All good points as above.
The store space for Xbox games is tiny. They starte doff with a bang, but the shelves shrunk for ther original Xbox. I wonder how they're going to conquer the gamestore real-estate now when they're only got one shelf compared to the PS2's library.
They had some Go and Shogi games for the Xbox Japanese market.... but there were millions of them for the PS2. Of course, the customer is going to go for the machine with the largest selection - that way if they buy a bummer, at least there's more to choose from.
Going back to the past, the reason why the Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 were so popular was because of the vast software selections. Sure there were lots of crap titles, but it didn't matter when there were no shortages of them.
I think the problem is more related to the fact that the Japanese have always stuck to their own home-grown companies when it comes to gaming. During the 80s, the Japanese had their own consoles which we could never get, and they were never interested in what the US or Europe was producing. I assume there is a subtle racism there. While the Japanese are accuse the Xbox of being underpowered in contrast to the up and coming still vapourware PS3, they couldn't use that argument for Xbox vs. PS2 - knowing the Japanese you'd have to assume bias there.
Also, considering the game lineup for the best-selling Playstation and 100% backwards compatibility existed for the PS2 - it's hard to see how the PS2 could have gone wrong. The Xbox never had a strong following here, nor did it have a large library of games. The backwards compatibility argument is a lost cause.
Thing is which really sticks out in my mind - the game launch line-up here in Japan is as bad as it was the first time for the Xbox - correct that - even worse. There's no Halo this time around, or smash hit game for the Japanese market. I haven't seen any TV ads. The PS2 release was covered by TV ads every day before the release reminding how long they would have to wait to play their new machine with release games.
I do get the feeling though, that the Xbox 360 is really an Xbox 1.5 - the masses of PS2 users are going to wait patiently for their PS3 I feel, so they can play all their PS2 games. Microsoft had better develop a compelling reason to buy an Xbox 360 for Japanese gamers pretty darned fast.
I agree that the open sourcing of Solaris was a broadside shot at RedHat's business model.
If Sun can do to Solaris what RedHat has done for Linux, there will be more competition - even more so given Sun's track record on operating systems and the fact that they do the hardware as well. I've had major issues installing RedHat on so called supported hardware - without a plethora of driver disks and system hacks. However OTOH, Solaris needs driver support so that it can run on any old desktop PC as well, and cope with all kinds of network, video, and RAID cards.
Until OpenSolaris becomes distro'ed (Schillix is a nice start, but you can't really call that a distro), we should see more interest from IT admins. At the moment, OpenSolaris has ways to go yet.
Studios don't need to create games with flash-in-the-pan graphics, as long as they make them fun. As far as I'm concerned, they can get away with Gameboy Advanced graphics on the Xbox 360 as long as the game is fun. It's nice to have all that kickass graphical ability for the hardware - BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN IT ALL HAS TO BE USED. Games with good gameplay mechanics don't require that much horsepower - unless of course, an original gameplay concept comes out that requires an incredible amount of CPU horsepower in order to be workable.
The thing is, people in boardrooms who understand marketing know that they can get wads of cash by making semi-playable games with fancy graphics - knowing that, for the most part, the gameplaying public generally consists of people who will be blown over by graphics and little else. Gameplay be damned. Also, they know if they make the game easy to finish fast, they'll be out there buying new games faster.
What I fear is that eventually game companies will make little less than semi-playable movies - which will cost more to buy than movies themselves. We already know that games make more than Hollywood. This is just the next logical step on the road to the next video game crash.
I think that this report is just a sign that many "old-timers" are just burned out with video games. All us oldies who grew up with the Atari 2600 have little patience anymore.
I think a lot of people feel that pretty much anything that could be done with video games has already been done to death. The only thing left to do is to be creative with good storylines, and boost the graphics capabilities of some machines. We have busy lives and the older we get, the less time we think we have to play around. We don't have time to do D-Day for the gazillionth time in the next WW2 FPS.
Sure, there are innovative game concepts out there yet to be exploited, but all the easy pickings are gone, all the ideas which are actually fun are gone, and we've grown tired/out of everything.
I'm STILL waiting for virtual reality machines to become feasible.
Actually I think Sapporo and Kirin are much better Japanese beers. Asahi make some pretty pissy beers, especially their Red label (urrgrgrghhhh!) and the even worse Green label (bleuaghghhggh!)
Windows is easy to maintain for the week required to set up a test system. After a while though, the system gets clogged, something ends up thrashing the CPU, all the icons start to jump from their applications to something else they fancy (hello Windows 2000?!), and you WILL require a reboot, which causes costly downtime - and some poor admin to come in on his weekend. This is NOT good in a situation where even 5 minutes of downtime on the weekend is NOT a good thing.
Sure, I've had monster planning and installs of Linux and FreeBSD - but those servers just don't go down. I almost forget that they are there. We built all the monitoring scripts ourselves so they let us know by email if they are experiencing trouble. A Solaris box we have has been running since 2000 without rebooting, surviving several software upgrades in the process.
Meanwhile my Windows 2000 desktop icons have decided to have an icon swapping party, and my laptop seems to get slower every year... not to mention the number of viruses it can get.
I remember playing his Questprobe:Spiderman adventure game. I couldn't figure it out because most of the solutions to the puzzles didn't revolve around beating the crap out of the villians. Poor Mysterio. I tried to kick the life out of him though.
It's perfectly OK for everyone in China to blatantly pirate information, but all hell breaks loose when you try and make a VoIP phone call overseas from there.
You'd think they'd want information to be free or something, but I guess that everything just cuts one way with these guys.
Considering encryption exists that cannot be broken during one's lifetime, it makes more sense to keep suspects detained indefinitely until they provide police the means to decrypt data required for an investigation.
That's assuming that there is enough evidence present to suggest that encrypted information exists on the media in question.... which you can't check until you decrypt it in the first place.
*sigh*
I mean, it would kind of suck if the police thought you had encrypted information on a hard disk - when in fact you just finished shredding the data with a DoD wipe and all they could see was random data... confusing it for encrypted information.
Perhaps slashdot geeks are a little different from the rest of the population because we're more motivated by advancing tech first, making money second.
Unfortunately the rest of the world doesn't think like that. Science and research is only a means to a wealthy end for some people no doubt.
This is just a sign that we've run out of frickin' new ideas for stories - now we have to patent all of them.
Never mind, I'll make up a story about a freyuasd who was the colour fghsdw and had a semi-lifelike state of existance in the 345-drfetys. Sooner or later a asdfghsd would come along and they would both sdfhsdfkk which would mean that gyudsfsdf asdf fs sdgji wetiwtl sdhaslfa laasfhafslf.
COMING SOON!
So what this guy is saying, is that "The Force" is actually George Lucas, and when they say "The Force be with you", they are basically saying "Pray that Lucas doesn't get you killed in the next scene"
Actaully, one of my customers has bought HP over another expensive brand for this very reason. HP is doing something right by offering Linux support on their hardware. Other hardware vendors had better start listening to their customers.
I have to admit that Debian is a really cool distro. It's my favourite desktop distro as well.
However, that doesn't cut it in the server room sometimes. I've had plenty of trouble trying to wean Debian "sarge" onto some types of servers (esp. blades) from manufacturers who don't support Linux or the BSDs on their hardware. In some cases I have had to do backflips to pry free OSes on. For many businesses this is too much hassle and too much of a risk. Add the fact that if they used Debian or BSD or whatever free-soft-distro-of-the-month is, they have no one to yell and scream at when something goes wrong. Some enterprises are going to have their vendor support their Linux, thank you very much. Having no one to scream at and blame when your business is dying from malfunctioning network drivers is not the way a CEO wants to go down.
In that sense, Debian doesn't quite cut it at an enterprise level (but it's still a kick-ass distro).
The thing is, nobody trusts Microsoft. When it comes to marketing, even more so. They can hype something all they want but everyone knows that Microsoft is just going to jerk their chain. They've done it before, they'll do it again.
In Japan, Microsoft just look try-hard. I saw their ads over here. It just screamed "try-hard" at me. Looking try-hard in Japan just turns people off - doesn't matter how good the product is. I wouldn't be surprised if the Xbox 360 flops over here again.
The problem I have with biometrics is that in the case of fingerprints, face scans, eye scans etc.. is that somebody could always chop off the particular body part to get access. With a password, you can't kill someone to get at it - or you lose the password entirely.
This is something I could never understand about Bill Gates.
He's the richest man in the world, and then he has to go and get married and live in a house which the Thunderbirds would be proud of! Sheer madness! Man, if I were him, I'd take all that loot and go find myself a nice island to buy.
As you read my post,... haven't you begun to notice that with every word,... every character you read... that you begin to really begin to breathe heavy, and as your heart beats faster, and you feel yourself falling a little sleepy... and as you find yourself doing these things, you remember a time,... a time long ago when you met a special person you remember fondly...and fell in love.... NOW, with me... in my experience... you want to give me positive mod points. Your karma will thank you, oh yes...
Slashdot Mirror
No, the police here will just find someone and force them to confess to it basically - just wearing you out until you confess.
All good points as above. The store space for Xbox games is tiny. They starte doff with a bang, but the shelves shrunk for ther original Xbox. I wonder how they're going to conquer the gamestore real-estate now when they're only got one shelf compared to the PS2's library. They had some Go and Shogi games for the Xbox Japanese market.... but there were millions of them for the PS2. Of course, the customer is going to go for the machine with the largest selection - that way if they buy a bummer, at least there's more to choose from. Going back to the past, the reason why the Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 were so popular was because of the vast software selections. Sure there were lots of crap titles, but it didn't matter when there were no shortages of them.
I think the problem is more related to the fact that the Japanese have always stuck to their own home-grown companies when it comes to gaming. During the 80s, the Japanese had their own consoles which we could never get, and they were never interested in what the US or Europe was producing. I assume there is a subtle racism there. While the Japanese are accuse the Xbox of being underpowered in contrast to the up and coming still vapourware PS3, they couldn't use that argument for Xbox vs. PS2 - knowing the Japanese you'd have to assume bias there.
Also, considering the game lineup for the best-selling Playstation and 100% backwards compatibility existed for the PS2 - it's hard to see how the PS2 could have gone wrong. The Xbox never had a strong following here, nor did it have a large library of games. The backwards compatibility argument is a lost cause.
Thing is which really sticks out in my mind - the game launch line-up here in Japan is as bad as it was the first time for the Xbox - correct that - even worse. There's no Halo this time around, or smash hit game for the Japanese market. I haven't seen any TV ads. The PS2 release was covered by TV ads every day before the release reminding how long they would have to wait to play their new machine with release games.
I do get the feeling though, that the Xbox 360 is really an Xbox 1.5 - the masses of PS2 users are going to wait patiently for their PS3 I feel, so they can play all their PS2 games.
Microsoft had better develop a compelling reason to buy an Xbox 360 for Japanese gamers pretty darned fast.
I agree that the open sourcing of Solaris was a broadside shot at RedHat's business model.
If Sun can do to Solaris what RedHat has done for Linux, there will be more competition - even more so given Sun's track record on operating systems and the fact that they do the hardware as well. I've had major issues installing RedHat on so called supported hardware - without a plethora of driver disks and system hacks. However OTOH, Solaris needs driver support so that it can run on any old desktop PC as well, and cope with all kinds of network, video, and RAID cards.
Until OpenSolaris becomes distro'ed (Schillix is a nice start, but you can't really call that a distro), we should see more interest from IT admins. At the moment, OpenSolaris has ways to go yet.
Studios don't need to create games with flash-in-the-pan graphics, as long as they make them fun. As far as I'm concerned, they can get away with Gameboy Advanced graphics on the Xbox 360 as long as the game is fun. It's nice to have all that kickass graphical ability for the hardware - BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN IT ALL HAS TO BE USED. Games with good gameplay mechanics don't require that much horsepower - unless of course, an original gameplay concept comes out that requires an incredible amount of CPU horsepower in order to be workable.
The thing is, people in boardrooms who understand marketing know that they can get wads of cash by making semi-playable games with fancy graphics - knowing that, for the most part, the gameplaying public generally consists of people who will be blown over by graphics and little else. Gameplay be damned.
Also, they know if they make the game easy to finish fast, they'll be out there buying new games faster.
What I fear is that eventually game companies will make little less than semi-playable movies - which will cost more to buy than movies themselves. We already know that games make more than Hollywood. This is just the next logical step on the road to the next video game crash.
I think that this report is just a sign that many "old-timers" are just burned out with video games. All us oldies who grew up with the Atari 2600 have little patience anymore. I think a lot of people feel that pretty much anything that could be done with video games has already been done to death. The only thing left to do is to be creative with good storylines, and boost the graphics capabilities of some machines. We have busy lives and the older we get, the less time we think we have to play around. We don't have time to do D-Day for the gazillionth time in the next WW2 FPS. Sure, there are innovative game concepts out there yet to be exploited, but all the easy pickings are gone, all the ideas which are actually fun are gone, and we've grown tired/out of everything. I'm STILL waiting for virtual reality machines to become feasible.
When they get Doom running on Firefox, let's see how the browser copes with nuts.wad
Actually I think Sapporo and Kirin are much better Japanese beers. Asahi make some pretty pissy beers, especially their Red label (urrgrgrghhhh!) and the even worse Green label (bleuaghghhggh!)
Windows is easy to maintain for the week required to set up a test system. After a while though, the system gets clogged, something ends up thrashing the CPU, all the icons start to jump from their applications to something else they fancy (hello Windows 2000?!), and you WILL require a reboot, which causes costly downtime - and some poor admin to come in on his weekend. This is NOT good in a situation where even 5 minutes of downtime on the weekend is NOT a good thing.
Sure, I've had monster planning and installs of Linux and FreeBSD - but those servers just don't go down. I almost forget that they are there. We built all the monitoring scripts ourselves so they let us know by email if they are experiencing trouble. A Solaris box we have has been running since 2000 without rebooting, surviving several software upgrades in the process.
Meanwhile my Windows 2000 desktop icons have decided to have an icon swapping party, and my laptop seems to get slower every year... not to mention the number of viruses it can get.
I remember playing his Questprobe:Spiderman adventure game. I couldn't figure it out because most of the solutions to the puzzles didn't revolve around beating the crap out of the villians. Poor Mysterio. I tried to kick the life out of him though.
.... given the geological anomalies present in South Australia
You mean the city of Adelaide?
So let me get this straight...
It's perfectly OK for everyone in China to blatantly pirate information, but all hell breaks loose when you try and make a VoIP phone call overseas from there.
You'd think they'd want information to be free or something, but I guess that everything just cuts one way with these guys.
I'm not sure what the you think, but I'm sure what the I think.
Let's ask what the they think....
Considering encryption exists that cannot be broken during one's lifetime, it makes more sense to keep suspects detained indefinitely until they provide police the means to decrypt data required for an investigation.
That's assuming that there is enough evidence present to suggest that encrypted information exists on the media in question.... which you can't check until you decrypt it in the first place.
*sigh*
I mean, it would kind of suck if the police thought you had encrypted information on a hard disk - when in fact you just finished shredding the data with a DoD wipe and all they could see was random data... confusing it for encrypted information.
Perhaps slashdot geeks are a little different from the rest of the population because we're more motivated by advancing tech first, making money second. Unfortunately the rest of the world doesn't think like that. Science and research is only a means to a wealthy end for some people no doubt.
This is just a sign that we've run out of frickin' new ideas for stories - now we have to patent all of them. Never mind, I'll make up a story about a freyuasd who was the colour fghsdw and had a semi-lifelike state of existance in the 345-drfetys. Sooner or later a asdfghsd would come along and they would both sdfhsdfkk which would mean that gyudsfsdf asdf fs sdgji wetiwtl sdhaslfa laasfhafslf. COMING SOON!
So what this guy is saying, is that "The Force" is actually George Lucas, and when they say "The Force be with you", they are basically saying "Pray that Lucas doesn't get you killed in the next scene"
Now it all makes sense!
Actaully, one of my customers has bought HP over another expensive brand for this very reason. HP is doing something right by offering Linux support on their hardware. Other hardware vendors had better start listening to their customers.
I have to admit that Debian is a really cool distro. It's my favourite desktop distro as well.
However, that doesn't cut it in the server room sometimes. I've had plenty of trouble trying to wean Debian "sarge" onto some types of servers (esp. blades) from manufacturers who don't support Linux or the BSDs on their hardware. In some cases I have had to do backflips to pry free OSes on. For many businesses this is too much hassle and too much of a risk. Add the fact that if they used Debian or BSD or whatever free-soft-distro-of-the-month is, they have no one to yell and scream at when something goes wrong. Some enterprises are going to have their vendor support their Linux, thank you very much. Having no one to scream at and blame when your business is dying from malfunctioning network drivers is not the way a CEO wants to go down.
In that sense, Debian doesn't quite cut it at an enterprise level (but it's still a kick-ass distro).
Netcraft confirms it
The thing is, nobody trusts Microsoft. When it comes to marketing, even more so. They can hype something all they want but everyone knows that Microsoft is just going to jerk their chain. They've done it before, they'll do it again.
In Japan, Microsoft just look try-hard. I saw their ads over here. It just screamed "try-hard" at me. Looking try-hard in Japan just turns people off - doesn't matter how good the product is. I wouldn't be surprised if the Xbox 360 flops over here again.
The problem I have with biometrics is that in the case of fingerprints, face scans, eye scans etc.. is that somebody could always chop off the particular body part to get access. With a password, you can't kill someone to get at it - or you lose the password entirely.
Passwords are pretty good IMHO.
Discuss.
# rpm -e BobYoung.rpm error: package BobYoung.rpm is not installed
This is something I could never understand about Bill Gates.
He's the richest man in the world, and then he has to go and get married and live in a house which the Thunderbirds would be proud of! Sheer madness!
Man, if I were him, I'd take all that loot and go find myself a nice island to buy.
As you read my post,... haven't you begun to notice that with every word, ... every character you read... that you begin to really begin to breathe heavy, and as your heart beats faster, and you feel yourself falling a little sleepy... and as you find yourself doing these things, you remember a time, ... a time long ago when you met a special person you remember fondly...and fell in love.... NOW, with me... in my experience... you want to give me positive mod points. Your karma will thank you, oh yes...