The parent comment has a very valid question. The article in question says, and I quote:
"Along with a 5× DVD drive for game loading and video playback, initial versions included an 8-Gbyte hard drive to improve startup time. Microsoft has since removed that drive to lower system costs."
This is undeniably false. All Xboxes have hard drives, and Microsoft did not put it in there to "improve startup time" as the article suggests. It was put in there to store game saves without the need for a memory card (although to transport game saves you need a memory card), store music for the small percentage of games that support custom soundtracks, to store downloadable content for those games that support it and offer it (supporting it and actually offering it are two different things), and supposedly for precaching of data to reduce load times (although this feature is not used very much, even by Microsoft first party games).
The parent's comment is certainly not overrated. If anything, the article linked to is overrated with factual errors such as MS removing the Xbox's hard drive to save money.
This ain't one of 'em, and for good reason, since it'd be too easy for a large corporation to cast a chilling effect on whistleblowing by stringing together some chain-of-profit in court, then retaliate on the whistleblower once they were outed.
Except there are laws to protect true whistleblowers. And, for the record, telling some rumor site detailed info on a soon to be released product that causes no harm to the general public or the government, does not count as whistleblowing.
Now, if the person had given information that Apple had installed backdoors into their OS to allow Apple to come into any OS X computer online, at will, and retreive any data or destroy any data on the target conputer at will, then that would be more along the lines of whistleblowing; since the knowledge that Apple could get into your computer at any time and muck around with your personal information would be a matter of public interest.
Now, if you can please explain how releasing trade secrets of an upcomming/possibly upcomming product that will not do harm to the general public in any way or will not cause harm to the government/national security in any way, I'd love to hear it.
As it stands, these cases do NOT fall under whistleblowing. They fall more under the term corporate espionage. If the Apple products would somehow have done harm to the general public or to the government and national security, then they would. But, they don't. And I would really like to hear your explanation as to how they do fall under whistleblowing.
If you read the rest of the submission, Blizzard said certain parts of the account can not be changed, and the original owner could log in through the account at a later time with no problems. I assume this means the username and password are the parts that simply cannot be changed.
So I was working for a company that was indirectly sponsoring the slaughter of endangered animals.
But now you work at a company that pretty much has no morals whatsoever, and would do the exact same thing Motarolla was doing, so long as it keeps its monopoly.
Microsoft has resorted to threats in the past ("Remove IE and put Netscape on your computers, you naughty OEMs, and we'll revoke your Windows licesnses!"-- Microsoft documents/mails/emails to OEMs confirmed this in the anti-trust case), and probably still resorts to similar threatening tactics today (the recent "sell no PC without an OS or we revoke your OEM Windows license" fiasco might ring a bell).
Microsoft has lost patent infringement suits in the past, and in one case even had internal memos that said they knew they did it (back in the DOS days, I beleive it was the "doublespace" compression technique), but that they didn't care... at least until they were found guilty.
Microsoft has lost numerous copyright suits as well. One recent one they lost, that would have cost them a mere $3 million (remember, this is MS we're talking about, $3 million is chump chang to them); but they appealed the ruling and have used their corporate tactics to stall the hearings for years. Of course, now that the small French company that won the suit has gone bankrupt, mainly from legal fees for years on end, and can no longer afford to defend their copyrights... well, guess what company is finally ready to go back to court? Yep, the one you work for. Must be nice to have a team of lawyers on staff, that make a weekly paycheck, instead of having to hire law firms to represent them.
Microsoft treats their permatemps like crap; and when the temps took them to court, and won, they fired them all to outsource the temps so they wouldn't have to abide by the ruling imposed-- because it only affected them if they paid their temps directly. And, to top it off, they fired around 20% of their full timers (some who had been there ten or more years), took away their stock options, and told them to come back as temps (at a lower wage) so they'd save money on health insurance. Even more over the top, a MS exec at the time then gloated about how they had "laid off 20% of the workforce" and had profits jump by "90%" because of it. Don't think you have any sort of job security at MS; because if they decide they need to save money they might just fire you from your full time job and make you come back as a permatemp without such things as health insurance or the same salary you currently make.
Personally, if I was one of those 10+ year full timers who got fired, lost my health insurance, and then was told to come back as a temp to work to provide for my family at a lower wage-- just so they could save some money-- there wouldn't be a Redmond campus right now, nor would Gates, Ballmer, or any of the board be alive today. I would have blown the whole campus sky high, ensuring that there was a board meeting going on when the explosions happened.
And we also shouldn't have to bring up how many Microsoft "Partners" have ended up going bankrupt once they were "in good" with Microsoft enough to allow MS to see their code, and then have MS come and impliment the same product before their "partner" could get it out. Oh, and that small French company that is now bankrupt? A former MS "partner."
So, honestly, does it sound to you like MS is much better than Motorolla in any moral issues? Motorolla (and every other cell phone company that uses that mine) indirectly lead to the killing of endangered species. Microsoft has itself, led to the downfall of many people's income and livelyhoods, including people that worked for them or with them; broken the law on numerous occasions; and with their outsourced manufacturing for things like the Xbox in China and Malaysia indirectly sponsers what amounts to slave labor in third world countries.
So, please, don't try and make MS sound any better by bringing up any sort of moral dillemas about things a former employer of yours indirectly sponsered. Your current employer does an equal amount of immoral things, if not more-- and more of them are concious decisions on the part of your employer's board members rather than indirect moral issues.
I think there are other reasons to be put in this question, as well.
One point that should be mentioned is the cost of IT personell for the companies. One major thing MS likes to say is that you can save money on MSCEs as opposed to Unix/Linux admins. However, when you consider that a small company could spend a little more in salary for a Unix/Linux admin, they would end up saving money in areas like taxes and healthcare expenses. If a company can have a single *nix admin at a lowball figure of $60k a year, over 2 MSCEs at $30k a year, they actually save money, because the 2 MSCEs require extra money in taxes, and double the cost of health insurance premiums.
There's also the added costs of forced upgrades, both in software and in hardware costs (new Windows/other MS solutions releases typically require bigger and better hardware) in MS solutions, especially with the Licence 5.0 that forces those small companies who have signed it to upgrade when Microsoft says to upgrade, not when they are ready to upgrade.
I think this particular question is important, but needs to be fleshed out to include all the added costs of using a Microsoft solution (Incluing time wasted getting rid of adware/spyware/viruses/other malware) and compare them to the added costs of switching to a *nix solution (training, support contracts, new admins).
I think if really broken down, this would show that Microsoft is really misleading customers in their TCO arguments, because they simply don't focus on the issues that add into the TCO that can possibly be said to be other parts of the business and not the IT department's problem.
Also note that if you are on something fast, like a PCJ motorcycle, you can actually get into areas before the area streams from the disk. For example, in Los Santos, get on a super fast bike, and drive down the eastern straight highway comming from the mountains at full speed. You can go so fast, that you will actually end up driving on the sky, with nothing around you, because the PS2 simply can't load the areas as fast as you are going through them.
I love San Andreas, but you have to be a fool, or a fanboi, or both, to not notice stuff like this happening.
It's no secret. All one has to do is look at what happened with sales after the PS2 was released in Japan. Game sales were near nonexistant for a good while, but DVD movie sales skyrocketed (at that point, for some reason, DVD players were still relatively expensive in Japan).
Just one particular DVD in Japan, The Matrix, had its release date moved up a week to match the PS2's launch date in Japan, and sold 600,000 copies in its first 2 weeks. Previous DVD movies in Japan were considered hits if they hit 10,000 copies sold.
According to a spokesperson for one such company, "The size of the DVD recording market was about 30 billion yen [286 million dollars] in 1999, but in 2000 it is sure to expand to 100 billion yen [952 million dollars]." From this google cache.
An expected increase of over 3x for the whole market in 2000, and one movie selling 60x the amount that was condiered to be "hit" material within 2 weeks of the Japanese PS2 launch should tell you something.
The PS2 also only sold around 1 game per system in March 2000 in Japan. While that's still a lot of games, a mere 1:1 sales ratio isn't what cosnole manufactures want--especially because of the massive loss Sony took on the PS2 at launch-- since they make the money back on game royalties; meanwhile the sales of DVD movies went though the roof, as evidenced by just one movie out of the tons of other DVDs that ended up selling way more than the games for the PS2 at the time.
Let's see, the story is as minimalistic as possible to even claim having one, and there is ZERO character development (beyond stats).
Must be a lot of people out there who kiss up to Molyneaux, or they were on a lot of drugs when they voted on that category. I just praise the gods it didn't win RPG of the year.
First of all, the Article clearly mentions "Flaw found in sony psp". your article seems to be about sony's petulent reaction to a wide known, huge problem. Tip: IT was not a huge known problem! its a tiny problem people just realized it has! how much time has the PSP been out, and how many times have you heard of this problem?
Quite a bit, since the launch of the PSP, actually. This article from 12-13-04, just a few days after the release of the PSP in Japan shows a gamut of reported defects, including the square button problem and a pic that shows the problem.
You also apparently believe Sony will never fix the problem. IT will be fixed. theres a coming American release of the PSP and I bet money all these glitches will be gone with it. (I mean, they are not even difficult to fix!) probably later and update will probably be released in Japan. Sony does this.
Funny, according to Sony, there is nothing to fix. This is how they designed the unit.
Guys I hate to break your bubble BUT where I live my friends (and customers) are buying the PSP at $500 (almost 4 times the estimated final price)
Oh, so the PSP is only going to be $125? Is that why it's more expensive than the DS in Japan as well? Most places are setting up pre-orders with an estimated base price of $200 for the PSP. So, tell us; how do you know that it's coming out at such a lowered price, oh great seer into the future?
no one has complaint about the battery (they charge it once a day, and we actually advice them that)
People can go a few days without charging their GBA SP or DS...
no one has found or noticed not even one single glitch (this button glitch will be news to them).
So no one has noticed the buttons not being responsive, or any dead pixels or anythig, eh? Maybe they got good units designed AWAY from Sony's specifications.
They are as happy as can be with it and surpringsily the psp's are outsold here.
And where, pray tell, is "here?"
I have only seen 2 DS being sold (by known n fanboys btw), most customers ask for it then return it after seing the graphics/games and checking the price.($200)
Which is why the DS has sold over 1 million units in North America and over 1 million units in Japan, right? Because only 2 people have bought them. They just have lots and lots of money to run around between North America and Japan buying up the DSes out there.
Do try to troll better next time. You're ludicrous assumption that the PSP will be only $125 and that the DS is actually more expensive than it is at retail, alone, show you're a brain dead fucktard who thinks he can sound intelligent.
Playable showcases of both the xbox next and ps3 arent too unlikely, both of them must be pretty close to final product.
Doubtful on the PS3. I know a few people at a dev studio or two which in turn are owned by large publishers, and they say they have the Xenon (Xbox 2) dev kits already, but the last time I asked (about a month ago) none of them had either the PS3 or Revolution dev kits.
There's also the fact that the prototypes for the Cell chip were only just recently made and are being tested.
If the PS3 is going to be using the Cell, there's going to be at least another year before anything is playable at an E3 or TGS or whatever. Under 5 months is simply not enough time to not only learn an entirely new architecture, but also make playable demos running on said new architecture. And E3 2005 is in less than 5 months.
The only way for the PS3 to have something playable at this year's E3 would be for Sony to change from using the Cell to using a different chip that developers already know (like an x86 or PPC variant, or maybe an updated Emotion Engine), and they could throw together playable tech demos.
But, if Sony still is adamant about using the Cell chip, then it's going to be at least another few months before they can even have development kits ready for developers to begin learning the new architecture on. In that case, don't expect to see "playable" PS3 units at E3 this year.
Way to judge by owning one, and not owning the one you're having an orgasm over. Promises, shmomises. Or do you still believe Sony is going to fully support the PS2 hard drive with downloadable movies and music, or IM clients, or that the PS2 will be able to render Toy Story in real time, all like Sony promised?
Moving the camera in Metal Gear Acid does not constitute "playable." The closest thing to being playable was 1 unit that had a RPG on it, but you were confined to one town, with no fighting, just talking to a few villagers and moving around. Again, hardly what I consider "playable" demo units.
In addition to the others who told you it should run pretty quickly after your first start up, its default preferences are to run once every week, in the background, and check for new updates. You can change this time from that to manual (only when you want), or more often or less than the default once per week.
Welcome to the world of Macintosh... I think you'll be happy with it.
Where can PS2 or GameCube boast a system only title selling like that?
Before the GTA Doublepack on the Xbox, the PS2 versions of GTA III and GTA VC collectively sold over 14 million units. Last numbers I saw for the GTA Doublepack on the Xbox, it was still under 1 million sold, worldwide.
I'd also hate to see the numbers for the FF series on the PS2, worldwide, or Dragon Warrior on the PS2 (not on Xbox, either of them)... as they sell millions alone just in Japan for each release. I think the last Dragon Warrior game alone on the PS2 sold over 3 million units in Japan. Imagine if it got out to other parts of the world.
n regards to GTA, I know quite a few folks who nixed their PS2s once GTA (the only game that mattered to them on PS2) came out for Xbox. They're kicking themselves now (San Andreas) but are awaiting a cleaner looking, faster loading and smoother playing Xbox port.
Which completely explains why the Xbox version of the GTA Doublepack has sold less than a million copies worldwide (as far as I know), right?
The Xbox only has Halo, Halo 2, Fable, Dead or Alive 3, Splinter Cell, and Project Gotham Racing as titles that have sold over 1 million units worldwide last time I checked. And, no, their Platinum Hits line is not reserved for titles that have sold over 1 million units, as some people think; do you really think crap like Star Wars: Obi Wan have sold over 1 million units? In fact, if you look at many of the Platinum Hits titles, they've sold like crap at full price, and aren't selling much better as Platinum Hits.
Not much to learn, really. Replance CTRL for Command (Apple key) for most functions, and then you know what to do if coming from a Windows world. CMD+C = copy, CMD+V = paste, etc.
I got my first Mac in March of '04, and within a few hours of just fooling around, I was moving just as quickly as I do on Windows. Now, after using it lmost exclusively for the past 9 months, I do things much fater on it than I could on my Windows box.
It's seriously easy as hell to learn, and plug in a USB multi-button mouse and work like you do on Windows for most things (only thing I miss is clicking the scroll wheel and moving up or down to quickly scroll through documents and such). Other than that, the OS is a snap to use.
Hell, they stated that there have been no patches for Xbox Live games fer God's sake! Almost every single Live game out there that supports downloadable content has been patched. And that issue was WELL after the first 2 patches were released for Capcom Vs. SNK 2 EO and Unreal Championship, almost a year after.
One issue I picked up a while back even mentioned "Sony" and "PlayStation 2" as much, if not more than they said the word "Xbox," either trying to put it down, or claiming huge conspiracies about why certain games were online on the PS2 and not on the Xbox at the time.
It's written by the biggest bunch of fanboys, evar.
The demo disks are about the only thing worthwhile from that rag. It seriously isn't even worth being used as toilet paper.
Print magazines have word and page limits they have to meet for printing costs. They'd probably like to talk a lot more about the games and their thoughts in the reviews, but page constraints combined with word limits make it hard to do.
They've been doing a lot more in terms of features, too, but those pages and words cut on the limits they can then use for reviews and/or previews.
That's why Internet sites are a good place to look for reviews. Most of us don't have word limits on our reviews, so we can go as long or as short as we want to. GameSpot typically goes 2-3 pages for reviews, IGN has gone as long as 10 pages for a single review, and my site puts all the review on one page, but I've written some that are 7 pages typed. Now, granted, on larger sites, a lot of those pages have space dedicated to advertisements (and IGN has those annoying iframe ads), but the online sites, overall, tend to have more in-depth coverage in their reviews.
2. No, they also do "weighted scoring." They give more credence to some reviewers/publications over others. GR gives an average based on the scores alone. Not every site/publication is counted towards the main score, until those sites/publication meet the requirements of GR. But no site is given more "weight" than any other, because there's 2 averages listed for games, the total average (every site listed), and the main average (those counted towards a game's main average score). As more sites/magazines meet the minimum requirements, they get put into the main average category.
On Metacritics, it seems if they like a reviewer or publication, then that person's/publication's reviews are given a bigger standing in their ratings. Hardly a good way to make decisions about purchases of anything when the meta-review site might take reviews by a person or publication that you don't like and bumps up their importance to make you think that the product is better or worse for you than it may be.
3. No, I'm not admitedly alienated from anything. I'm admitedly not rolling in enough disposible income to upgrade my PC every 6 months to play the latest and greatest games with all their whiz-bang effects. I have no desire to spend $400 on a video card every 6 months to a year, nor the extra flow to do so willy nilly. I have no desire to upgrade my computer when the majority of the programs I use won't really take advantage of the upgrades; and when I do decide to upgrade, I do it with what I need to do in mind, not being able to play PC games. I needed portability, I got a 14" iBook, not the more expensive 17" PowerBook I could have gone for and just not had any money for an extra few weeks. When I got my last PC I got it with enough RAM and CPU speed and HDD space to get me through for what I needed it to do for a few years. And, whattaya know? A few years later it is still working for what I need it to do.
PC games and their getting more outrageous by the day minimum specs are not something I care to look at, because I simply refuse to spend my money on upgrades to my PC just for the games. If I upgrade my PC, it's because I need it upgraded for other things. My consoles can support me for my gaming for years at a time, whereas a PC I might buy now will need something new in it in as short as a few months after purchase if I want to play Half-Doom-26 at 1600x1200 with 24x anti-aliasing and 12.9 surround sound implanted in my head.
Would I look into them more if I had more disposible income? Yes. But, I don't have it to work with right now, so I'm not going to be phased if I happen to miss out on Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 or World of WarCraft. Eventually I'll get a PC that can run them, and by that time, the games will be in the bargian bin.
Yes, 30kbps. I average around 6-8 KB/s upload. Around 10 KB/s max upload on a really good day. I think the most I ever got after @Home went under and Comcast took over was 12 KB/s.
I get great download, though. A bad day for downloading is around 80-100 KB/s from a reliable host. I've had well over 200 KB/s download before, though. It seems to stay in the 130-160 KB/s range most of the time, though.
1. Yes, I also loathed Fable, as well. And despite what Meta-can't-even-have-reviews-for-Madden-2005-yet-c ritic says, reviewers (and I am a game reviewer) also did not like NHL 2005 as much this year. If you think a 77% (75% on Metacritic) is a game that is "critically acclaimed," you're insane. Critically acclaimed would end up in the top 10%-15% (max) of scoring as an average.
You say it's all brand loyalty...Trust me, it's not. Look at the reviews on Metacritic.com.
FUCK METACRITIC. Metacritic doesn't even have a freaking score for Madden 2005 yet. GameRankings has an average based on 31 reviews. Fuck Metacritic.com about game review scores. GR is where it is at, it has reviews for a game that's been out for MONTHS that Metacritic doesn't, and has reviews for hundreds upon hundreds of games from hundreds of review sources.
3) You say you haven't even played The Sims (the best selling PC game of all time) or BF1942 (one of the biggest selling and most award winning games of the year), and yet you turn around and say that EA's published all crap. Hmmm...right.
Sorry, I'll go out and upgrade my PC just so I can play 2 games I'm not all that interested in playing, just for you and your trusting in a site that can't even find reviews for Madden 2005 ass. I doubt my little 8 MB video card can handle these games. My iBook probably could, with it's 32 MB Radeon 9200 Mobility, but I use my iBook for more productive things than the Sims or Battlefield 1942.
It is quite possible that I don't really review PC games, isn't it? In fact, I've only ever reviewed 1 PC/Mac game, and that was Unreal Tournament 2004 for the Mac... but I had to uninstall it to free up room for more productive things on me iBook. And my console game reviews take up a lot of my gaming time, so I don't have the opportunity to go out and buy the Sims for the consoles, even if I was interested in playing it.
That's the nice thing about what I review... I get to pick and choose what I want to review, unless I get the games for free from the publishers, then I damn well need to review them in case they have games I want in the future. So, unless EA decides the site I work for is worthy of their notice, I don't forsee myself getting The Sims or The Sims Online, or The Sims 2 anytime soon. In the meantime, I'll review the EA games I feel like buying and reviewing, and the last one was Def Jam Fight for NY. The rest of their crap I'll try, but I'm not buying it unless it is good enough by my standards.
And 99% of EA's games are simply not good enough for my standards.
They aren't a goddamn gaming only meta-study/review average site! They do books and DVDs and all sorts of other shit. Look at GameRankings for averages for games based on just GAMING SITES.
And, in there, you will see that EA's Madden has gone down since 2003, not up. Not a huge amount, but it is falling in scores.
Slashdot Mirror
"Along with a 5× DVD drive for game loading and video playback, initial versions included an 8-Gbyte hard drive to improve startup time. Microsoft has since removed that drive to lower system costs."
This is undeniably false. All Xboxes have hard drives, and Microsoft did not put it in there to "improve startup time" as the article suggests. It was put in there to store game saves without the need for a memory card (although to transport game saves you need a memory card), store music for the small percentage of games that support custom soundtracks, to store downloadable content for those games that support it and offer it (supporting it and actually offering it are two different things), and supposedly for precaching of data to reduce load times (although this feature is not used very much, even by Microsoft first party games).
The parent's comment is certainly not overrated. If anything, the article linked to is overrated with factual errors such as MS removing the Xbox's hard drive to save money.
Except there are laws to protect true whistleblowers. And, for the record, telling some rumor site detailed info on a soon to be released product that causes no harm to the general public or the government, does not count as whistleblowing.
Now, if the person had given information that Apple had installed backdoors into their OS to allow Apple to come into any OS X computer online, at will, and retreive any data or destroy any data on the target conputer at will, then that would be more along the lines of whistleblowing; since the knowledge that Apple could get into your computer at any time and muck around with your personal information would be a matter of public interest.
Now, if you can please explain how releasing trade secrets of an upcomming/possibly upcomming product that will not do harm to the general public in any way or will not cause harm to the government/national security in any way, I'd love to hear it.
As it stands, these cases do NOT fall under whistleblowing. They fall more under the term corporate espionage. If the Apple products would somehow have done harm to the general public or to the government and national security, then they would. But, they don't. And I would really like to hear your explanation as to how they do fall under whistleblowing.
If you read the rest of the submission, Blizzard said certain parts of the account can not be changed, and the original owner could log in through the account at a later time with no problems. I assume this means the username and password are the parts that simply cannot be changed.
But now you work at a company that pretty much has no morals whatsoever, and would do the exact same thing Motarolla was doing, so long as it keeps its monopoly.
Microsoft has resorted to threats in the past ("Remove IE and put Netscape on your computers, you naughty OEMs, and we'll revoke your Windows licesnses!"-- Microsoft documents/mails/emails to OEMs confirmed this in the anti-trust case), and probably still resorts to similar threatening tactics today (the recent "sell no PC without an OS or we revoke your OEM Windows license" fiasco might ring a bell).
Microsoft has lost patent infringement suits in the past, and in one case even had internal memos that said they knew they did it (back in the DOS days, I beleive it was the "doublespace" compression technique), but that they didn't care... at least until they were found guilty.
Microsoft has lost numerous copyright suits as well. One recent one they lost, that would have cost them a mere $3 million (remember, this is MS we're talking about, $3 million is chump chang to them); but they appealed the ruling and have used their corporate tactics to stall the hearings for years. Of course, now that the small French company that won the suit has gone bankrupt, mainly from legal fees for years on end, and can no longer afford to defend their copyrights... well, guess what company is finally ready to go back to court? Yep, the one you work for. Must be nice to have a team of lawyers on staff, that make a weekly paycheck, instead of having to hire law firms to represent them.
Microsoft treats their permatemps like crap; and when the temps took them to court, and won, they fired them all to outsource the temps so they wouldn't have to abide by the ruling imposed-- because it only affected them if they paid their temps directly. And, to top it off, they fired around 20% of their full timers (some who had been there ten or more years), took away their stock options, and told them to come back as temps (at a lower wage) so they'd save money on health insurance. Even more over the top, a MS exec at the time then gloated about how they had "laid off 20% of the workforce" and had profits jump by "90%" because of it. Don't think you have any sort of job security at MS; because if they decide they need to save money they might just fire you from your full time job and make you come back as a permatemp without such things as health insurance or the same salary you currently make.
Personally, if I was one of those 10+ year full timers who got fired, lost my health insurance, and then was told to come back as a temp to work to provide for my family at a lower wage-- just so they could save some money-- there wouldn't be a Redmond campus right now, nor would Gates, Ballmer, or any of the board be alive today. I would have blown the whole campus sky high, ensuring that there was a board meeting going on when the explosions happened.
And we also shouldn't have to bring up how many Microsoft "Partners" have ended up going bankrupt once they were "in good" with Microsoft enough to allow MS to see their code, and then have MS come and impliment the same product before their "partner" could get it out. Oh, and that small French company that is now bankrupt? A former MS "partner."
So, honestly, does it sound to you like MS is much better than Motorolla in any moral issues? Motorolla (and every other cell phone company that uses that mine) indirectly lead to the killing of endangered species. Microsoft has itself, led to the downfall of many people's income and livelyhoods, including people that worked for them or with them; broken the law on numerous occasions; and with their outsourced manufacturing for things like the Xbox in China and Malaysia indirectly sponsers what amounts to slave labor in third world countries.
So, please, don't try and make MS sound any better by bringing up any sort of moral dillemas about things a former employer of yours indirectly sponsered. Your current employer does an equal amount of immoral things, if not more-- and more of them are concious decisions on the part of your employer's board members rather than indirect moral issues.
One point that should be mentioned is the cost of IT personell for the companies. One major thing MS likes to say is that you can save money on MSCEs as opposed to Unix/Linux admins. However, when you consider that a small company could spend a little more in salary for a Unix/Linux admin, they would end up saving money in areas like taxes and healthcare expenses. If a company can have a single *nix admin at a lowball figure of $60k a year, over 2 MSCEs at $30k a year, they actually save money, because the 2 MSCEs require extra money in taxes, and double the cost of health insurance premiums.
There's also the added costs of forced upgrades, both in software and in hardware costs (new Windows/other MS solutions releases typically require bigger and better hardware) in MS solutions, especially with the Licence 5.0 that forces those small companies who have signed it to upgrade when Microsoft says to upgrade, not when they are ready to upgrade.
I think this particular question is important, but needs to be fleshed out to include all the added costs of using a Microsoft solution (Incluing time wasted getting rid of adware/spyware/viruses/other malware) and compare them to the added costs of switching to a *nix solution (training, support contracts, new admins).
I think if really broken down, this would show that Microsoft is really misleading customers in their TCO arguments, because they simply don't focus on the issues that add into the TCO that can possibly be said to be other parts of the business and not the IT department's problem.
I love San Andreas, but you have to be a fool, or a fanboi, or both, to not notice stuff like this happening.
Just one particular DVD in Japan, The Matrix, had its release date moved up a week to match the PS2's launch date in Japan, and sold 600,000 copies in its first 2 weeks. Previous DVD movies in Japan were considered hits if they hit 10,000 copies sold.
According to a spokesperson for one such company, "The size of the DVD recording market was about 30 billion yen [286 million dollars] in 1999, but in 2000 it is sure to expand to 100 billion yen [952 million dollars]." From this google cache.
An expected increase of over 3x for the whole market in 2000, and one movie selling 60x the amount that was condiered to be "hit" material within 2 weeks of the Japanese PS2 launch should tell you something.
The PS2 also only sold around 1 game per system in March 2000 in Japan. While that's still a lot of games, a mere 1:1 sales ratio isn't what cosnole manufactures want--especially because of the massive loss Sony took on the PS2 at launch-- since they make the money back on game royalties; meanwhile the sales of DVD movies went though the roof, as evidenced by just one movie out of the tons of other DVDs that ended up selling way more than the games for the PS2 at the time.
Let's see, the story is as minimalistic as possible to even claim having one, and there is ZERO character development (beyond stats).
Must be a lot of people out there who kiss up to Molyneaux, or they were on a lot of drugs when they voted on that category. I just praise the gods it didn't win RPG of the year.
Quite a bit, since the launch of the PSP, actually. This article from 12-13-04, just a few days after the release of the PSP in Japan shows a gamut of reported defects, including the square button problem and a pic that shows the problem.
You also apparently believe Sony will never fix the problem. IT will be fixed. theres a coming American release of the PSP and I bet money all these glitches will be gone with it. (I mean, they are not even difficult to fix!) probably later and update will probably be released in Japan. Sony does this.
Funny, according to Sony, there is nothing to fix. This is how they designed the unit.
Guys I hate to break your bubble BUT where I live my friends (and customers) are buying the PSP at $500 (almost 4 times the estimated final price)
Oh, so the PSP is only going to be $125? Is that why it's more expensive than the DS in Japan as well? Most places are setting up pre-orders with an estimated base price of $200 for the PSP. So, tell us; how do you know that it's coming out at such a lowered price, oh great seer into the future?
no one has complaint about the battery (they charge it once a day, and we actually advice them that)
People can go a few days without charging their GBA SP or DS...
no one has found or noticed not even one single glitch (this button glitch will be news to them).
So no one has noticed the buttons not being responsive, or any dead pixels or anythig, eh? Maybe they got good units designed AWAY from Sony's specifications.
They are as happy as can be with it and surpringsily the psp's are outsold here.
And where, pray tell, is "here?"
I have only seen 2 DS being sold (by known n fanboys btw), most customers ask for it then return it after seing the graphics/games and checking the price.($200)
Which is why the DS has sold over 1 million units in North America and over 1 million units in Japan, right? Because only 2 people have bought them. They just have lots and lots of money to run around between North America and Japan buying up the DSes out there.
Do try to troll better next time. You're ludicrous assumption that the PSP will be only $125 and that the DS is actually more expensive than it is at retail, alone, show you're a brain dead fucktard who thinks he can sound intelligent.
Doubtful on the PS3. I know a few people at a dev studio or two which in turn are owned by large publishers, and they say they have the Xenon (Xbox 2) dev kits already, but the last time I asked (about a month ago) none of them had either the PS3 or Revolution dev kits.
There's also the fact that the prototypes for the Cell chip were only just recently made and are being tested.
If the PS3 is going to be using the Cell, there's going to be at least another year before anything is playable at an E3 or TGS or whatever. Under 5 months is simply not enough time to not only learn an entirely new architecture, but also make playable demos running on said new architecture. And E3 2005 is in less than 5 months.
The only way for the PS3 to have something playable at this year's E3 would be for Sony to change from using the Cell to using a different chip that developers already know (like an x86 or PPC variant, or maybe an updated Emotion Engine), and they could throw together playable tech demos.
But, if Sony still is adamant about using the Cell chip, then it's going to be at least another few months before they can even have development kits ready for developers to begin learning the new architecture on. In that case, don't expect to see "playable" PS3 units at E3 this year.
Moving the camera in Metal Gear Acid does not constitute "playable." The closest thing to being playable was 1 unit that had a RPG on it, but you were confined to one town, with no fighting, just talking to a few villagers and moving around. Again, hardly what I consider "playable" demo units.
Welcome to the world of Macintosh... I think you'll be happy with it.
Before the GTA Doublepack on the Xbox, the PS2 versions of GTA III and GTA VC collectively sold over 14 million units. Last numbers I saw for the GTA Doublepack on the Xbox, it was still under 1 million sold, worldwide.
I'd also hate to see the numbers for the FF series on the PS2, worldwide, or Dragon Warrior on the PS2 (not on Xbox, either of them)... as they sell millions alone just in Japan for each release. I think the last Dragon Warrior game alone on the PS2 sold over 3 million units in Japan. Imagine if it got out to other parts of the world.
Which completely explains why the Xbox version of the GTA Doublepack has sold less than a million copies worldwide (as far as I know), right?
The Xbox only has Halo, Halo 2, Fable, Dead or Alive 3, Splinter Cell, and Project Gotham Racing as titles that have sold over 1 million units worldwide last time I checked. And, no, their Platinum Hits line is not reserved for titles that have sold over 1 million units, as some people think; do you really think crap like Star Wars: Obi Wan have sold over 1 million units? In fact, if you look at many of the Platinum Hits titles, they've sold like crap at full price, and aren't selling much better as Platinum Hits.
Not much to learn, really. Replance CTRL for Command (Apple key) for most functions, and then you know what to do if coming from a Windows world. CMD+C = copy, CMD+V = paste, etc.
I got my first Mac in March of '04, and within a few hours of just fooling around, I was moving just as quickly as I do on Windows. Now, after using it lmost exclusively for the past 9 months, I do things much fater on it than I could on my Windows box.
It's seriously easy as hell to learn, and plug in a USB multi-button mouse and work like you do on Windows for most things (only thing I miss is clicking the scroll wheel and moving up or down to quickly scroll through documents and such). Other than that, the OS is a snap to use.
Hell, they stated that there have been no patches for Xbox Live games fer God's sake! Almost every single Live game out there that supports downloadable content has been patched. And that issue was WELL after the first 2 patches were released for Capcom Vs. SNK 2 EO and Unreal Championship, almost a year after.
One issue I picked up a while back even mentioned "Sony" and "PlayStation 2" as much, if not more than they said the word "Xbox," either trying to put it down, or claiming huge conspiracies about why certain games were online on the PS2 and not on the Xbox at the time.
It's written by the biggest bunch of fanboys, evar.
The demo disks are about the only thing worthwhile from that rag. It seriously isn't even worth being used as toilet paper.
They've been doing a lot more in terms of features, too, but those pages and words cut on the limits they can then use for reviews and/or previews.
That's why Internet sites are a good place to look for reviews. Most of us don't have word limits on our reviews, so we can go as long or as short as we want to. GameSpot typically goes 2-3 pages for reviews, IGN has gone as long as 10 pages for a single review, and my site puts all the review on one page, but I've written some that are 7 pages typed. Now, granted, on larger sites, a lot of those pages have space dedicated to advertisements (and IGN has those annoying iframe ads), but the online sites, overall, tend to have more in-depth coverage in their reviews.
2. No, they also do "weighted scoring." They give more credence to some reviewers/publications over others. GR gives an average based on the scores alone. Not every site/publication is counted towards the main score, until those sites/publication meet the requirements of GR. But no site is given more "weight" than any other, because there's 2 averages listed for games, the total average (every site listed), and the main average (those counted towards a game's main average score). As more sites/magazines meet the minimum requirements, they get put into the main average category.
On Metacritics, it seems if they like a reviewer or publication, then that person's/publication's reviews are given a bigger standing in their ratings. Hardly a good way to make decisions about purchases of anything when the meta-review site might take reviews by a person or publication that you don't like and bumps up their importance to make you think that the product is better or worse for you than it may be.
3. No, I'm not admitedly alienated from anything. I'm admitedly not rolling in enough disposible income to upgrade my PC every 6 months to play the latest and greatest games with all their whiz-bang effects. I have no desire to spend $400 on a video card every 6 months to a year, nor the extra flow to do so willy nilly. I have no desire to upgrade my computer when the majority of the programs I use won't really take advantage of the upgrades; and when I do decide to upgrade, I do it with what I need to do in mind, not being able to play PC games. I needed portability, I got a 14" iBook, not the more expensive 17" PowerBook I could have gone for and just not had any money for an extra few weeks. When I got my last PC I got it with enough RAM and CPU speed and HDD space to get me through for what I needed it to do for a few years. And, whattaya know? A few years later it is still working for what I need it to do.
PC games and their getting more outrageous by the day minimum specs are not something I care to look at, because I simply refuse to spend my money on upgrades to my PC just for the games. If I upgrade my PC, it's because I need it upgraded for other things. My consoles can support me for my gaming for years at a time, whereas a PC I might buy now will need something new in it in as short as a few months after purchase if I want to play Half-Doom-26 at 1600x1200 with 24x anti-aliasing and 12.9 surround sound implanted in my head.
Would I look into them more if I had more disposible income? Yes. But, I don't have it to work with right now, so I'm not going to be phased if I happen to miss out on Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 or World of WarCraft. Eventually I'll get a PC that can run them, and by that time, the games will be in the bargian bin.
Dammit used the 989 crap MLB instead of EA's MVP scores. MVP 2004 would make it above 85% with an 88.2%, but no MVP 2005 released yet.
I get great download, though. A bad day for downloading is around 80-100 KB/s from a reliable host. I've had well over 200 KB/s download before, though. It seems to stay in the 130-160 KB/s range most of the time, though.
You say it's all brand loyalty...Trust me, it's not. Look at the reviews on Metacritic.com .
FUCK METACRITIC. Metacritic doesn't even have a freaking score for Madden 2005 yet. GameRankings has an average based on 31 reviews. Fuck Metacritic.com about game review scores. GR is where it is at, it has reviews for a game that's been out for MONTHS that Metacritic doesn't, and has reviews for hundreds upon hundreds of games from hundreds of review sources.
3) You say you haven't even played The Sims (the best selling PC game of all time) or BF1942 (one of the biggest selling and most award winning games of the year), and yet you turn around and say that EA's published all crap. Hmmm...right.
Sorry, I'll go out and upgrade my PC just so I can play 2 games I'm not all that interested in playing, just for you and your trusting in a site that can't even find reviews for Madden 2005 ass. I doubt my little 8 MB video card can handle these games. My iBook probably could, with it's 32 MB Radeon 9200 Mobility, but I use my iBook for more productive things than the Sims or Battlefield 1942.
It is quite possible that I don't really review PC games, isn't it? In fact, I've only ever reviewed 1 PC/Mac game, and that was Unreal Tournament 2004 for the Mac... but I had to uninstall it to free up room for more productive things on me iBook. And my console game reviews take up a lot of my gaming time, so I don't have the opportunity to go out and buy the Sims for the consoles, even if I was interested in playing it.
That's the nice thing about what I review... I get to pick and choose what I want to review, unless I get the games for free from the publishers, then I damn well need to review them in case they have games I want in the future. So, unless EA decides the site I work for is worthy of their notice, I don't forsee myself getting The Sims or The Sims Online, or The Sims 2 anytime soon. In the meantime, I'll review the EA games I feel like buying and reviewing, and the last one was Def Jam Fight for NY. The rest of their crap I'll try, but I'm not buying it unless it is good enough by my standards.
And 99% of EA's games are simply not good enough for my standards.
They aren't a goddamn gaming only meta-study/review average site! They do books and DVDs and all sorts of other shit. Look at GameRankings for averages for games based on just GAMING SITES.
And, in there, you will see that EA's Madden has gone down since 2003, not up. Not a huge amount, but it is falling in scores.