Sometimes a question is asked not to find the answer, but to provoke thought and discussion to better understand the subject. While there may be no single answer to the greatest console, there are a number of responses that give insight into the various technical and non-technical which contribute to making a console great.
I could probably come up with 10 or so factors in deciding how to rank my consoles. Then I would define the scales and think of a novel way to weight them (probably by year and technological limitations
Unless you include every possible criteria, the selection of criteria that feed into that matrix is subjective. Is number of polygons pushed per second important? What about ease of programming, clockspeed, # PCB layers, # of 3rd party games, carbon footprint? Would it be fair that video quality has 100 items and sound only 30?
Last but not least, I would need someone with enough time to play through all of them. Most importantly, this subject(s) would need to be non-interested meaning they have no previous gaming experience
Wouldn't the "best" console not just appeal to those completely new to the industry, but also those who have varying degrees of experience? How do you remove the bias of the person's experience with computers or any other electronics? Someone who has used computers even for non-game use may be more apt to accept a long boot time, than a person who is used to the instant gratification of a television.
Why will pong always be better than NES Contra for my dad? Because it was his generation's game. Why is NES Contra always better for me than Souped Up Console Gears of War? Because that was my generation's game.
Nostalgic enjoyment doesn't necessarily mean the person isn't capable of being objective and understand the limitations of "their" game versus the current crop. Rather than just dismiss somebody saying Pong is better than Half-life, ask the person why they feel that. It might be that what is important to them like ease of play, is more important than graphics.
If you want me to be impressed with a comprehensive study, I expect a cold hard naive matrix and not some subjective highly tailored prose laden essay written by an avid gamer.
Such a comprehensive study on objective facts will at best answer the trivial question of which console is the most powerful, and give less real insight than an opinionated blog.
Sorry to dash your hopes, but there are a bunch of ways you "willingly" authorize companies to sell your number. Just look at the little text on cell phone bill/credit card application/airline ticket/etc.
Music Industry: Don't worry, we'll just ripoff the artist by taking a bigger cut of the merchandising profits and charge them to play their own music in concert
hey artists: you'll get paid for concerts and advertising, nothing else. get used to it
Artist: Now I have the choice to make much less money in concert or earn $50 and beer down at a local dive - worse, whichever I chose the coke & hookers are no longer free QQ
i hereby pass a law saying the sun will move in the opposite direction. same impact on reality
Government: We are raising your taxes to fund a special taskforce charged with collecting more evidence that the sun is going the wrong direction and pay for a manned expedition into the sun to deliver the federal subpoena
The labels will still get money, the artist will still get screwed, and government will still get bigger End of story
For sixty bucks a month, we could essentially 'decriminalize' private non-commercial copyright infringement? How is that not an example of money well spent?
The first question is where will it stop? My crochet pattern is being shared, gimme money; my recipe for apple pie is being shared, gimme money. You'll end up with a line of people with their hand out The second question is who gets that money? Judging by similar taxes like on blank CDs, it will line the pockets of the media giants and not to compensate the independent artist.
Y'know, the idea that, there's sometimes more important things than just my own selfish interests?
Y'know this goes both ways. Those who download without providing compensation in return, are acting in their own selfish interest.
didn't FDR say something about how "naked self-interest is not only bad morals, but bad economics, too?"
Didn't Michael Douglas (as Gordan Gecko) say "The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that: Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right; greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words"
You can't summarize a relationship complex as self-interest and economics in one sentence
This is why I love being Canadian. The solution to a big huge problem is usually nothing more than a smaller tiny problem.
To play devil's advocate (not the pinball game) - This might cause more problems than it solves. I can imagine the labels will threaten 1) Pulling their merchandise off the shelves - Negatively impacting retail 2) Pulling their artists out of concerts - leaving arenas/music halls empty 3) Pulling their ads off of radio, television, magazines, etc - hurting the media 4) Abandoning any production locations - leaving various recording staff unemployed
This would seriously impact the tax base. Whether or not they'd actually do such a thing is irrelavent. My guess is the threat alone is enough to make the politicians, even in a progressive country like Canada, to crumble.
The biggest flaw with the current civil litigation system is that punitive damages have become as much about making the winning plaintiff rich, as its original purpose to chastise the defendant. The simple solution is a plaintiff is only entitled to actual damages and make all punitive damages awarded to the government. This gets the punitive portion back to it's original purpose punish the loser to protect the public. It also forces the plaintiff to demonstrate they have been materially impacted to get actual damages, so just sitting on a patent doing nothing won't net you any money.
True it won't stop all patent trolls who will try to inflate actual damages, but it will reduce the number because the sky high rewards won't be there.
It's just one of the downsides of capitalism - if a company can make money, they will want to make money, even if that involves working against the employees. Especially when the company is a multnational corporation that can just go elsewhere if there's trouble.
On the flip side a consumer will buy cheaper, even if that involves working against his neighbor. What you are describing is how capitalism spreads wealth to the lower classes (they just happen to be in another country), improves the overall efficiency lowering prices for goods & services freeing up capital, and creates a net gain. That's not a negative.
It's sad that TV is the defacto "solid frame of reference for social interaction" these days.
Why? TV is just a method for distributing information, same as books and radio. What makes it the defacto frame for social interaction is that 90%+ of homes have one.
Even though they are doing well financially, the ones doing the 70 hrs are neglecting their lives and their family. They are more likely to breakdown or have family troubles. The others struggle making ends meet with lower paying jobs working the same hours and have the same problems. All the while, America is decaying and heading straight towards recession
It's not the profit driven ideology, it's the consumerism ideology. There are low cost areas to live, of course more people prefer to live in popular, and thus more expensive places. They want a house in the burbs with a big backyard and therefore need a car or two, along with increased fuel costs. Americans want things right now, so are willing to pay a premium in the form of interest on debt. People aren't "struggling making ends meet," they are struggling to support their preferred lifestyle. America isn't decaying, it's been the same for 200 years.
Most of the gung ho corporate types insist that they can multi task wonderfully and trying to reason with them is pointless.
Maybe they are using a different definition of multi-tasking than you do. Corporate multi-tasking isn't - surf the web, talk on the phone, and write emails at the same time. It's more - working on project A, managing project B, researching project C. Typically long term tasks don't consume all your time every day, effective multi-taskers are those who can plan and weave different projects together not on a minute-to-minute basis, but rather a day-to-day.
There were superstars before the RIAA, they just made their money performing rather than selling recorded music. One would hope that this can & will happen in the future.
But then we lose out on those people who aren't the rare breed that can sing, write, & perform. Great songwriters end up with their works unsung, great singers don't get a chance to share their gift, and the Pussycat Dolls don't get to bounce up and down on stage for teenage boys.
I have no interest at all in an MMO. Every one I have seen requires lots of hard work to get anywhere, and are just not enjoyable.
MMOs don't represent the possibilities for the technology. The reason MMOs are made to be grindfests is the developers want you to continue playing the exact same game for the same subscription fee. Meanwhile, it is possible to have instancing of different games or different themes on the same game. All that's really different between a World of Warcraft instance and a Neverwinter Night's campaign is the gameplay design.
Meanwhile I've basically no money, no skills, no real way to advance beyond the very begging of the game without spending months. Spending months at the very beginning of a game really does not sound like fun to me.
So basically you want to have everything handed to you in the beginning? In KOTOR I spent the first quarter of the game without a lightsaber, not much fundamentally different other than in MMOs you can see those players who put forth the effort before you... sounds more like jealousy than the actual game. Rarely does it take months to get beyond the very beginning of the game, in fact the biggest problem with most MMOs is that once you get to the end (level cap), there isn't much to do.
Course I guess it would simply turn all games into MMO games in essense, plus single player game content would take a back seat to the multiplay content, so games like MassEffect wouldn't appear as attractive.
Not necessarily. The technology is there to create single player content in an online format. For example if I run into an MMO instance alone, I'm essentially playing a single player game. The real question is why keep an online game single player. Once you have all these people logged in together, why not allow them to interact and promote a community.
About fifty percent of the human race is middle men and they don't take kindly to being eliminated.
--Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity
Oddly enough, all he was a middle man.
Think about it when you see the RIAA fighting to survive. That is their purpose. The tubes have made them non-important.
No, the tubes have cut their profits, not really impacted their purpose. The labels are marketing machines, distribution is only 1 avenue where they make money.
"Merchandising, merchandising. Where the real money from the movie is made" - Yogurt, Spaceballs
It's when the creator of the content or his agent is seen as predatory or arbitrarily restrictive that people begin to look for other sources.
I think this applies only to a minority. There are those who sample before buying, or who rage against the corporations... but primarily people downloading are looking for free stuff. I would say the/. population falls into such an intellectually motivated minority.
Content sales in the very near future will be done with fewer middle-men, and more with direct relationships. It will be done with fewer restrictions, and more trust. There's already a lot of innovation occurring in business models built that way, just not by the record companies and movie studios.
It's been tried before, but time and time again the masses have shown preference to the marketing machine that delivers hype, merchandising, glamour, as well as music/movies
Then if the artist put up a paypal link...
Profit.
So magically the people downloading music and not paying for it are going to start paying? That doesn't seem to be a reasonable expectation.
It's riskier. The music has to be better.
No, suddenly every musician has a level playing field and it becomes more difficult to filter the good artists from the noise. There's some good bands on Myspace, but it's a helluva pain to find them.
It has been demonstrated that talented artists can make a living doing what they love without DRM. What has not been demonstrated is that labels can survive that way.
What's been demonstrated is that labels will make money any way they can. They will still make money without DRM, just not as much, and artists will still sell out.
PS. "The Music Man" is a particularly apt example of the problem and essentially nullifies your point. Almost the entire cast, crew, and musicians involved in it's creation are dead. The only people making money off of it are distributors that made no artistic contribution to it's creation.
Yeah, there's no contribution in getting all those parties to work together, or to get the capital in place to sponsor the project. I agree copyright is too long, but that is a seperate issue from DRM.
American laws follow the tradition of "spirit of the law" rather than "letter of the law".
America has been moving away from "the spirit" and more towards "the letter." This is reflected in minimum sentencing guidelines, "zero tolerance" ordinance, and rulings in favor of the letter rather than spirit.
No the real solution is organize to get others to vote for third parties. Even mainstream candidates cater to voting blocks (eg "the black vote," unions, NRA, christian coalition, etc)
But what you're suggesting is that whereas the computers we have now don't feel anything, if we program them to pretend that they do, suddenly those feelings may (will?) become real. I don't find that compelling.
Why do you say we program to "pretend" they do. We can make them react in a specific way to stimulus the same as people, how does that become pretending? Does a machine only pretend to see something because the optical sensor doesn't work the same as a human's?
Jesus Christ got nailed to a stick. What the fuck am I supposed to do to make everyone like me?
I'm not a biblical scholar, but I think he got nailed up on a tree to show - if everybody likes everybody else, then everybody will like you. And I think something about now being able to eat bacon.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you include every possible criteria, the selection of criteria that feed into that matrix is subjective. Is number of polygons pushed per second important? What about ease of programming, clockspeed, # PCB layers, # of 3rd party games, carbon footprint? Would it be fair that video quality has 100 items and sound only 30?
Wouldn't the "best" console not just appeal to those completely new to the industry, but also those who have varying degrees of experience? How do you remove the bias of the person's experience with computers or any other electronics? Someone who has used computers even for non-game use may be more apt to accept a long boot time, than a person who is used to the instant gratification of a television.
Nostalgic enjoyment doesn't necessarily mean the person isn't capable of being objective and understand the limitations of "their" game versus the current crop. Rather than just dismiss somebody saying Pong is better than Half-life, ask the person why they feel that. It might be that what is important to them like ease of play, is more important than graphics.
Such a comprehensive study on objective facts will at best answer the trivial question of which console is the most powerful, and give less real insight than an opinionated blog.
Sorry to dash your hopes, but there are a bunch of ways you "willingly" authorize companies to sell your number. Just look at the little text on cell phone bill/credit card application/airline ticket/etc.
Artist: Now I have the choice to make much less money in concert or earn $50 and beer down at a local dive - worse, whichever I chose the coke & hookers are no longer free QQ
Government: We are raising your taxes to fund a special taskforce charged with collecting more evidence that the sun is going the wrong direction and pay for a manned expedition into the sun to deliver the federal subpoena
The labels will still get money, the artist will still get screwed, and government will still get bigger
End of story
The second question is who gets that money? Judging by similar taxes like on blank CDs, it will line the pockets of the media giants and not to compensate the independent artist.
Y'know this goes both ways. Those who download without providing compensation in return, are acting in their own selfish interest.
Didn't Michael Douglas (as Gordan Gecko) say
"The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that: Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right; greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words"
You can't summarize a relationship complex as self-interest and economics in one sentence
1) Pulling their merchandise off the shelves - Negatively impacting retail
2) Pulling their artists out of concerts - leaving arenas/music halls empty
3) Pulling their ads off of radio, television, magazines, etc - hurting the media
4) Abandoning any production locations - leaving various recording staff unemployed
This would seriously impact the tax base. Whether or not they'd actually do such a thing is irrelavent. My guess is the threat alone is enough to make the politicians, even in a progressive country like Canada, to crumble.
The biggest flaw with the current civil litigation system is that punitive damages have become as much about making the winning plaintiff rich, as its original purpose to chastise the defendant.
The simple solution is a plaintiff is only entitled to actual damages and make all punitive damages awarded to the government. This gets the punitive portion back to it's original purpose punish the loser to protect the public. It also forces the plaintiff to demonstrate they have been materially impacted to get actual damages, so just sitting on a patent doing nothing won't net you any money.
True it won't stop all patent trolls who will try to inflate actual damages, but it will reduce the number because the sky high rewards won't be there.
What you are describing is how capitalism spreads wealth to the lower classes (they just happen to be in another country), improves the overall efficiency lowering prices for goods & services freeing up capital, and creates a net gain. That's not a negative.
America isn't decaying, it's been the same for 200 years.
It's more - working on project A, managing project B, researching project C. Typically long term tasks don't consume all your time every day, effective multi-taskers are those who can plan and weave different projects together not on a minute-to-minute basis, but rather a day-to-day.
Great songwriters end up with their works unsung, great singers don't get a chance to share their gift, and the Pussycat Dolls don't get to bounce up and down on stage for teenage boys.
So basically you want to have everything handed to you in the beginning? In KOTOR I spent the first quarter of the game without a lightsaber, not much fundamentally different other than in MMOs you can see those players who put forth the effort before you... sounds more like jealousy than the actual game. Rarely does it take months to get beyond the very beginning of the game, in fact the biggest problem with most MMOs is that once you get to the end (level cap), there isn't much to do.
No, the tubes have cut their profits, not really impacted their purpose. The labels are marketing machines, distribution is only 1 avenue where they make money.
It's been tried before, but time and time again the masses have shown preference to the marketing machine that delivers hype, merchandising, glamour, as well as music/movies
No, suddenly every musician has a level playing field and it becomes more difficult to filter the good artists from the noise. There's some good bands on Myspace, but it's a helluva pain to find them.
What's been demonstrated is that labels will make money any way they can. They will still make money without DRM, just not as much, and artists will still sell out.
Yeah, there's no contribution in getting all those parties to work together, or to get the capital in place to sponsor the project. I agree copyright is too long, but that is a seperate issue from DRM.
Does a machine only pretend to see something because the optical sensor doesn't work the same as a human's?