It's the invisible line that causes all the problems, too!
Google provides great search results. They get money from ads, but maybe not as much as they might get from making the advertising line an invisible one.
Yahoo sees this, and they know they can make fantastic revenue by selling better reaching ads to customers.
The problem is what happens in the long term. Yahoo is trying to make a quick buck for the shareholders. But evil corporations, much like spammers really, will advertise so hard, they don't care what you're looking for in a search engine, so long as their site is first on your search results and their spam is at the top of your inbox, that's great for them.
But in the long term, the searchers aren't dumb. Google doesn't serve up walmart.com for every single search entry you enter, it gives them what they want - good results. Yahoo will be surfing up herbalviagra.com after every search result. Which engine will you use?
It'll be the same old engine with a few little tweaks. The reason we know this? It's being released on an ancient console. No need to buy a new PC for this one, anything that'll run GTA3 will run this.
Try using tabbed browsing in Firefox or Mozilla before you start claiming it's useless. I use tabbed browsers exclusively on Windows.
I use opera. Opera, by default, is configured with tabbed browsing. One of the first things I turn off, too.
This choice has nothing to do with window management by any particular OS, and everything to do with my browsing habits. I presently have 16 tabs open in my browser. I'm a translator, I need to have lots of things open at once -- online references like Wikipedia, corporate IR pages, and dictionaries; Google; my webmail; and other fun things like Slashdot:).
If you use windows, you can group like tasks on the start menu easily enough. If you use Linux, then depending on the capabilities of your window manager you might be able to find a solution. One thing is for certain: If you rely on your web browser for window management then your operating system is lacking or you are not using it correctly. Which is why tabbed browsing is abhorrent.
Any windowing system becomes unacceptably cluttered if I use untabbed browsing and try to accomplish the same effect. ALT-TAB becomes a mess.
On the other hand, by using tabbed browsing, you lose about 50% of your screen to tabs for all the windows you have open, right? I value my real estate more than most people then.
And for that matter, try using a mature *nix distro before you make unfounded (or perhaps just misinformed) accusations.
Ahh and the inevitable personal attack, this is what really sells Linux to the general populace. I use Redhat 9.0 when I'm not using Windows, but I've used several different distros and window managers in the past. The high level of fragmentation in Linux makes window management even more difficult, as one method for management will work fine on one desktop, but it won't on another without configuring it the same way first. Windows tends to act very predictably no matter where you find it, however.
Exactly, if MS engineers and QA guys decided that all they had to do was design an OS and a UI that *they* could understand, they'd end up with something very similar in look and feel to Linux, and it would probably be almost as fragmented. It might not be as good as Linux under the hood, but then if MS had the same UI as Linux did, it would have died out to Apple or OS/2 or just about anything else back in '95.
As they said in Ghostbusters, "The door swings both ways". So yeah, there'll be a new method of advertising that gets by the popup blocking we currently use. But we're always going to be able to develop a better ad blocker.
Serious ad-haters simply block the vast list of ad serving IP's. No advertising technology will get past that one, and the business model most commonly used is to keep ads on different servers from the actual web information.
MS won't add tabs to IE, it doesn't fit their global UI standard. Everything in MS applications looks and feels the same, this is what has enabled MS to keep the desktop, and it's a key point of failure for linux on the desktop.
You won't see tabs in IE until you see tabs in Windows Explorer, MS Word and outlook. And that isn't likely to happen, as tabs are just a way to have "multiple windows" in a system that doesn't manage them very well (this is why tabbed browsing is more popular in the *nix world instead of the windows world). The uniform windows management in Windows performs well enough that very few users need tabbed browsing to keep track of what they're doing. Linux is too erratic and inconsistent, so using tabs in a browser is needed to control browser windows.
The Comanche, as people have mentioned, is stealthy in the several big important ways.
Firstly, it's got a much lower radar profile than any other helicopter in use today. Curved surfaces with very few sharp angles keep radar from bouncing off it sharply. Radar absorbing paint, etc etc also help to reduce radar visibility.
Secondly, the comanche pumps its engine heat directly through the body onto the tail rotor, which blows and diffuses hot air away from the chopper quickly. If you view a comanche through IR, it looks very cool indeed - little heat signature for heatseekers to chase.
Finally, you'll notice a couple of structural differences with the comanche that improve the general running noise. It has five blades on the main rotor, which smooth out the rotor noise. The tail rotor is cantered slightly, and most importantly, you notice that sheath that completely surrounds the rotor? That prevents the main rotor currents from interfering with the tail rotor currents (that's what cause the really loud beating sound that you hear on most choppers). For these reasons, the comanche is very very quiet.
So the developers were quite successful in their objectives. Just not what the army wanted after all.
Yes, the Midichlorians are one of the big reasons I love watching Star Wars Ep1, along with Jar-Jar Binks and Anakin. These elements allow me to watch the whole movie in half an hour, thanks to my good friend, the "chapter skip" button. And it really is a great half-hour movie!
Let's look at the defence for Lucas, and I don't really think he deserves much, but we must try and do what we can to save the SW franchise.
1) Anakin's "virgin birth" was not attributed to midichlorians. People just make that leap. Nobody expected the Stormtroopers were all Maori either. Lucas isn't walking a straight line for the audience. Also, there's no mention of Shmi being a virgin. She was a slave, I really doubt she was a virgin at all. Anakin just didn't have a father.
2) The only Jedi to ever mention Midichlorians and think they were important was Qui-Gonn, although Obi-Wan was aware of them. Qui-Gonn is also the only Jedi concerned with the "Living Force", which for all we know is totally different again to the conventional Force that Yoda is always going on about.
3) Lucas has widely dropped the whole Midichlorian thing to the wayside. It's his story, he can represent it how he wants, and his ideas change as he goes. If you read the Starkiller drafts, originally the Jedi Bendu used a totally different force energy to the bad guys, who use something called the Bogan. (I crack up every time I hear the term but Lucas really did call it that).
And SPARC, Alpha, and PowerPC are all more powerful than the current Opteron chips, and cheaper by several orders of magnitude (specifically PowerPC).
Huh? Looked at some benchmarks lately? (And not the ones produced by Apple that compare really obscure synthetic benchmarks of Opterons underclocked and running with half the same RAM as a PPC)?
SPARCs and Alphas are cheaper than Opterons by several orders of magnitude? Are they still making Alphas? If they are, and they're cheaper, and "more powerful", I can't see why there aren't a whole bunch of Linux gamers using them.
It's amazing they're still selling Magic cards. Each new release contains more powerful cards (obviously, to ensure people want to buy new boosters).
I'm surprised they haven't gotten to the point that there's a 1 colourless rare artifact with T:Defeat target opponent.
That's what stopped me playing the game really. Although every now and then I'll play multiplayer with a group of friends. Some of the guys use proxies, I didn't like that to start with but proxies are definately better than having everyone sink bucketloads of money into new cards all the time. And multiplayer games are a lot more relaxing than sweaty duels with nerds who consider winning more important than life itself!
There's a couple of open source upstart MMORPG style games being worked on. Currently they're anything but impressive however.
Having said that, anyone who can put together a successful mostly free MMORPG in open source will pose a real serious threat to the big guys. MMORPG is really begging for a "free" approach. O/S games development sadly lags way behind the rest of the industry however.
Assuming they can find some kind of paypal/wish/donation system to keep up servers and pay for bandwidth, anyway.
EFI allows really big enhancements to the bootup procedures. Everything that happens from POST onwards in BIOS's today is a huge waste of time. (Especially on windows PCs, haha). All that time spend ennumarating ISA slots (what ISA slots?), floppy drives, hard drives, etc etc is a big time blowout.
One of the biggest steps in moving from that 1-2 minute bootup time on a PC is getting rid of the 10 or so seconds we spend letting the BIOS do its thing.
Why shouldn't you hit the "on" button and see the logon screen instantly? With more and more advances like EFI and solid state storage this might be closer than you think.
I can just see myself yelling at the squad guys in Rainbow 6 until they start to cry, then feeling bad and taking them all out for a beer. Then we'd forget completely about the mission.
The moral of the story? Voice recognition makes the terrorists win. Or something.
You can tweak windows so that apps will run with the bare minimum of privelege required.
What is amusing, in a narrow minded way, is that *nix advocates continually and endlessly fail to acknowledge that these applications that won't run unless you're admin are third party. They're not developed by MS. Microsoft business apps run quite well without admin privelege. Yet the parent blames Windows!
If these developers started writing must-have killer applications for Linux, and made them so they'd only run as root, would you blame Linus Torvalds for making a lousy operating system?
I still say they have it way too good in the USA. Sure, things are getting a little more restrictve, but nonetheless.
Let me tell you how it is in Australia! When Telstra, our telecommunication overlord and monopoly release ADSL for all us little punters, you could get it at a tremendous cost, and they gave you a whole 300MB quota. Then they charged you a significant rate per MB after that. It's taken about 2 years to creep up to 1GB for the basic Telstra plan.
After Telstra was forced by various competition enforcement bodies, third parties are allowed to sell internet services over Telstras local loop. However, Telstra charges incredibly high prices for these services and there are terrible delays. These brave smaller ISPs are able to offer reasonably high limits, starting around 3GB and going anywhere up to 16GB (if you want to pay for it). ISP's will either charge/MB over the limit, or shape the account down to around 56k (varies from provider to provider).
There are a few groups of ISP's with peering agreements, these make the very low limits on Australian broadband tolerable.
Some ISP's do offer unlimited, however there are a couple of provisos.. if you use too much bandwidth, your priority for connections declines and so does your general quality of service.
The primary real reason behind this is that the USA offers, I don't know, something like 1GB of traffic to Australia, and charges like crazy for the rest, generally bringing most countries who wish to communicate with the USA to their knees.
If you want to see how the rest of the world lives, have a look at http://whirlpool.net.au - it might open your eyes up a little.
Prediction - Intel will spend more outrageous amounts of money ensuring that their new "Penteron64" outperforms the A64's on the market. They will produce vast amounts of Penterons, and release them exactly at the same time as the first 64-bit Windows XP is released.
They will then spend vast amounts of money marketing their new product to PHB's, which will ensure they wrest back market share that AMD has taken while Intel has been sitting around with a finger up the you-know-what.
I say, prepare for the onslaught of the Blue Men Group and the new Penteron64 processor.
And then there's the whole no true 64 bit windows yet
The tinfoil hat crowd would happily tell you that the reason there's no 64 bit windows is because Microsoft knew about this a long time ago and deliberately held off releasing Win64 technology because of some shady business dealings with Intel.
If you think about it, it's really very convenient for Intel, and MS hasn't bothered to give any good reason for the delay (especially when you consider that Linux has been available in 64bit land for aeons).
An alternative that the author didn't contemplate:
PC gaming is being marginalised by the game production houses. There isn't really a huge growth in new PC game development by the big players. Independants are making a few small games, true, but the majority of the work is being done in the modding community. This will only last as long as new games are released for PC in a moddable format (which means the games are developed for PC, again a diminishing trend). It will also only last for as long as mods aren't available on consoles. The Xbox already has an internet connection and a hard drive. All that needs to happen is that Xbox games get downloadable mods and game fixing patches, just like PC's, and game houses will be able to code exclusively for consoles, seeing no advantage of releasing games for the "uncontrolled" DRM free PC.
Furthermore, as you can see, console ports are continually on the rise and they're continually failing on the PC. Yes, this is because PC gamers bathe, have haircuts, and are generally distinguishing. But the gaming industry will just interpret the low sales as a lack of demand rather than product inferiority, and further reduce efforts to develop for PC.
This is where the so-called rennaissance comes in. Independent houses don't have the resources to produce a game with the same content as the big houses. Games developed in the "first cycle" that the author mentioned could have been achieved (and often were) by a small handful of talented staff. I know iD wasn't huge when they made Wolfenstein! But Wolfenstein won't cut it anymore. An independent rennaissance cannot be.
One factor for contemplation, however, is the PC hardware industry. Despite the lack of growth in the PC gaming sector, the PC hardware sector is skyrocketing. AMD and Intel both need a stong gaming community to push product like the AthlonFX and the Xeon^H^H^H^HPentium EE. ATI doesn't need PC gaming anymore thanks to Xbox2, but nVidia doesn't have a console anymore (not that they made money on Xbox anyway). So nVidia needs PC gaming to stay alive (they also need a competitive graphics architecture, but that's another story). Will these companies have any influence over the console-pushers and big gaming houses? Will they be able to turn the tide away from consoles?
Console gaming killed the arcade machine, because the console game had better graphics, sound, and you could play it at home. But will the console kill the PC? The only advantages that the console has on PC is the low entry cost, and the vast industry backing. Arcades died because that was what customers wanted - but will the PC game die because Namco and Sony and Activision want it to?
What's more amazing is that someone is willing to spend over $35M advertising through these games! I could find better things to do with $35M, I can tell you that.
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It's the invisible line that causes all the problems, too!
Google provides great search results. They get money from ads, but maybe not as much as they might get from making the advertising line an invisible one.
Yahoo sees this, and they know they can make fantastic revenue by selling better reaching ads to customers.
The problem is what happens in the long term. Yahoo is trying to make a quick buck for the shareholders. But evil corporations, much like spammers really, will advertise so hard, they don't care what you're looking for in a search engine, so long as their site is first on your search results and their spam is at the top of your inbox, that's great for them.
But in the long term, the searchers aren't dumb. Google doesn't serve up walmart.com for every single search entry you enter, it gives them what they want - good results. Yahoo will be surfing up herbalviagra.com after every search result. Which engine will you use?
It'll be the same old engine with a few little tweaks. The reason we know this? It's being released on an ancient console. No need to buy a new PC for this one, anything that'll run GTA3 will run this.
Try using tabbed browsing in Firefox or Mozilla before you start claiming it's useless. I use tabbed browsers exclusively on Windows.
:).
I use opera. Opera, by default, is configured with tabbed browsing. One of the first things I turn off, too.
This choice has nothing to do with window management by any particular OS, and everything to do with my browsing habits. I presently have 16 tabs open in my browser. I'm a translator, I need to have lots of things open at once -- online references like Wikipedia, corporate IR pages, and dictionaries; Google; my webmail; and other fun things like Slashdot
If you use windows, you can group like tasks on the start menu easily enough. If you use Linux, then depending on the capabilities of your window manager you might be able to find a solution. One thing is for certain: If you rely on your web browser for window management then your operating system is lacking or you are not using it correctly. Which is why tabbed browsing is abhorrent.
Any windowing system becomes unacceptably cluttered if I use untabbed browsing and try to accomplish the same effect. ALT-TAB becomes a mess.
On the other hand, by using tabbed browsing, you lose about 50% of your screen to tabs for all the windows you have open, right? I value my real estate more than most people then.
And for that matter, try using a mature *nix distro before you make unfounded (or perhaps just misinformed) accusations.
Ahh and the inevitable personal attack, this is what really sells Linux to the general populace. I use Redhat 9.0 when I'm not using Windows, but I've used several different distros and window managers in the past. The high level of fragmentation in Linux makes window management even more difficult, as one method for management will work fine on one desktop, but it won't on another without configuring it the same way first. Windows tends to act very predictably no matter where you find it, however.
Exactly, if MS engineers and QA guys decided that all they had to do was design an OS and a UI that *they* could understand, they'd end up with something very similar in look and feel to Linux, and it would probably be almost as fragmented. It might not be as good as Linux under the hood, but then if MS had the same UI as Linux did, it would have died out to Apple or OS/2 or just about anything else back in '95.
As they said in Ghostbusters, "The door swings both ways". So yeah, there'll be a new method of advertising that gets by the popup blocking we currently use. But we're always going to be able to develop a better ad blocker. Serious ad-haters simply block the vast list of ad serving IP's. No advertising technology will get past that one, and the business model most commonly used is to keep ads on different servers from the actual web information.
MS won't add tabs to IE, it doesn't fit their global UI standard. Everything in MS applications looks and feels the same, this is what has enabled MS to keep the desktop, and it's a key point of failure for linux on the desktop.
You won't see tabs in IE until you see tabs in Windows Explorer, MS Word and outlook. And that isn't likely to happen, as tabs are just a way to have "multiple windows" in a system that doesn't manage them very well (this is why tabbed browsing is more popular in the *nix world instead of the windows world). The uniform windows management in Windows performs well enough that very few users need tabbed browsing to keep track of what they're doing. Linux is too erratic and inconsistent, so using tabs in a browser is needed to control browser windows.
A little sun? Sun sells unix! SCO owns unix! Darl is responsible for the whole incident. Sue!
But for some reason, the simulator keeps crashing with error messages like "six multiplied by nine" and "fourty-two".
The Comanche, as people have mentioned, is stealthy in the several big important ways.
Firstly, it's got a much lower radar profile than any other helicopter in use today. Curved surfaces with very few sharp angles keep radar from bouncing off it sharply. Radar absorbing paint, etc etc also help to reduce radar visibility.
Secondly, the comanche pumps its engine heat directly through the body onto the tail rotor, which blows and diffuses hot air away from the chopper quickly. If you view a comanche through IR, it looks very cool indeed - little heat signature for heatseekers to chase.
Finally, you'll notice a couple of structural differences with the comanche that improve the general running noise. It has five blades on the main rotor, which smooth out the rotor noise. The tail rotor is cantered slightly, and most importantly, you notice that sheath that completely surrounds the rotor? That prevents the main rotor currents from interfering with the tail rotor currents (that's what cause the really loud beating sound that you hear on most choppers). For these reasons, the comanche is very very quiet.
So the developers were quite successful in their objectives. Just not what the army wanted after all.
Yes, the Midichlorians are one of the big reasons I love watching Star Wars Ep1, along with Jar-Jar Binks and Anakin. These elements allow me to watch the whole movie in half an hour, thanks to my good friend, the "chapter skip" button. And it really is a great half-hour movie!
Let's look at the defence for Lucas, and I don't really think he deserves much, but we must try and do what we can to save the SW franchise.
1) Anakin's "virgin birth" was not attributed to midichlorians. People just make that leap. Nobody expected the Stormtroopers were all Maori either. Lucas isn't walking a straight line for the audience. Also, there's no mention of Shmi being a virgin. She was a slave, I really doubt she was a virgin at all. Anakin just didn't have a father.
2) The only Jedi to ever mention Midichlorians and think they were important was Qui-Gonn, although Obi-Wan was aware of them. Qui-Gonn is also the only Jedi concerned with the "Living Force", which for all we know is totally different again to the conventional Force that Yoda is always going on about.
3) Lucas has widely dropped the whole Midichlorian thing to the wayside. It's his story, he can represent it how he wants, and his ideas change as he goes. If you read the Starkiller drafts, originally the Jedi Bendu used a totally different force energy to the bad guys, who use something called the Bogan. (I crack up every time I hear the term but Lucas really did call it that).
And SPARC, Alpha, and PowerPC are all more powerful than the current Opteron chips, and cheaper by several orders of magnitude (specifically PowerPC).
Huh? Looked at some benchmarks lately? (And not the ones produced by Apple that compare really obscure synthetic benchmarks of Opterons underclocked and running with half the same RAM as a PPC)?
SPARCs and Alphas are cheaper than Opterons by several orders of magnitude? Are they still making Alphas? If they are, and they're cheaper, and "more powerful", I can't see why there aren't a whole bunch of Linux gamers using them.
Who modded this guy insightful?
co-op like DooM and Serious Sam? Or is Co-op being frowned on because they intend to port to a console?
It's amazing they're still selling Magic cards. Each new release contains more powerful cards (obviously, to ensure people want to buy new boosters).
I'm surprised they haven't gotten to the point that there's a 1 colourless rare artifact with T:Defeat target opponent.
That's what stopped me playing the game really. Although every now and then I'll play multiplayer with a group of friends. Some of the guys use proxies, I didn't like that to start with but proxies are definately better than having everyone sink bucketloads of money into new cards all the time. And multiplayer games are a lot more relaxing than sweaty duels with nerds who consider winning more important than life itself!
There's a couple of open source upstart MMORPG style games being worked on. Currently they're anything but impressive however.
Having said that, anyone who can put together a successful mostly free MMORPG in open source will pose a real serious threat to the big guys. MMORPG is really begging for a "free" approach. O/S games development sadly lags way behind the rest of the industry however.
Assuming they can find some kind of paypal/wish/donation system to keep up servers and pay for bandwidth, anyway.
EFI allows really big enhancements to the bootup procedures. Everything that happens from POST onwards in BIOS's today is a huge waste of time. (Especially on windows PCs, haha). All that time spend ennumarating ISA slots (what ISA slots?), floppy drives, hard drives, etc etc is a big time blowout.
One of the biggest steps in moving from that 1-2 minute bootup time on a PC is getting rid of the 10 or so seconds we spend letting the BIOS do its thing.
Why shouldn't you hit the "on" button and see the logon screen instantly? With more and more advances like EFI and solid state storage this might be closer than you think.
I can just see myself yelling at the squad guys in Rainbow 6 until they start to cry, then feeling bad and taking them all out for a beer. Then we'd forget completely about the mission.
The moral of the story? Voice recognition makes the terrorists win. Or something.
You can tweak windows so that apps will run with the bare minimum of privelege required.
What is amusing, in a narrow minded way, is that *nix advocates continually and endlessly fail to acknowledge that these applications that won't run unless you're admin are third party. They're not developed by MS. Microsoft business apps run quite well without admin privelege. Yet the parent blames Windows!
If these developers started writing must-have killer applications for Linux, and made them so they'd only run as root, would you blame Linus Torvalds for making a lousy operating system?
He now wove the new thoughts into his music, and straightway discord arose about him
I've seen this before. This is Microsoft's "Embrace and Extend" policy.
I still say they have it way too good in the USA. Sure, things are getting a little more restrictve, but nonetheless.
/MB over the limit, or shape the account down to around 56k (varies from provider to provider).
Let me tell you how it is in Australia! When Telstra, our telecommunication overlord and monopoly release ADSL for all us little punters, you could get it at a tremendous cost, and they gave you a whole 300MB quota. Then they charged you a significant rate per MB after that. It's taken about 2 years to creep up to 1GB for the basic Telstra plan.
After Telstra was forced by various competition enforcement bodies, third parties are allowed to sell internet services over Telstras local loop. However, Telstra charges incredibly high prices for these services and there are terrible delays. These brave smaller ISPs are able to offer reasonably high limits, starting around 3GB and going anywhere up to 16GB (if you want to pay for it). ISP's will either charge
There are a few groups of ISP's with peering agreements, these make the very low limits on Australian broadband tolerable.
Some ISP's do offer unlimited, however there are a couple of provisos.. if you use too much bandwidth, your priority for connections declines and so does your general quality of service.
The primary real reason behind this is that the USA offers, I don't know, something like 1GB of traffic to Australia, and charges like crazy for the rest, generally bringing most countries who wish to communicate with the USA to their knees.
If you want to see how the rest of the world lives, have a look at http://whirlpool.net.au - it might open your eyes up a little.
Prediction - Intel will spend more outrageous amounts of money ensuring that their new "Penteron64" outperforms the A64's on the market. They will produce vast amounts of Penterons, and release them exactly at the same time as the first 64-bit Windows XP is released.
They will then spend vast amounts of money marketing their new product to PHB's, which will ensure they wrest back market share that AMD has taken while Intel has been sitting around with a finger up the you-know-what.
I say, prepare for the onslaught of the Blue Men Group and the new Penteron64 processor.
And then there's the whole no true 64 bit windows yet
The tinfoil hat crowd would happily tell you that the reason there's no 64 bit windows is because Microsoft knew about this a long time ago and deliberately held off releasing Win64 technology because of some shady business dealings with Intel.
If you think about it, it's really very convenient for Intel, and MS hasn't bothered to give any good reason for the delay (especially when you consider that Linux has been available in 64bit land for aeons).
Written in 1556, by a German, in Latin
The RIAA will still sue, Metallica, as proven many times in the past, belongs to them.
An alternative that the author didn't contemplate:
PC gaming is being marginalised by the game production houses. There isn't really a huge growth in new PC game development by the big players. Independants are making a few small games, true, but the majority of the work is being done in the modding community. This will only last as long as new games are released for PC in a moddable format (which means the games are developed for PC, again a diminishing trend). It will also only last for as long as mods aren't available on consoles. The Xbox already has an internet connection and a hard drive. All that needs to happen is that Xbox games get downloadable mods and game fixing patches, just like PC's, and game houses will be able to code exclusively for consoles, seeing no advantage of releasing games for the "uncontrolled" DRM free PC.
Furthermore, as you can see, console ports are continually on the rise and they're continually failing on the PC. Yes, this is because PC gamers bathe, have haircuts, and are generally distinguishing. But the gaming industry will just interpret the low sales as a lack of demand rather than product inferiority, and further reduce efforts to develop for PC.
This is where the so-called rennaissance comes in. Independent houses don't have the resources to produce a game with the same content as the big houses. Games developed in the "first cycle" that the author mentioned could have been achieved (and often were) by a small handful of talented staff. I know iD wasn't huge when they made Wolfenstein! But Wolfenstein won't cut it anymore. An independent rennaissance cannot be.
One factor for contemplation, however, is the PC hardware industry. Despite the lack of growth in the PC gaming sector, the PC hardware sector is skyrocketing. AMD and Intel both need a stong gaming community to push product like the AthlonFX and the Xeon^H^H^H^HPentium EE. ATI doesn't need PC gaming anymore thanks to Xbox2, but nVidia doesn't have a console anymore (not that they made money on Xbox anyway). So nVidia needs PC gaming to stay alive (they also need a competitive graphics architecture, but that's another story). Will these companies have any influence over the console-pushers and big gaming houses? Will they be able to turn the tide away from consoles?
Console gaming killed the arcade machine, because the console game had better graphics, sound, and you could play it at home. But will the console kill the PC? The only advantages that the console has on PC is the low entry cost, and the vast industry backing. Arcades died because that was what customers wanted - but will the PC game die because Namco and Sony and Activision want it to?
"Well I didn't vote for you!"
"You don't vote for kings!"
"Well how do you become king then?"
"The lady of the lake...."
What's more amazing is that someone is willing to spend over $35M advertising through these games! I could find better things to do with $35M, I can tell you that.