Because typos like accidently hitting - don't ever happen.
Before you go and assume MS was doing this because people were running Opera, just take a deep breath. Now, if you want something to be angry, realize that MS probably didn't fix up the style sheet for Opera yet, despite being contacted.
The toploading NES had no composite port. Instead, you had to re-add the composite and audio mono hookups via a complicated hardware hack. I once saw a webpage that showed how do to it.
However, when you consider that a NES GameGenie will also fix these troubles for far less $$, it really doesn't matter:)
You lose the composite out, and it's not any more reliable than the classic model.
How can I say that? It's simple, you need to go get a NES GameGenie. If you're unfamiliar with it, the added 3.5 inches/8.75 cm makes it so you can't push the cartridge down. The benefit of this is that you get a nice, solid connection every time you push it into the unit. My NES became practically useless to use without the GameGenie in 1992, but with the GameGenie I've never had a problem.
So, save yourself either time (the time to fix in this article), the money (a top loading NES is not worth 150$ CDN), and the composite out (because top loading NES is RF only!), and just get a GameGenie.
I can play my GCN games in 15 years (assuming the laser hasn't worn out). With Windows and drivers and DirectX, 2 years is the maximum I'd expect out of those games on computer.
"Hell, most of these clowns keep quoting stuff like 'games that run at 60 frames per second' without knowing that their fucking TV only shows them 30."
Yes, but this is important. As long as your refresh rate is double of your redraw rate, your eye won't notice tearing or other visible problems (ever benchmarked Quake with vysnc turned off?). The 60 fps is important to the timing loop of the engine, as well as to the visual quality. Grab a Dreamcast game like Shenmue which has slowdown in certain parts, and watch as the tearing suddenly appears when the engine starts dropping frames as it's rendering.
It's the same basic idea as the the DAC in your soundcard: a 44Khz sampled digital stream is required to approximate an analog 22Khz sample, due to the nature of the sound wave: "The absolute minimum number of samples per cycle needed to properly reproduce a sinusoid is two -- one at the peak, one at the trough. This will give a crude approximation to the original signal but will be able to capture the frequency and amplitude. This means that the sampling frequency should be at least twice the frequency of the sinusoid being digitised; this is know as the Nyquist Frequency." (Pretty graphs are here)
"*i* can barely tell the difference, and I am a graphic designer."
" Windows is the gamers platform of choice. When I buy a new game, i sure as heck dont want to spend 8 hours configuring WineX to run it at a 25%-50% loss of power"
Please. I'd much rather buy my console games and never have to worry about drivers period. Consoles are the gamers' platform of choice, because you can still plug your NES in and play it exactly the same way you did 20 years ago. How do you play Space Quest 2? How about Warcraft 1? I can't, none of my computers run DOS.
When I buy a new game, I sure as heck don't want to spend 8 hours downloading patches, new versions of DirectX, new nVidia drivers, and then find out things like online play mentioned in the manual aren't even in the damn game (Sim City 4..). If you disagree, it's probably because you're so used to doing it that you don't think anything of it until it's pointed out to you.
I don't see how that math works.
on
Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 1
If I buy one game for 74$, and then gen the equivalent of its sequel for 15$ more (even with a monthly fee), how is that more than two 74$ games?
If I am of the case where I have only 1 game that I play online, then chances are it will cost more over all (because my fixed costs are a very high percentage at that level). However, the more games I play online, the cheaper it is per-game. Economies of scale do apply to this as much as any other cost-curve model.
As I've state before, this is very much a personal choice. That you doesn't agree with it doesn't invalidate it. If you want to, please write up a nice essay on how it all works out. I would enjoy seeing your numbers.
"Hate to break it to you, but 250,000 * $50 = $12.5 million. That means you need to keep your 50K subscribers around for over two years to make as much money as you would selling your game to the wider audience of people not willing to pay per month."
$0 * 1,000,000 $50 * 5,000. That's right, even 5,000 people who are willing to pay will bring in more than millions of people who don't want to pay. You can't get a box out to a store without paying for shipping and the store itself -- sales people aren't free. To further reduce that profit by charging a lower box fee means you have to make more off of the service, otherwise you'll start losing money quickly. Or you could charge more for the box, but then less people will buy it. It's a complex balancing act you seem to have little understanding of.
You're also ignoring the next level up of subscription services: things like Xbox Live!. All your fees that you might have to pay per game, are wrapped into one, easy fee. If you want to play 10 games online, great. They'll charge a value that means they can cover costs and maintain their servers, while making a profit. And then they add on premiums, like extra content for games: finished Splinter Cell? Pay 10$ and get a whole new set of missions! Don't want to buy NBA 2k4 at 74$? Pay 15$, and get the 2k4 rosters for 2k3!
And the basic online matching and gamertag stuff for every game is included in this fee (except PSO, which has to be the stupidest thing MS has ever done with their Live! service).
Re:There are many reasons to pay.
on
Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 1
" Um, ther's [sic] no advertising on battle.net. It's funded by box sales. It doesn't matter wether[sic] you'd be willing to pay per month for it because you payed[sic] up front. Also, if you couldn't play on battle.net alot[sic], lets[sic] say only on saturdays[sic] for an hour but[sic] you really liked it, wouldn't it suck to have to pay $1 an hour for what everybody else gets for $0.20 a day?"
This is why, when you make economic decisions, you weigh options. The highest-valued alternative you give up is the opportunity cost of your decision. This should be common sense to anyone living in North America. "Will I be playing enough to justify 15$ a month? 5$ a month? What could that money buy me instead?" If you have a problem with it costing N dollars, wait until it drops, or don't pay. Whinning about how it should be free is stupid -- you're not EA, it's not your decision to make. All you do is make yourself sound like a whiny teenager living in your parents' basement.
"The problem with The Sims is that they're trying to charge a fee for somthing that their prospective customers already get for free. You're getting to read this comment for free. Why don't you send me some money to read it.[sic]"
What exactly are they charging for that customers get free? The Sims Online? Where else do I get The Sims Online for free? They're charging for a service, running through their servers -- all of which they provide. If it is a bad setup, they will fail. If it's not a problem, they will become profitable.
"The Sims is a bad business model even though millions of people play The Sims for free every day. Having alot[sic] of mindshare doesn't mean people will give you money."
Well, it may or may not be a bad model. The market will decide. You need to understand that while you may not personally agree with something, you are not a statistically important part of the market unless you act in concert with other people. If there is a fundamental problem with it, you should organize a group of peope against playing The Sims Online. However, I doubt many people will rally under the banner, "It should be free!" except other people who won't pay for anything. And, if you haven't noticed, if you don't pay, people don't care. There are other people who can and will pay.
Speaking of double-21.. "You're getting to read this comment for free. "
Maybe you weren't paying attention. Slashdot has advertisements, they also have the option of paying for page views. At no point was any of this free. Someone is paying for it, wether it be me directly or an advertiser indirectly. Again, you see to have this idea in your head that the internet is free, and that there is a magical sugar-candy mountain land where everything is without cost.
There are many reasons to pay.
on
Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 1
"All I have to say is I hope this pay-to-play trend ends quickly. "
I don't have a problem paying for something. I pay for electricity and internet access, why not for a good online service? The only problem is that the only online service out there that might meet this, Xbox Live!, is already useless. No downloadable content, game stats not normalized vs. hours played (so all the 13-year-olds who can play 6 hours a day are #1), etc.
If I played online in Battle.net a lot, I wouldn't mind paying 5$ cdn a month for it. Or even a little more. If you work it out per day, it's nothing. Per day you pay around 20 or 30$ for rent, and 10$ for food and utilities. What's 20 cents for online play without advertisements, with no cheaters, etc?
"If Battle.net can be free, why can't The Sims online be free?"
Maybe you should tune in to sanity FM. If someone is offering a service, they can charge what they want for it. If it sucks, it'll go away. But there is no way that a service can exist and cost 0 dollars to run, someone pays somewhere. You pay with your eyeballs, and the advertisers who get your eyeballs bankroll your play time. Or perhaps economics wasn't one of your strong points growing up.
Oh, of course. Why does /. like anything?
on
Kevin Mitnick Answers
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
Why does/. like Mitnick?
Why does/. like Linux?
Why does/. like Apple?
Why does/. like video games?
Why does/. like programming?
/. can't like anything, because it's a website. However, as an open website, the people who read slashdot control it. And those people like Linux, they like Apple, they like Mitnick, etc. If you don't like it, either leave, or stop whinning and don't read the stories you don't want to read. I don't see anyone pointing a gun to your head, forcing you to type a whiny post about every story you don't like.
The project I was on wasn't going to ship. It was very close to being useful with only bug shaking out needing to be done. But if it wasn't going to ship in October, it wasn't going to ship in November, and wasn't going to ship in December.. well, it wasn't going to ship.
I would spend about 10 hours/day, M-F, out of my house, at work, staring at a computer screen. I interacted with maybe 4 people. Because I don't have a car, my time out at a mall or with people would be limited to past 18:00 W-F. Essentially, I would work at work, come home, be too tired to do more than play some light video games and have supper, then sleep.
When it started getting to the point where the moment I left work on Friday, I was already dreading Monday morning, I knew something had to change. I mean, the work was fun. But everyday, week after week, and showing no final product because the core programmer kept refactoring was really disheartening. I have programming projects at home I didn't touch during that period, because I was so sick of code by the end of the day.
Plus, the technology itself just isn't mature enough for me. Standards of many interfaces still vary so much between systems; standards are rarely properly adhered to. Code development tools, while neat (stepping debugging, etc), still lack features that I consider good. VS.net lets you collapse code, for example. But it won't let you jump at a function definiton to all calls to that function (even though it'll do the reverse).
Then I was offered a job at a video game store. Knowing my video games and history, being sociable, goal oriented, and familiar with business practices was enough to get my foot in the door without them even seeing a resume. I gave notice at my old job, documented everything (more so than I had) so that it'd be easier to give to someone else, and walked away.
I may not be making as much money, but my schedule varies; I'm in a mall downtown so I can get errands done. I see many people each day, and educate them about various things. Some of them are regulars who like to keep on top of things, some of them are casual shoppers. Some are even plain shop lifters. The flexibility and social nature of the job appeal to me.
Programming is probably going to remain a hobby for me in future. I am able to sit down, design, write, and test programs, but I don't find it rewarding like I used to. Writting small scripts and such in HLLs for my own use is great (the more the machine does for me, the better). But I'll probably not write much C code anymore (except maybe helping debug some OSS app I use, or if I finally finish writing a NES emulator;)), and never see C#, Java, or other languages I used to deal with daily.
I'm thinking that teaching human languages might be a good goal in 10 years. It's social, human language study is a mature science, and the language arts majors tend to be less.. anal retentive about things. A great example of bad geeks were a pair who swore up and down that PC gaming beat out console gaming. Even with the patches, higher upgrade costs, fewer genres, fewer titles, and generally equivalent game costs. Their main argument was that if you didn't have the time to spend each day grooming your PC and OS setup (around 1-2 hours), you weren't fit to PC game in general.
Personally, I just want something that works as expected. That's why I'll probably start buy a Mac the next time I need a new PC (again, after 6 years of DIY white boxes + Slackware). I just don't have the personal patience to sit down and install, setup, and debug every application (this applies to Windows programs too). With things like books, game consoles, microwaves, or TVs, things are boolean in terms of working. Computers aren't:-/ Hot plug modules, self-configurablity, easy security and access restrictions, etc, none exist in any current operating system to the degree that they should. For some reason, the world seems locked in a 1995 mind set, with only new incremental features being added -- no major changes that make computers more useful as tools. And I don't have the time to sit and coddle them like I used to.
Any time a company lays down minimum standards, people only do the minimum. If you set minimums for things like surround sound of a certain type and quality, then all games will have it. Simple, ne?
Efficient code is not neccesarily judged by code size.
Which is more efficient, pushing a string onto a stack and calling a software interupt, or writting something which looks like:
print "Hello, world.";
I can tell you which one is easier to read and write by the humans. You can get a perfect shape for your screws by hand threading them, or you can have a factory which threads thousands of screws an hour (perhaps with the odd dud), which allows you (the human) to design a train engine -- not just concentrate on making that one, perfect screw.
Hardware can do so much, and it can do so much more each year. To not use that is a waste.
If you grow up knowing nothing but how painfully short on being able to fullfill your needs, let alone wants, then your definition of personal success is probably a job where you can earn money which lets you take care of needs and wants.
I'm happy living in basement suites, not owning a car, etc. I grew up in Canada on Welfare. This seems to meet your criteria, right? But I left a programming job for a sales job (and had my pay cut by 2/3rds) because I wasn't happy in the job.
Once you get past fulfilling your needs, and your wants (to an extent), and really look around.. you see that there are other nice goals you can set out to achieve. These goals are different for everyone. Maybe your goal is to make $200,000 USD a year. Mine isn't. You don't have any right or reason to say your position is any more or less valid than mine, you only have the right to respect my decisions.
"I just have no sympathy for whiny, rich people who are desperate to "find themselves,""
That person is doing what they think is best for their situation. Which is, they've worked hard for something (and perhaps had some luck on their side), and now they find that after all they've put into it.. it's just not what they expected, nor is it what they enjoy. Money doesn't buy happyness after all.
Then someone like you comes along, with the money does buy happyness meme firmly entrenched. Yes, from your point of view, those people are assholes. They're doing something you think you wouldn't do in your situation. You are blinded by your own views of events.
You can't know someone until you've walked in their shoes. You seem to believe that regardless of how shitty or good a job may be, the pay will make up for it. I can't really make a comment on that, because I'm not you. You can't really make a comment on someone's decision to change jobs, because you're not them.
I left a programming job where I made ~$16,740 USD for a sales job where I make ~$5,952 USD a year gross. The programming job was not fullfilling. I've learned that if the only reason you're in a job is for the money, you've become a whore.
But that was my experience. That you disagree with that does not invalidate it. Your entire post seems like sour grapes to me. If I had mod points, I'd set you -1, jealous whine.
And this is why I don't like the PS2's surround "setup" -- because there is none. Each game does its own thing. NHL 2002 and SSX Tricky use DTS (4.1 only..), SOCOM uses PL2 (5.0), most use stereo with maybe DD 5.1 cutscenes (Metal Gear).
Most of the PS1 stuff is prologic encoded (granted, it's probably all premixed). Why couldn't Sony have set down a standard for surround in the PS2?
Point 1.. yes, you can beat a game in 20 hours. Rental periods are one week. If you add up a full time job, commute, and 20 hours for a video games, you're looking at around 65 hours or more for most people. That leaves about 10 hours for other kinds of entertainment. Do you want to make that trade off?
I'd rather spend 20 or 30$ for a game now, even if it sits, and enjoy it at my own pace. If I do get 20 or more hours out of the game, I'm looking at a fraction of a dollar per hour. Way cheaper than movies (rental or theatre); way, way, way cheaper than music (an hour of which costs the same as 2 hour movies!).
And if you do choose good games, they don't tend to depreciate as much as bad games. Final Fantasy 3 for the SNES? Great game. I can still sell a copy (if I had one) on eBay for a fair price.
"But c'mon, the systme has been out this long and the good games are only now starting to really trickle in, and the best ones are cross-platform."
Every single system only gets so many great titles per year of its life. If you look at your 15 solid-gold SNES cartridges from back in the day, you fondly remember playing them. Do you remember the really shitty games no one even tries to sell anymore? How about how long it was between Mario games, or how amazing it was to get Metroid 3 years after the SNES came out?
Launch titles are a mixed bag, with most of them being rushed, sucking, or under-using the power of the system. There are enough great Sega and Tecmo titles to justify owning an Xbox. On the GameCube, there are enough great Nintendo, Sega, and other titles available to justify buying it. Same for the PS2: how many RPGs do you want? I bought Suikoden 3, Legaia 2, Wild Arms 3, etc. These are great games that are reasons to own a system. If you look at your library, and you see only games you'd rather not play or sell.. then you should be picking more carefully.
My GC library is around 17 games, my PS2 is 7, my Xbox is 7. With every console/portable I have, I'm sitting around 175 games. I do have crappy games, but years of experience have taught me how to quickly spot something I'll enjoy. And if you're in doubt, rent it -- or ask the people at the store (assuming it's EB, not Wal-mart:)).
I bought my Xbox for Jet Set Radio Future. That game was enough for me to buy it. I've spent 30 hours on it in total. I may never play it again, but I sure got my warth from it.
And that's not the only game I've played for a number of hours on my Xbox. Most of the ones I play a lot are Sega games, so I always buy Sega releases. Whenever I do the math, I'm paying around 50 or 60 cents Canadian per hour of enjoyment. I think only the public library comes close to that:)
At a really low bitrate. I don't know about your audio setup, but I can hear artifacting on the vocals to Soundgarden's Superunknown CD over the sounds of the engine. Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball will crash after every round with custom tracks turned on. The "feature" of custom tracks is useless to me (and probably many others) for these quality and stability reasons.
"The PS/2 can do pre-encoded Dolby Digital 5.1, good for cutscenes and DVDs, but nothing in-game. A (very) few games do in-game encoding to DTS, but this requires dedicating one of the two vector processors to sound encoding."
Wrong again. The PS2 does in-game Prologic 2. I don't have any numbers on the overhead required for it, but Socom is one of the handful of titles to use this (I think the real number of PL2 PS2 games is around 4).
As for saying PL2 is the best the GameCube can dude, it sure whups the ass of stereo.
Halo 2 may look awesome to you, but it's been pushed back from June through October. I don't think we'll see it before December, 2003. Will the Xbox still be a contender then?
One of the downloadable perks for PSO on GameCube is getting a copy of NiGHTS you can download to your linked GBA. Then you can at least be one step closer to NiGHTS.
"If MS legalizes the mod chips then the Linux folk would completely abandon interest. "
No, there are always people who like to modify things. I'm happy to just buy Sega games, Tecmo games, and the odd non-Sega/Tecmo game (Splinter Cell, for example) for use on my Xbox. Legally, I have the right to do whatever I want with my Xbox, including using it as a toilet. I can put any chips I want into it, even PowerPC chips!
People don't want to modify their Xboxes because they legally restrained from that action, they want to modify them because it's a fairly compact (compared to a full tower PC) unit with all the important hardware for DTS/DD and HDTV in one unit.
"Especially the first and the latter are THE reasons why Metacity (and many other Linux WMs) are much and much more usable than any version Windows."
Yes, of course. Workspaces and magnetic window movement are exactly why Linux is the most popular desktop operating system.
Oh, wait.. No. Organizing your windows on your desktop is not something that anyone who wants to use the computer as a tool cares about. They care about something they turn on, do work with, and turn off. They don't want to think about organizing files, changing configs, dealing with dependancies, etc, etc, etc. That is why MacOS and Apple still exist.
This may be the best system for you, a nerd, but it is far from a usable system for most people in the world. Would you like to drive a car that requires hand cranking, manual shifting, and constant attention and tuning of ratios while it's running, because it gets 100mpg? Maybe. I don't, I just want something I can turn on and use, then turn off.
Which was my point: if you require a few hundred lines of lisp to get some desired behaviour from a system, the system is broken.
Slashdot Mirror
Because typos like accidently hitting - don't ever happen.
Before you go and assume MS was doing this because people were running Opera, just take a deep breath. Now, if you want something to be angry, realize that MS probably didn't fix up the style sheet for Opera yet, despite being contacted.
The toploading NES had no composite port. Instead, you had to re-add the composite and audio mono hookups via a complicated hardware hack. I once saw a webpage that showed how do to it.
:)
However, when you consider that a NES GameGenie will also fix these troubles for far less $$, it really doesn't matter
You lose the composite out, and it's not any more reliable than the classic model.
How can I say that? It's simple, you need to go get a NES GameGenie. If you're unfamiliar with it, the added 3.5 inches/8.75 cm makes it so you can't push the cartridge down. The benefit of this is that you get a nice, solid connection every time you push it into the unit. My NES became practically useless to use without the GameGenie in 1992, but with the GameGenie I've never had a problem.
So, save yourself either time (the time to fix in this article), the money (a top loading NES is not worth 150$ CDN), and the composite out (because top loading NES is RF only!), and just get a GameGenie.
I can play my GCN games in 15 years (assuming the laser hasn't worn out). With Windows and drivers and DirectX, 2 years is the maximum I'd expect out of those games on computer.
"Hell, most of these clowns keep quoting stuff like 'games that run at 60 frames per second' without knowing that their fucking TV only shows them 30."
Yes, but this is important. As long as your refresh rate is double of your redraw rate, your eye won't notice tearing or other visible problems (ever benchmarked Quake with vysnc turned off?). The 60 fps is important to the timing loop of the engine, as well as to the visual quality. Grab a Dreamcast game like Shenmue which has slowdown in certain parts, and watch as the tearing suddenly appears when the engine starts dropping frames as it's rendering.
It's the same basic idea as the the DAC in your soundcard: a 44Khz sampled digital stream is required to approximate an analog 22Khz sample, due to the nature of the sound wave: "The absolute minimum number of samples per cycle needed to properly reproduce a sinusoid is two -- one at the peak, one at the trough. This will give a crude approximation to the original signal but will be able to capture the frequency and amplitude. This means that the sampling frequency should be at least twice the frequency of the sinusoid being digitised; this is know as the Nyquist Frequency." (Pretty graphs are here)
"*i* can barely tell the difference, and I am a graphic designer."
Well, now you know.
" Windows is the gamers platform of choice. When I buy a new game, i sure as heck dont want to spend 8 hours configuring WineX to run it at a 25%-50% loss of power"
Please. I'd much rather buy my console games and never have to worry about drivers period. Consoles are the gamers' platform of choice, because you can still plug your NES in and play it exactly the same way you did 20 years ago. How do you play Space Quest 2? How about Warcraft 1? I can't, none of my computers run DOS.
When I buy a new game, I sure as heck don't want to spend 8 hours downloading patches, new versions of DirectX, new nVidia drivers, and then find out things like online play mentioned in the manual aren't even in the damn game (Sim City 4..). If you disagree, it's probably because you're so used to doing it that you don't think anything of it until it's pointed out to you.
If I buy one game for 74$, and then gen the equivalent of its sequel for 15$ more (even with a monthly fee), how is that more than two 74$ games?
If I am of the case where I have only 1 game that I play online, then chances are it will cost more over all (because my fixed costs are a very high percentage at that level). However, the more games I play online, the cheaper it is per-game. Economies of scale do apply to this as much as any other cost-curve model.
As I've state before, this is very much a personal choice. That you doesn't agree with it doesn't invalidate it. If you want to, please write up a nice essay on how it all works out. I would enjoy seeing your numbers.
"Hate to break it to you, but 250,000 * $50 = $12.5 million. That means you need to keep your 50K subscribers around for over two years to make as much money as you would selling your game to the wider audience of people not willing to pay per month."
$0 * 1,000,000 $50 * 5,000. That's right, even 5,000 people who are willing to pay will bring in more than millions of people who don't want to pay. You can't get a box out to a store without paying for shipping and the store itself -- sales people aren't free. To further reduce that profit by charging a lower box fee means you have to make more off of the service, otherwise you'll start losing money quickly. Or you could charge more for the box, but then less people will buy it. It's a complex balancing act you seem to have little understanding of.
You're also ignoring the next level up of subscription services: things like Xbox Live!. All your fees that you might have to pay per game, are wrapped into one, easy fee. If you want to play 10 games online, great. They'll charge a value that means they can cover costs and maintain their servers, while making a profit. And then they add on premiums, like extra content for games: finished Splinter Cell? Pay 10$ and get a whole new set of missions! Don't want to buy NBA 2k4 at 74$? Pay 15$, and get the 2k4 rosters for 2k3!
And the basic online matching and gamertag stuff for every game is included in this fee (except PSO, which has to be the stupidest thing MS has ever done with their Live! service).
" Um, ther's [sic] no advertising on battle.net. It's funded by box sales. It doesn't matter wether[sic] you'd be willing to pay per month for it because you payed[sic] up front. Also, if you couldn't play on battle.net alot[sic], lets[sic] say only on saturdays[sic] for an hour but[sic] you really liked it, wouldn't it suck to have to pay $1 an hour for what everybody else gets for $0.20 a day?"
This is why, when you make economic decisions, you weigh options. The highest-valued
alternative you give up is the opportunity cost of your decision. This should be common sense to anyone living in North America. "Will I be playing enough to justify 15$ a month? 5$ a month? What could that money buy me instead?" If you have a problem with it costing N dollars, wait until it drops, or don't pay. Whinning about how it should be free is stupid -- you're not EA, it's not your decision to make. All you do is make yourself sound like a whiny teenager living in your parents' basement.
"The problem with The Sims is that they're trying to charge a fee for somthing that their prospective customers already get for free. You're getting to read this comment for free. Why don't you send me some money to read it.[sic]"
What exactly are they charging for that customers get free? The Sims Online? Where else do I get The Sims Online for free? They're charging for a service, running through their servers -- all of which they provide. If it is a bad setup, they will fail. If it's not a problem, they will become profitable.
"The Sims is a bad business model even though millions of people play The Sims for free every day. Having alot[sic] of mindshare doesn't mean people will give you money."
Well, it may or may not be a bad model. The market will decide. You need to understand that while you may not personally agree with something, you are not a statistically important part of the market unless you act in concert with other people. If there is a fundamental problem with it, you should organize a group of peope against playing The Sims Online. However, I doubt many people will rally under the banner, "It should be free!" except other people who won't pay for anything. And, if you haven't noticed, if you don't pay, people don't care. There are other people who can and will pay.
Speaking of double-21.. "You're getting to read this comment for free. "
Maybe you weren't paying attention. Slashdot has advertisements, they also have the option of paying for page views. At no point was any of this free. Someone is paying for it, wether it be me directly or an advertiser indirectly. Again, you see to have this idea in your head that the internet is free, and that there is a magical sugar-candy mountain land where everything is without cost.
"All I have to say is I hope this pay-to-play trend ends quickly. "
I don't have a problem paying for something. I pay for electricity and internet access, why not for a good online service? The only problem is that the only online service out there that might meet this, Xbox Live!, is already useless. No downloadable content, game stats not normalized vs. hours played (so all the 13-year-olds who can play 6 hours a day are #1), etc.
If I played online in Battle.net a lot, I wouldn't mind paying 5$ cdn a month for it. Or even a little more. If you work it out per day, it's nothing. Per day you pay around 20 or 30$ for rent, and 10$ for food and utilities. What's 20 cents for online play without advertisements, with no cheaters, etc?
"If Battle.net can be free, why can't The Sims online be free?"
Maybe you should tune in to sanity FM. If someone is offering a service, they can charge what they want for it. If it sucks, it'll go away. But there is no way that a service can exist and cost 0 dollars to run, someone pays somewhere. You pay with your eyeballs, and the advertisers who get your eyeballs bankroll your play time. Or perhaps economics wasn't one of your strong points growing up.
Why does /. like Mitnick?
/. like Linux?
/. like Apple?
/. like video games?
/. like programming?
/. can't like anything, because it's a website. However, as an open website, the people who read slashdot control it. And those people like Linux, they like Apple, they like Mitnick, etc. If you don't like it, either leave, or stop whinning and don't read the stories you don't want to read. I don't see anyone pointing a gun to your head, forcing you to type a whiny post about every story you don't like.
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The project I was on wasn't going to ship. It was very close to being useful with only bug shaking out needing to be done. But if it wasn't going to ship in October, it wasn't going to ship in November, and wasn't going to ship in December.. well, it wasn't going to ship.
;)), and never see C#, Java, or other languages I used to deal with daily.
.. anal retentive about things. A great example of bad geeks were a pair who swore up and down that PC gaming beat out console gaming. Even with the patches, higher upgrade costs, fewer genres, fewer titles, and generally equivalent game costs. Their main argument was that if you didn't have the time to spend each day grooming your PC and OS setup (around 1-2 hours), you weren't fit to PC game in general.
:-/ Hot plug modules, self-configurablity, easy security and access restrictions, etc, none exist in any current operating system to the degree that they should. For some reason, the world seems locked in a 1995 mind set, with only new incremental features being added -- no major changes that make computers more useful as tools. And I don't have the time to sit and coddle them like I used to.
I would spend about 10 hours/day, M-F, out of my house, at work, staring at a computer screen. I interacted with maybe 4 people. Because I don't have a car, my time out at a mall or with people would be limited to past 18:00 W-F. Essentially, I would work at work, come home, be too tired to do more than play some light video games and have supper, then sleep.
When it started getting to the point where the moment I left work on Friday, I was already dreading Monday morning, I knew something had to change. I mean, the work was fun. But everyday, week after week, and showing no final product because the core programmer kept refactoring was really disheartening. I have programming projects at home I didn't touch during that period, because I was so sick of code by the end of the day.
Plus, the technology itself just isn't mature enough for me. Standards of many interfaces still vary so much between systems; standards are rarely properly adhered to. Code development tools, while neat (stepping debugging, etc), still lack features that I consider good. VS.net lets you collapse code, for example. But it won't let you jump at a function definiton to all calls to that function (even though it'll do the reverse).
Then I was offered a job at a video game store. Knowing my video games and history, being sociable, goal oriented, and familiar with business practices was enough to get my foot in the door without them even seeing a resume. I gave notice at my old job, documented everything (more so than I had) so that it'd be easier to give to someone else, and walked away.
I may not be making as much money, but my schedule varies; I'm in a mall downtown so I can get errands done. I see many people each day, and educate them about various things. Some of them are regulars who like to keep on top of things, some of them are casual shoppers. Some are even plain shop lifters. The flexibility and social nature of the job appeal to me.
Programming is probably going to remain a hobby for me in future. I am able to sit down, design, write, and test programs, but I don't find it rewarding like I used to. Writting small scripts and such in HLLs for my own use is great (the more the machine does for me, the better). But I'll probably not write much C code anymore (except maybe helping debug some OSS app I use, or if I finally finish writing a NES emulator
I'm thinking that teaching human languages might be a good goal in 10 years. It's social, human language study is a mature science, and the language arts majors tend to be less
Personally, I just want something that works as expected. That's why I'll probably start buy a Mac the next time I need a new PC (again, after 6 years of DIY white boxes + Slackware). I just don't have the personal patience to sit down and install, setup, and debug every application (this applies to Windows programs too). With things like books, game consoles, microwaves, or TVs, things are boolean in terms of working. Computers aren't
Any time a company lays down minimum standards, people only do the minimum. If you set minimums for things like surround sound of a certain type and quality, then all games will have it. Simple, ne?
Efficient code is not neccesarily judged by code size.
Which is more efficient, pushing a string onto a stack and calling a software interupt, or writting something which looks like:
print "Hello, world.";
I can tell you which one is easier to read and write by the humans. You can get a perfect shape for your screws by hand threading them, or you can have a factory which threads thousands of screws an hour (perhaps with the odd dud), which allows you (the human) to design a train engine -- not just concentrate on making that one, perfect screw.
Hardware can do so much, and it can do so much more each year. To not use that is a waste.
If you grow up knowing nothing but how painfully short on being able to fullfill your needs, let alone wants, then your definition of personal success is probably a job where you can earn money which lets you take care of needs and wants.
I'm happy living in basement suites, not owning a car, etc. I grew up in Canada on Welfare. This seems to meet your criteria, right? But I left a programming job for a sales job (and had my pay cut by 2/3rds) because I wasn't happy in the job.
Once you get past fulfilling your needs, and your wants (to an extent), and really look around.. you see that there are other nice goals you can set out to achieve. These goals are different for everyone. Maybe your goal is to make $200,000 USD a year. Mine isn't. You don't have any right or reason to say your position is any more or less valid than mine, you only have the right to respect my decisions.
"I just have no sympathy for whiny, rich people who are desperate to "find themselves,""
That person is doing what they think is best for their situation. Which is, they've worked hard for something (and perhaps had some luck on their side), and now they find that after all they've put into it.. it's just not what they expected, nor is it what they enjoy. Money doesn't buy happyness after all.
Then someone like you comes along, with the money does buy happyness meme firmly entrenched. Yes, from your point of view, those people are assholes. They're doing something you think you wouldn't do in your situation. You are blinded by your own views of events.
You can't know someone until you've walked in their shoes. You seem to believe that regardless of how shitty or good a job may be, the pay will make up for it. I can't really make a comment on that, because I'm not you. You can't really make a comment on someone's decision to change jobs, because you're not them.
I left a programming job where I made ~$16,740 USD for a sales job where I make ~$5,952 USD a year gross. The programming job was not fullfilling. I've learned that if the only reason you're in a job is for the money, you've become a whore.
But that was my experience. That you disagree with that does not invalidate it. Your entire post seems like sour grapes to me. If I had mod points, I'd set you -1, jealous whine.
And this is why I don't like the PS2's surround "setup" -- because there is none. Each game does its own thing. NHL 2002 and SSX Tricky use DTS (4.1 only..), SOCOM uses PL2 (5.0), most use stereo with maybe DD 5.1 cutscenes (Metal Gear).
Most of the PS1 stuff is prologic encoded (granted, it's probably all premixed). Why couldn't Sony have set down a standard for surround in the PS2?
Point 1.. yes, you can beat a game in 20 hours. Rental periods are one week. If you add up a full time job, commute, and 20 hours for a video games, you're looking at around 65 hours or more for most people. That leaves about 10 hours for other kinds of entertainment. Do you want to make that trade off?
I'd rather spend 20 or 30$ for a game now, even if it sits, and enjoy it at my own pace. If I do get 20 or more hours out of the game, I'm looking at a fraction of a dollar per hour. Way cheaper than movies (rental or theatre); way, way, way cheaper than music (an hour of which costs the same as 2 hour movies!).
And if you do choose good games, they don't tend to depreciate as much as bad games. Final Fantasy 3 for the SNES? Great game. I can still sell a copy (if I had one) on eBay for a fair price.
"But c'mon, the systme has been out this long and the good games are only now starting to really trickle in, and the best ones are cross-platform."
:)).
Every single system only gets so many great titles per year of its life. If you look at your 15 solid-gold SNES cartridges from back in the day, you fondly remember playing them. Do you remember the really shitty games no one even tries to sell anymore? How about how long it was between Mario games, or how amazing it was to get Metroid 3 years after the SNES came out?
Launch titles are a mixed bag, with most of them being rushed, sucking, or under-using the power of the system. There are enough great Sega and Tecmo titles to justify owning an Xbox. On the GameCube, there are enough great Nintendo, Sega, and other titles available to justify buying it. Same for the PS2: how many RPGs do you want? I bought Suikoden 3, Legaia 2, Wild Arms 3, etc. These are great games that are reasons to own a system. If you look at your library, and you see only games you'd rather not play or sell.. then you should be picking more carefully.
My GC library is around 17 games, my PS2 is 7, my Xbox is 7. With every console/portable I have, I'm sitting around 175 games. I do have crappy games, but years of experience have taught me how to quickly spot something I'll enjoy. And if you're in doubt, rent it -- or ask the people at the store (assuming it's EB, not Wal-mart
I bought my Xbox for Jet Set Radio Future. That game was enough for me to buy it. I've spent 30 hours on it in total. I may never play it again, but I sure got my warth from it.
:)
And that's not the only game I've played for a number of hours on my Xbox. Most of the ones I play a lot are Sega games, so I always buy Sega releases. Whenever I do the math, I'm paying around 50 or 60 cents Canadian per hour of enjoyment. I think only the public library comes close to that
At a really low bitrate. I don't know about your audio setup, but I can hear artifacting on the vocals to Soundgarden's Superunknown CD over the sounds of the engine. Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball will crash after every round with custom tracks turned on. The "feature" of custom tracks is useless to me (and probably many others) for these quality and stability reasons.
"The PS/2 can do pre-encoded Dolby Digital 5.1, good for cutscenes and DVDs, but nothing in-game. A (very) few games do in-game encoding to DTS, but this requires dedicating one of the two vector processors to sound encoding."
Wrong again. The PS2 does in-game Prologic 2. I don't have any numbers on the overhead required for it, but Socom is one of the handful of titles to use this (I think the real number of PL2 PS2 games is around 4).
As for saying PL2 is the best the GameCube can dude, it sure whups the ass of stereo.
Halo 2 may look awesome to you, but it's been pushed back from June through October. I don't think we'll see it before December, 2003. Will the Xbox still be a contender then?
One of the downloadable perks for PSO on GameCube is getting a copy of NiGHTS you can download to your linked GBA. Then you can at least be one step closer to NiGHTS.
"If MS legalizes the mod chips then the Linux folk would completely abandon interest. "
No, there are always people who like to modify things. I'm happy to just buy Sega games, Tecmo games, and the odd non-Sega/Tecmo game (Splinter Cell, for example) for use on my Xbox. Legally, I have the right to do whatever I want with my Xbox, including using it as a toilet. I can put any chips I want into it, even PowerPC chips!
People don't want to modify their Xboxes because they legally restrained from that action, they want to modify them because it's a fairly compact (compared to a full tower PC) unit with all the important hardware for DTS/DD and HDTV in one unit.
"Especially the first and the latter are THE reasons why Metacity (and many other Linux WMs) are much and much more usable than any version Windows."
Yes, of course. Workspaces and magnetic window movement are exactly why Linux is the most popular desktop operating system.
Oh, wait.. No. Organizing your windows on your desktop is not something that anyone who wants to use the computer as a tool cares about. They care about something they turn on, do work with, and turn off. They don't want to think about organizing files, changing configs, dealing with dependancies, etc, etc, etc. That is why MacOS and Apple still exist.
This may be the best system for you, a nerd, but it is far from a usable system for most people in the world. Would you like to drive a car that requires hand cranking, manual shifting, and constant attention and tuning of ratios while it's running, because it gets 100mpg? Maybe. I don't, I just want something I can turn on and use, then turn off.
Which was my point: if you require a few hundred lines of lisp to get some desired behaviour from a system, the system is broken.