That's just fleecing us And annual rehashes of pre-existing content at full retail price isn't fleecing the consumers? Oh dear. I suppose you'd rather we consider ourselves as not taking ownership of the CD/DVD when we buy it from the store? Would you rather we saw your game not as an item we purchase, but as an experience that one can indulge in for a nominal fee just like those found on darkened street corners? After all, once we're finished with your underwhelming offerings, we would be stuck with something we can't get rid of.
You believe only parents should be allowed to decide if M-rated content is suitable for their children, but also believe that enforcement of age limits is wrong. So... Just how bad is the teenage parenthood problem now? Wouldn't enforcing the age restriction keep the decision in the hands of parents by preventing the underage child from making the purchasing decision? Okay, so it's a bit of a nuisance for Timmy's mother when he wants to buy GTA and she still has to go and buy it for him even though she doesn't care what he gets up to on the Playstation and she's going to be late for her nail appointment. Hopefully, though, she'll take a look at the box and start to think about the kind of media her child is consuming.
For the record, my personal opinion is that violent games are no more dangerous to children than any other violent media, and that violent media doesn't necessarily beget violent children. A lack of understanding of the morality of human existence is the root of the problem here, and that comes from lackadaisical and ineffective parenting. Or just really fucked up kids.
...If the game industry did the honourable thing and gave a fair share of their profits to the hard-working, democratically elected politicians. In fact, not only would this not be a problem, but if they all did a quick whip-around, they could out-bribe Wal-Mart and get legislation in place to force those shelves to be full of AO-rated violent sex-fests. Heck, get EA Montreal to send down some of that primo mary jane they've been bogarting and Bam! - a new war is started in some piss-pot hellhole and EA has exclusive rights to all games based on the conflict.
Or, alternatively, someone could actually use their fucking mind in all of this and get a decent, well-enforced rating system in place so the vile opportunists that are advancing on this industry will get nothing out of their perverted actions.
Even the reflection of the SUV is faithfully recreated in game! Stunning!
Seriously, couldn't they have photoshopped it out? Other than that, the screenshots they've been showing have been very impressive, and the PGR gameplay is great fun. Should help shift a few X360s if it really is a launch title.
Loose spelling, poor grammar, and lots of trolling. Oh, itraor, if only you had linked to your own in-depth analysis on your blog, you would have had the Slashdot Superfecta.
Except that MS launched first, of course. And the hard disk comes with it, though it's removable for some strange reason. And they've made the backwards compatibility issue clear now. As for wireless controllers... I doubt Sony were the first to think of it.
Also, if Sony goes for a hard drive, wireless networking, and TiVo functionality, how is that not copying the X360? MS has already announced the X360 has all of that (at least, connected to a MCE PC). I just wish Sony would play 'me, too' with MS and actually give us some real-time footage, but I think we've got a long wait before we know what the PS3 can actually do.
What on Earth does that have to do with the X360? Other than it coming out ahead of the competition, Sega's failures there bear no similarity to the situation Microsoft faces. Sega had already had the MegaCD, the 32 addon for the Megadrive/Genesis, and the Saturn be rejected by consumers. They had unfortunately been out of it for a while by the time the Dreamcast launched.
Microsoft has had a great deal of success with the Xbox, by some measures overtaking one of the biggest names in the industry (Nintendo) and by many more leading the pack with their online gaming service - something that many would consider to be the next Big Thing for consoles after it changed the PC gaming industry so drastically over the last decade.
All of this is of course ignoring the fact that MS just won't let this fail. The Xbox is a massive end-run to get a Microsoft device in the living room, to get their brand recognition up for people that don't go near computers, and to use as a platform for the rest of their intentions such as in IPTV. It's a Microsoft reach around so you won't notice the pounding they're going to give you, and I doubt they'll be willing to pull out early.
You'll have to open up a protocol, and bypass the firewall matrix to do that. If that doesn't work, you'll have to use the powerline to reroute data. And if all that fails, just go to one of those nice big workstations over in an unused room where no one will find you - they have complete access to the whole CTU network.
I love 24, but when they get into the techno-crapple it makes me want to remove my brain with a rusted fork.
Because there's 500,000 people willing to play it?
Meanwhile, Sony announced a few days ago that they have shipped 90 million PS2s and over 800 million games.
...Why did Sony bamboozle us at E3 with flashy pre-renderings that had nothing to do with what the PS3 would output? And why did MS come out immediately to counter by saying their demos were on alpha kits at about 1/3rd the power of the X360, and would they would get a lot better? Fuck, by the next generation of consoles, one of these guys will have a GPU so powerful it can generate new colours, like fuscheen.
It's basic biology, or psychology, or whatever ology - me wantee sparklie pretty thing. The graphics just have to trigger that part of your brain that overrides rational judgement so you'll be at your local EB in late November drooling over the counter with $400 in your hand.
Graphics matter to games, because they sell the games. And when the games get sold, the developers are allowed out of the cages for a week so they can see their families and get a decent meal.
As for graphics having no bearing on 'gameplay' - are we sure there is nothing in the real world that can't be rendered in a game with a reasonable amount of accuracy? I seriously doubt we've already hit the plateau for that. We haven't seen too many truly deformable landscapes, for example, or even truly deformable models. Surely they would have an impact on the challenge a game has to offer?
The cynic in this uninformed non-American reckons that it's because the video game industry isn't giving kickbacks to the legislators in the way the MPAA and RIAA have been. Maybe when they start paying their protection money, these guys will ease up the pressure and add software pirates to the axis of evil, along with the P2P users that are already being rounded up in their outposts of tyranny.
But as I said, that's me being cynical. If I were rational, I'd say that while it is unfortunate that this legislation was even thought up, it probably is necessary these days. There's already a rating system in place for video games, but it's for nothing if the retailers won't enforce it. We're going to have to accept that video games could possibly have the same effect on a child as other forms of media when the violence isn't given the right context - if the child is too young to understand the difference between reality and fiction, they shouldn't be playing these games. The important thing to remember though, is that these games do not teach people how to kill. It's an argument that's often thrown around, and it's just bullshit. We're born with instinct, a hard-wiring in our evolved brains that gives us the ability to kill our prey, and to say that a video game trains us to kill is absurd. People then make the point that the Army uses games to teach soldiers how to kill, but to the best of my knowledge these tools are used for tactics and strategy, rather than actual simulation of the act of killing. Let's not forget that guns also operate on a simple point-and-click interface that makes it ridiculously easy to take a life. But that's the fault of video games, obviously.
Is this legislation a substitute for parental responsibility? Of course it is. Is it being forced through by those that lack understanding and evidence? You betcha. But somehow those two wrongs have made a right. Don't moan at me, you guys voted for it. We voted for that lying fuck that sweats a lot.
Early adopters get screwed, that's just how it is. I got an Xbox as soon as it arrived in Britain, and it set me back #300. Even with the mass quantities in which these new systems will be produced, they're still going to cost an incredible amount, and it shouldn't be surprising if prices were up a bit on the launch prices of this generation.
What's scary is the potential cost of games, and how that affects pricing. If a publisher puts $15m in a game over 2 years of development, they'll be reluctant to put it on the shelves at less than $50, and it would be more likely around $60. So in order to keep that down, MS would have to offer them another way to make money... Say hello to Xbox Live and paying out small, almost unnoticable, sums of money for new content, where the only cost is the human one - developers hammering out as much as possible to pay back that $15m they 'owe' the publishing house, in pennies and dimes.
What makes you think the kids will be buying these systems? There may well be a 360 under the Christmas tree this year, but these days it's more likely that Santa left it for Daddy and not Little Timmy.
I was pretty sold on the 360 anyway, and any kind of backwards compatibility would just be icing on a delicious, concave cake. I've been watching the HD footage on Fileshack (not affiliated, I just paid GBP2.75 this morning for Mercury to get the HD stuff, knowing that the same trailers will be put online after E3 in their original form) and these games look incredible. There must have been some massive leap that occured while I was busy with Doom3 and HL2 because I was not expecting this kind of quality from the next-gen consoles and PC games. Heck, I'm even looking forward to the EA titles.
And I haven't even started looking at the PS3 yet. I might have to take a second gap year at this rate.
The console market these days works on selling the hardware at a loss, and the software at a huge profit.
MS had a problem with the original Xbox launch in that their hardware was going to cost a fortune compared to the PS2 (which had been out for some time already and I think had come down in price), and it would still lose them money. So they had the idea that they would bundle the console with a load of games and get customers to leave Wal-Mart some $400-500 lighter. That's why around the launch time they kicked up a fuss about their 'attach rate', their marketing term for this tactic.
The problem I see with them trying the same stunt this time is that this tactic relies on high quality launch titles, and since developers would have only had their dev kits for about a year come November when the 360 launches, they might not have anything to launch with.
If it's not backwards compatible, then maybe they'll launch with an updated Halo 2 and some EA Sports titles. People have been buying HDTVs to watch football, so maybe NFL 2006 would be a good title to launch with and show off the HD prowess of the console.
Arrested Development is easily the best TV show to come from America in a long, long time. Stop watching reality TV you imbeciles and watch a show that's intelligent enough to not have to tell you when, and for how long, to laugh.
Re:New Slashdot section, same worthless opinion
on
Dell Still Intel Only
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· Score: 1
Well, sure, this tactic of playing Intel has every opportunity of coming and biting them in the behind at some later point. But when you have a commitment to shareholders to increase short-term profits, it would not be a popular decision to take the plunge and invest in supporting AMD hardware. Such a decision would also increase costs in after-sales support, and how do you justify doing that when you've already taken drastic measures to cut costs in this area.
"Oh, sorry your job went to India, but back then we didn't have the budget to keep you on." See, it's not going to go down so well.
Maybe Dell just doesn't want the enterprise server market. They seem to do well in the SMB segment, selling to companies that many times don't even have a real IT department, and just have 'Dave that knows computers'. And if you can screw these guys out of a bit more money with the brand recognition that Intel (dum... dum-dum-ding-ding) has, then that's the more favourable business model.
It's only a small number of customers that actually want to chose an AMD platform, and those are the only people that Dell lose by not offering them the choice. To most, who provides the hardware is not important so long as it performs the tasks it's intended for. And Intel is still (only just, mind) fulfilling that obligation.
I can now see why you'd want to highlight the 'flaws' you see in their strategy, but perhaps jumping in with a comment once the story is posted would be beneficial to the Slashdot community, rather than leaving the readers to sift through articles rife with biased rantings.
"Why not offer customers an alternative that has better performance instead of risking the lose of those customers to another vendor that does?"
Why not let a man run his own damn company in the way he has done so successfully for many years? Oh wait, obviously under your guidance Dell would have made trillions by now instead of billions.
Seriously, what's wrong with the people that submit this stuff? Are you hoping that such insight will encourage people to read your blog? Because I gotta tell you, buddy, your blog sucks more phallus than even NASA could calculate. We're talking numbers that exist only in theory here, bucko. The simple human mind can't even grasp the sheer enormity of cock gobbling going on.
"huge controllers" - Rectified with the Controller S, which has long been the standard controller. In fact, every game now only references this version, and the original has been long forgotten.
"superlarge system that doesn't really fit anywhere" - Sure, if your home entertainment system has no space for your average DVD player, then the Xbox will have nowhere to go. It's unlikely you'll have somewhere for a PS2 to go that wouldn't also accomodate an Xbox, except if you were planning to put the PS2 vertically.
"horribly buggy games" - Wah? KoToR? I guess you mean KoToR2, which was an awful game on any platform because of the decision to stop developing about halfway through the process. I know that there were problems with Xbox live and a few games (SC:PT I think had a serious lobby bug) but Live allows developers to patch games in serious circumstances, despite MS's wishes for it to not be used in this way. They'd rather it were used for expanded content and, you know, decent console multiplayer gaming.
"power adaptors which start house fires" - There actually haven't been any house fires yet. There have also been numerous notices for all that could possibly be affected by this extremelly rare fault to obtain a cable that may (or admittedly, may not) fix it.
"incessasnt cooling issues" - I keep my Xbox in an enclosed, wooden cabinet that sits in front of a radiator. I leave XBMC on auto temp control, and I can't hear it at all once I start playing video/music.
"DVD support" - Version 1 Xbox, from the evening after they started selling them here in the UK. It's played all media I've put in it - CD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-R. Certainly no disc read errors for me.
"projector support" - Wasn't there actually a third party selling an Xbox themed projector? How could they be doing that if it wasn't possible to hook up a projector to the system, and surely projectors use the same hookups as regular display devices, or their usage would be incredibly limited.
I know, you put a disclaimer at the top of your post. But a disclaimer doesn't obviate the need to present truth in your argument.
Yeah, Durham is a great university. With this kind of research going on, they've definitely attained a reputation that leaves them neatly perched a sliver above mediocrity.
I keed, I keed. They were my backup-backup choice, and if they hadn't been so shortsighted as to put the uni that far north, I might have gone to their open day.
Firstly, I don't think that it being FOSS has much to do with the creativity of this project. This could be done in an entirely proprietary coding language based on the ancient communication skills of yaks high in the Himalayas and it would come to serve the same purpose. But hey, you used the term and it got you a mod point. Kudos.
Secondly, as far as I can tell this is not actually controlling the Robosapien with your voice, in the same way that I'm not actually communicating with the internet in binary. It's a kind of 'monkey-hear, monkey-repeat' tool, by setting up macros that run on the input of your voice, designed to beam commands to the Robosapien by IR. Following this theory, one could strategically position a USB anemometer as the input and claim to be controlling the Robosapien by farting.
You can go back to the beginnings of computer games to find kids on the playground talking about their favourite games - the boss they defeated last night, or the level they unlocked after a marathon session. Just because the internet affords every able-fingered person the opportunity to pour their inane ponderings into the public domain doesn't make this a new form of journalism. I'm not going to base a purchasing decision on some guy recounting last night's fan-boy wet dream of his favourite game onto his blog.
I am, however, willing to wade through the knee-deep excrement ponds that are forums, and attempt to gauge the overall opinion of a game and any major problems that it was released with. Beyond that, the only way I can decide if a game is right for me is by getting hold of a good demo, and that's where the internet becomes useful - as a delivery system of actual game content, rather than pointless opinion.
I've been using a Loox 720 for a few months now, and the VGA resolution screen allows many sites to be viewed well in their full versions. Okay, so the full PDAs are on their way out to be replaced by smartphones, but there's only a minor difference between the two platforms - even more so when they may both run Windows Mobile.
Despite the increase in resoltion, though, pages do still need to be actively developed for mobile devices, whereas currently they seem to be byproducts of whatever news update script the site uses. Slashdot's own could do with some work.
The BBC News Low Graphics site is the best example of a site designed for mobile devices. No fancy tables, small images, unobtrusive text-only menu. It renders beautifully on my PDA.
The other problem in all of this is that there's just no good way of serving adverts to mobile devices. With such a limited amount of space, using up large chunks of it for anything other than content would just irritate the user, as would using up their metered bandwidth to download large ad graphics.
Slashdot Mirror
how are e-abortions treated? I would assume spawn-camping is frowned upon.
"Whaddya say? Let's gangbang this thing and go home."
That's just fleecing us
And annual rehashes of pre-existing content at full retail price isn't fleecing the consumers? Oh dear. I suppose you'd rather we consider ourselves as not taking ownership of the CD/DVD when we buy it from the store? Would you rather we saw your game not as an item we purchase, but as an experience that one can indulge in for a nominal fee just like those found on darkened street corners? After all, once we're finished with your underwhelming offerings, we would be stuck with something we can't get rid of.
You believe only parents should be allowed to decide if M-rated content is suitable for their children, but also believe that enforcement of age limits is wrong. So... Just how bad is the teenage parenthood problem now? Wouldn't enforcing the age restriction keep the decision in the hands of parents by preventing the underage child from making the purchasing decision? Okay, so it's a bit of a nuisance for Timmy's mother when he wants to buy GTA and she still has to go and buy it for him even though she doesn't care what he gets up to on the Playstation and she's going to be late for her nail appointment. Hopefully, though, she'll take a look at the box and start to think about the kind of media her child is consuming.
For the record, my personal opinion is that violent games are no more dangerous to children than any other violent media, and that violent media doesn't necessarily beget violent children. A lack of understanding of the morality of human existence is the root of the problem here, and that comes from lackadaisical and ineffective parenting. Or just really fucked up kids.
...If the game industry did the honourable thing and gave a fair share of their profits to the hard-working, democratically elected politicians. In fact, not only would this not be a problem, but if they all did a quick whip-around, they could out-bribe Wal-Mart and get legislation in place to force those shelves to be full of AO-rated violent sex-fests. Heck, get EA Montreal to send down some of that primo mary jane they've been bogarting and Bam! - a new war is started in some piss-pot hellhole and EA has exclusive rights to all games based on the conflict.
Or, alternatively, someone could actually use their fucking mind in all of this and get a decent, well-enforced rating system in place so the vile opportunists that are advancing on this industry will get nothing out of their perverted actions.
Even the reflection of the SUV is faithfully recreated in game! Stunning! Seriously, couldn't they have photoshopped it out? Other than that, the screenshots they've been showing have been very impressive, and the PGR gameplay is great fun. Should help shift a few X360s if it really is a launch title.
Loose spelling, poor grammar, and lots of trolling. Oh, itraor, if only you had linked to your own in-depth analysis on your blog, you would have had the Slashdot Superfecta.
Better luck next time.
Except that MS launched first, of course. And the hard disk comes with it, though it's removable for some strange reason. And they've made the backwards compatibility issue clear now. As for wireless controllers... I doubt Sony were the first to think of it. Also, if Sony goes for a hard drive, wireless networking, and TiVo functionality, how is that not copying the X360? MS has already announced the X360 has all of that (at least, connected to a MCE PC). I just wish Sony would play 'me, too' with MS and actually give us some real-time footage, but I think we've got a long wait before we know what the PS3 can actually do.
What on Earth does that have to do with the X360? Other than it coming out ahead of the competition, Sega's failures there bear no similarity to the situation Microsoft faces. Sega had already had the MegaCD, the 32 addon for the Megadrive/Genesis, and the Saturn be rejected by consumers. They had unfortunately been out of it for a while by the time the Dreamcast launched.
Microsoft has had a great deal of success with the Xbox, by some measures overtaking one of the biggest names in the industry (Nintendo) and by many more leading the pack with their online gaming service - something that many would consider to be the next Big Thing for consoles after it changed the PC gaming industry so drastically over the last decade.
All of this is of course ignoring the fact that MS just won't let this fail. The Xbox is a massive end-run to get a Microsoft device in the living room, to get their brand recognition up for people that don't go near computers, and to use as a platform for the rest of their intentions such as in IPTV. It's a Microsoft reach around so you won't notice the pounding they're going to give you, and I doubt they'll be willing to pull out early.
So to speak.
You'll have to open up a protocol, and bypass the firewall matrix to do that. If that doesn't work, you'll have to use the powerline to reroute data. And if all that fails, just go to one of those nice big workstations over in an unused room where no one will find you - they have complete access to the whole CTU network. I love 24, but when they get into the techno-crapple it makes me want to remove my brain with a rusted fork.
Because there's 500,000 people willing to play it?
Meanwhile, Sony announced a few days ago that they have shipped 90 million PS2s and over 800 million games.
...Why did Sony bamboozle us at E3 with flashy pre-renderings that had nothing to do with what the PS3 would output? And why did MS come out immediately to counter by saying their demos were on alpha kits at about 1/3rd the power of the X360, and would they would get a lot better? Fuck, by the next generation of consoles, one of these guys will have a GPU so powerful it can generate new colours, like fuscheen.
It's basic biology, or psychology, or whatever ology - me wantee sparklie pretty thing. The graphics just have to trigger that part of your brain that overrides rational judgement so you'll be at your local EB in late November drooling over the counter with $400 in your hand.
Graphics matter to games, because they sell the games. And when the games get sold, the developers are allowed out of the cages for a week so they can see their families and get a decent meal.
As for graphics having no bearing on 'gameplay' - are we sure there is nothing in the real world that can't be rendered in a game with a reasonable amount of accuracy? I seriously doubt we've already hit the plateau for that. We haven't seen too many truly deformable landscapes, for example, or even truly deformable models. Surely they would have an impact on the challenge a game has to offer?
The cynic in this uninformed non-American reckons that it's because the video game industry isn't giving kickbacks to the legislators in the way the MPAA and RIAA have been. Maybe when they start paying their protection money, these guys will ease up the pressure and add software pirates to the axis of evil, along with the P2P users that are already being rounded up in their outposts of tyranny.
But as I said, that's me being cynical. If I were rational, I'd say that while it is unfortunate that this legislation was even thought up, it probably is necessary these days. There's already a rating system in place for video games, but it's for nothing if the retailers won't enforce it. We're going to have to accept that video games could possibly have the same effect on a child as other forms of media when the violence isn't given the right context - if the child is too young to understand the difference between reality and fiction, they shouldn't be playing these games. The important thing to remember though, is that these games do not teach people how to kill. It's an argument that's often thrown around, and it's just bullshit. We're born with instinct, a hard-wiring in our evolved brains that gives us the ability to kill our prey, and to say that a video game trains us to kill is absurd. People then make the point that the Army uses games to teach soldiers how to kill, but to the best of my knowledge these tools are used for tactics and strategy, rather than actual simulation of the act of killing. Let's not forget that guns also operate on a simple point-and-click interface that makes it ridiculously easy to take a life. But that's the fault of video games, obviously.
Is this legislation a substitute for parental responsibility? Of course it is. Is it being forced through by those that lack understanding and evidence? You betcha. But somehow those two wrongs have made a right. Don't moan at me, you guys voted for it. We voted for that lying fuck that sweats a lot.
Early adopters get screwed, that's just how it is. I got an Xbox as soon as it arrived in Britain, and it set me back #300. Even with the mass quantities in which these new systems will be produced, they're still going to cost an incredible amount, and it shouldn't be surprising if prices were up a bit on the launch prices of this generation.
What's scary is the potential cost of games, and how that affects pricing. If a publisher puts $15m in a game over 2 years of development, they'll be reluctant to put it on the shelves at less than $50, and it would be more likely around $60. So in order to keep that down, MS would have to offer them another way to make money... Say hello to Xbox Live and paying out small, almost unnoticable, sums of money for new content, where the only cost is the human one - developers hammering out as much as possible to pay back that $15m they 'owe' the publishing house, in pennies and dimes.
What makes you think the kids will be buying these systems? There may well be a 360 under the Christmas tree this year, but these days it's more likely that Santa left it for Daddy and not Little Timmy.
I was pretty sold on the 360 anyway, and any kind of backwards compatibility would just be icing on a delicious, concave cake.
I've been watching the HD footage on Fileshack (not affiliated, I just paid GBP2.75 this morning for Mercury to get the HD stuff, knowing that the same trailers will be put online after E3 in their original form) and these games look incredible. There must have been some massive leap that occured while I was busy with Doom3 and HL2 because I was not expecting this kind of quality from the next-gen consoles and PC games. Heck, I'm even looking forward to the EA titles.
And I haven't even started looking at the PS3 yet. I might have to take a second gap year at this rate.
The console market these days works on selling the hardware at a loss, and the software at a huge profit.
MS had a problem with the original Xbox launch in that their hardware was going to cost a fortune compared to the PS2 (which had been out for some time already and I think had come down in price), and it would still lose them money. So they had the idea that they would bundle the console with a load of games and get customers to leave Wal-Mart some $400-500 lighter. That's why around the launch time they kicked up a fuss about their 'attach rate', their marketing term for this tactic.
The problem I see with them trying the same stunt this time is that this tactic relies on high quality launch titles, and since developers would have only had their dev kits for about a year come November when the 360 launches, they might not have anything to launch with.
If it's not backwards compatible, then maybe they'll launch with an updated Halo 2 and some EA Sports titles. People have been buying HDTVs to watch football, so maybe NFL 2006 would be a good title to launch with and show off the HD prowess of the console.
...And save our Bluths instead.
Arrested Development is easily the best TV show to come from America in a long, long time. Stop watching reality TV you imbeciles and watch a show that's intelligent enough to not have to tell you when, and for how long, to laugh.
Well, sure, this tactic of playing Intel has every opportunity of coming and biting them in the behind at some later point. But when you have a commitment to shareholders to increase short-term profits, it would not be a popular decision to take the plunge and invest in supporting AMD hardware. Such a decision would also increase costs in after-sales support, and how do you justify doing that when you've already taken drastic measures to cut costs in this area.
"Oh, sorry your job went to India, but back then we didn't have the budget to keep you on."
See, it's not going to go down so well.
Maybe Dell just doesn't want the enterprise server market. They seem to do well in the SMB segment, selling to companies that many times don't even have a real IT department, and just have 'Dave that knows computers'. And if you can screw these guys out of a bit more money with the brand recognition that Intel (dum... dum-dum-ding-ding) has, then that's the more favourable business model.
It's only a small number of customers that actually want to chose an AMD platform, and those are the only people that Dell lose by not offering them the choice. To most, who provides the hardware is not important so long as it performs the tasks it's intended for. And Intel is still (only just, mind) fulfilling that obligation.
I can now see why you'd want to highlight the 'flaws' you see in their strategy, but perhaps jumping in with a comment once the story is posted would be beneficial to the Slashdot community, rather than leaving the readers to sift through articles rife with biased rantings.
"Why not offer customers an alternative that has better performance instead of risking the lose of those customers to another vendor that does?"
Why not let a man run his own damn company in the way he has done so successfully for many years? Oh wait, obviously under your guidance Dell would have made trillions by now instead of billions.
Seriously, what's wrong with the people that submit this stuff? Are you hoping that such insight will encourage people to read your blog? Because I gotta tell you, buddy, your blog sucks more phallus than even NASA could calculate. We're talking numbers that exist only in theory here, bucko. The simple human mind can't even grasp the sheer enormity of cock gobbling going on.
"huge controllers" - Rectified with the Controller S, which has long been the standard controller. In fact, every game now only references this version, and the original has been long forgotten.
"superlarge system that doesn't really fit anywhere" - Sure, if your home entertainment system has no space for your average DVD player, then the Xbox will have nowhere to go. It's unlikely you'll have somewhere for a PS2 to go that wouldn't also accomodate an Xbox, except if you were planning to put the PS2 vertically.
"horribly buggy games" - Wah? KoToR? I guess you mean KoToR2, which was an awful game on any platform because of the decision to stop developing about halfway through the process. I know that there were problems with Xbox live and a few games (SC:PT I think had a serious lobby bug) but Live allows developers to patch games in serious circumstances, despite MS's wishes for it to not be used in this way. They'd rather it were used for expanded content and, you know, decent console multiplayer gaming.
"power adaptors which start house fires" - There actually haven't been any house fires yet. There have also been numerous notices for all that could possibly be affected by this extremelly rare fault to obtain a cable that may (or admittedly, may not) fix it.
"incessasnt cooling issues" - I keep my Xbox in an enclosed, wooden cabinet that sits in front of a radiator. I leave XBMC on auto temp control, and I can't hear it at all once I start playing video/music.
"DVD support" - Version 1 Xbox, from the evening after they started selling them here in the UK. It's played all media I've put in it - CD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-R. Certainly no disc read errors for me.
"projector support" - Wasn't there actually a third party selling an Xbox themed projector? How could they be doing that if it wasn't possible to hook up a projector to the system, and surely projectors use the same hookups as regular display devices, or their usage would be incredibly limited.
I know, you put a disclaimer at the top of your post. But a disclaimer doesn't obviate the need to present truth in your argument.
Yeah, Durham is a great university. With this kind of research going on, they've definitely attained a reputation that leaves them neatly perched a sliver above mediocrity.
I keed, I keed. They were my backup-backup choice, and if they hadn't been so shortsighted as to put the uni that far north, I might have gone to their open day.
Maybe.
Firstly, I don't think that it being FOSS has much to do with the creativity of this project. This could be done in an entirely proprietary coding language based on the ancient communication skills of yaks high in the Himalayas and it would come to serve the same purpose. But hey, you used the term and it got you a mod point. Kudos.
Secondly, as far as I can tell this is not actually controlling the Robosapien with your voice, in the same way that I'm not actually communicating with the internet in binary. It's a kind of 'monkey-hear, monkey-repeat' tool, by setting up macros that run on the input of your voice, designed to beam commands to the Robosapien by IR. Following this theory, one could strategically position a USB anemometer as the input and claim to be controlling the Robosapien by farting.
Still, cute toy to play with.
You can go back to the beginnings of computer games to find kids on the playground talking about their favourite games - the boss they defeated last night, or the level they unlocked after a marathon session. Just because the internet affords every able-fingered person the opportunity to pour their inane ponderings into the public domain doesn't make this a new form of journalism. I'm not going to base a purchasing decision on some guy recounting last night's fan-boy wet dream of his favourite game onto his blog. I am, however, willing to wade through the knee-deep excrement ponds that are forums, and attempt to gauge the overall opinion of a game and any major problems that it was released with. Beyond that, the only way I can decide if a game is right for me is by getting hold of a good demo, and that's where the internet becomes useful - as a delivery system of actual game content, rather than pointless opinion.
I've been using a Loox 720 for a few months now, and the VGA resolution screen allows many sites to be viewed well in their full versions. Okay, so the full PDAs are on their way out to be replaced by smartphones, but there's only a minor difference between the two platforms - even more so when they may both run Windows Mobile.
Despite the increase in resoltion, though, pages do still need to be actively developed for mobile devices, whereas currently they seem to be byproducts of whatever news update script the site uses. Slashdot's own could do with some work.
The BBC News Low Graphics site is the best example of a site designed for mobile devices. No fancy tables, small images, unobtrusive text-only menu. It renders beautifully on my PDA.
The other problem in all of this is that there's just no good way of serving adverts to mobile devices. With such a limited amount of space, using up large chunks of it for anything other than content would just irritate the user, as would using up their metered bandwidth to download large ad graphics.