, since Google offers no such copy.
In this case, a third party has taken your work, put his name on it, and sold it to people. In the Google case, they've borrowed your work, read through it, gave it back and told everyone else how to find a copy should they want it. Google is like the maven that tells you about the new book or tv show you haven't heard of yet, not the kid selling free newspapers.
I too found the writing to need a severe overhaul. If this is the level of writing skill the author has, he or she really needs a paid writer. That and an HTML designer. Ouch.
So now you're claiming Sony should sell PS3s the way diamond wholesalers distribute their most precious gems.
You have very limited business foresight if you don't understand that the 50 million or so people Sony will eventually hope to reach with PS3s are its market, not the 500 thousand that will get one on opening days.
You're insane -- you think that Sony should have excluded all their 'real' customers in favor of those rich enough to bid on the units instead? To what end? And for how long? The first thousand? The first million? They'll sell out the first few million units without a single unit being on a shelf for 24 hours straight ... this is a police/store/social problem, not a business one.
If you really want to see that envelope pushed, have a go at Magna Carta. Its one of my current favorite storylines and overall RPG games on a console (as opposed to NWN on my PC) and is a lot of fun to play most of the time, but the main character has breasts. Ok ok, he's barrel-chested ... they look like breasts on a PS2. Oh, and his butt shows. Yeah, his butt. Luckily, you don't have to look at him most of the game.
As pointed out on the links I referenced, physically mature is not equal to age of majority.
Most girls in north america are now 'womanly' between 13 and 15 years old (that includes breast & hip size according to CNN surveys). With make up and a good hair-do, they look like a young version of an older woman instead of an aged version of a young woman.
PS a lot of celebrities you may know were on magazine covers long before they turned 18, including Britney Spears, Biance and many others.
Re-read your own comment above; it has nothing to do with Novell. It has nothing to do with this agreement. Your complaints are about Microsoft alone.
What Novell has agreed to in no way puts them in a worse position vis-a-vis the GPL unless they make stupid decisions in the future (ditto for all other GPL software distributing companies).
Novell may or may not do something idiotic in the future if and when Microsoft sues someone for infringement, but that hasn't happened yet and won't necessarily ever happen.
Just because you believe those girls to be legal doesn't mean they are, and that's exactly my point. When's the last time you saw an age printed in the corner of the photo (except in a porno)?
"Kay, modeling our new line of masquera turned 15 this may and hopes to be a nurse some day"
A quick google brought me this site: