On another note: one of the Revolution's big features is its ability to emulate Nintendo's previous consoles, i.e. act as a variety of virtual machines. So the idea of a virtual machine for indie developers might not be far-fetched.
This would also allow them to limit the damage that a malicious or flaky indie game could do to the Revolution (I'm thinking: deleted save games, trojan-infected zombie consoles sending spam over the 'net...)
What would be sweet is if Nintendo released a cheap/free (OSS!) devkit for NES, SNES and N64. Let indie developers make games that are aimed at those platforms, perhaps even a tiered setup with the NES/SNES environments are free, and the N64 kit is reasonably priced ($49 or $99 or something). The entire development process for these systems could be done on a relatively fast PC nowadays, as long as the software was done well for the N64 emu.
After the GCN was fully phased out they could offer those kits to the larger indie dev houses (or very passionate small ones:) at a discounted price as well. S'pose it would depend on how popular these smaller games were and how much money N felt they could make on keeping that platform alive.
Setup an online distribution system similar to Cafe Press where you upload your app and set a price. That price would include a base fee for Nintendo, based on the platform of the game and it's size. So a new NES game may have an 'overhead' of $.75 so you opt to make it available for download for $1.75. Nintendo gets their 75cents and you get a buck for each copy sold. SNES games might be $1 for Nintendo and the rest for you. And so on with N64 games.
The upside here is that Nintendo can make the money back on the free kits pretty quickly with just a few smallish hits, and with the amount of OSS compilers, emulators, libraries, etc, there wouldn't be a whole lot of work involved packaging it all up for a download. Making an N64 emulator and programming environment, including, hopefully, some sort of simple modeler or at least a way to easily import models from a variety of standard formats would b more difficult, and so they could get some of that cash back in way of sales for the software kit (and maybe some sort of adaptor for the Revolution controller to a PC) and then again in sales of games.
Plus, any independent non-big studio game could be run safely in a sandbox type emulator environment, and if the only way to get them was through Nintendo's download service, they could yank games that were reported (and then verified) as being buggy, malicious, etc.
It would be easy to knock these games as being based on outdated systems and non-relevant, but I think there is tremendous possibility for some of these older system still. Especially the N64. It was capable of some very GOOD graphics, even by todays standards, and was powerful enough to handle some impressive games. The lower detail of the textures and limited resolutions will help keep development costs and time down and hopefully push designers to do something original, fun, exciting, etc which is what indie gaming is supposed to be about!
But stop complaining because someone else worked harder in life to make more money than you.
Oh yes, because PARIS HILTON works so farking hard. She works so much more than I do, I feel so bad for her. Her billions have come at great personal cost. Fark that.
Even on a smaller scale, lets say that you have Joe the factory worker who drive 20 miles each way to his job, and Jim the lawyer who drives 20 miles to his firms office. If you pay a flat rate per mile/gallon/whatever, it will effect Joe substancially more that Jim. Yet, I would arue that since Joe actually produces something his going to work is more benificial to the economy than Jim, the lawyer, who just sucks cash from the economy.
I'm the same way. I a still chugging through Minish Cap, and embarrassingly enough, Wind Waker. Now, I have REALLY enjoyed both of these games. My problem is that I will play for a while, fairly regularly, and get about halfway through. Then something comes up, like you said. A project at work, or a book, or a trip, etc.
Now I come back to the game and I cannot for the life of me remember what it is I am supposed to be doing there. I can't remember where I am headed, where I have already been, etc. So I just spend my first session back at the game running around being lost, not having any fun, and I just quit and don't go back.
Games need to be broken up into smaller bits, that you can complete in a couple sessions, and that are entirely distinct from past parts, either by merit of geography or story. They should have their own independent story, that while related to previous installments, can still stand on their own.
In short games should be like a good TV show. You can watch any episode you want at any point in the series and it will make sense and be enjoyable. BUT, if you have seen all the previous episodes you will get more out of it... things will be revealed about storylines and characters that only makes sense/are apparent if you have have seen the previous episodes.
With the built in broadband connectivity of each of the new consoles, and with, hopefully, harddrives at least readily available for them, I hope to see episodic content available for direct download, or better yet subscription. Pay $5-10 and get this months episode of the new Zelda game, or whatever. If you play episode one and don't care for it, your done, and you only spent a few bucks. However, if you like it, you can play a new game every month for a year; one that you can beat over the course of a week or two (or a weekend for the hardcore). Plus the developer can start to see revenue faster (no need to drop $100 million on creating a game right up front), which will lower the barrier for entry, giving us better variety in games.
Because of the figure-eight flight path of the Sirius satellites, it should be theoretically possible to pick up the signal anywhere from the north pole down to Brazil. YMMV.
That's not entirely true. The satellites power down on the edges of their orbits in order to recharge. So, event though they are physically over all of that area, they aren't necessarily broadcasting. They DO work pretty far outside of the states though. The reception in Cuba is pretty good according to some of my military buddies who were stationed in GTMO.
Hm, are you sure about that? I'm pretty certain that POTS phone lines have separate trans and receive lines. I used to work for a telecom company, and the signal coming into the telco office is separate. So unless the phone combines the signal and then it is split somewhere before it enters the telephone office there should be a line for Rx, Tx, and a ground wire.
I think the OP was suggesting that the music be only accessable within the PodCast, but the meta data include iTunes links to purchase the songs indiviually. So you could, in theory, listen to any of the songs in the PodCast, but they wouldn't be individually serachable or selectable in your iTunes library. You would have to find that particular PodCast and then scan to the song you were looking for... or you could look in that PodCasts meta data for the name/artist of that song and pay $.99 to download it from iTunes to have full (DRMed) access to it... I think it's a good idea that just might work!
Most TV shows seem to be in the $40-50 range per season, so maybe 20-24 episodes, depending on the show and the season.
That's somewhere around $2/ episode, plus your getting extra's like deleted scenes and commentaries, etc. However, by the time a show makes it to DVD they've already made the money on it from advertising, so the DVD sales are just gravy.
I think there is a market for either direct to DVD or downloadable new syndicated content, though. Throw in some clever product placement, charge $2.50 an episode, or $40 for a season pass, make them available weekly, and keep old episodes available for purchase during the whole season. After the first 6 or 8 weeks make the first episode available for free, DRM-less as well, so it can get swapped around, and I think you could probably do pretty well. Couldn't sell one of the very popular/expensive to produce shows that way, but you could sell a lot of niche content.
Doing business this way wouldn't even preclude DVD sales either. Take the season offline when the new one is going to begin, and sell DVD sets with bonus features, etc, to people who missed it or to really big fans who want everything to do with the show. The bonuses would have to be really good though. Well produced behind the scene's stuff, deleted scenes tat have been finished in post-production and re-inserted where they belong in the episode (as an optional playback feature) and the first episode of the next season or a free download of it a week before it is available to the public, etc.
Good news about Futurama tho! Great show. I think Fox discussed doing a direct to DVD 24 spin off that would sell in the summer months. Eight one hour episodes on DVD that would come out 2 to a disc every other week or something for about $12, with some behind the scenes stuff and special sneak peeks at next seasons 24, etc. Dunno what happened to that idea. Maybe they will make this a regular trend for the summers, when TV is down but DVD sales generally seem to be up (due to having nothing good on TV?)?
That's a very good idea. I think that it's highly possible a combination of the two would be used. They may included some emulation in the 360, enough so that alot of game work pretty much of the time. Especially older games that may not have been as demanding or used certain difficult to emulate functions. Then for other games, especially very popular ones, they could release new binaries as you suggest.
Another benefit would be for VERY popular games, the re-released binary could be a $5 (or free:) download that also includes added features, like better anti-aliasing and light effects and what not. Something more than the original, but not quite the quality of a new 360 game. Think Halo 2 on this one. It would be an easy way to make a few bucks, and add some "new" launch titles.
Come to think of it, $5 upgrades to say 10 very popular games could be counted as 10 extra release titles, which would make the marketing drones VERY happy. ("XBox360 launched with 25 titles, more than the Revolution and PS3 combined").
Well, I had an XBox briefly, while I was traveling alot for work and wanted to play some games and watch DVDs in a hotel. I bought it around launch time. About 8 months later I returned home and back to my gaming PC and decided that I didn't really need to XBox (plus I wasn't, at that point, impressed with the games at all).
Now, I am looking at this last year or so worth of XBox games, and the MUCH improved Live! games that are available, and am impressed. I have also switched to a Mac, so my gaming selection is a bit smaller now. My wife is also starting to get into video games, so we bought a GameCube (she's a Linux user, and it's also so much easier to play mulitplayer on a console).
Because of all these things, I have decided to buy a next gen system. I was leaning towards the Revolution as I generally enjoy the Nintendo first party games immensely (Zelda fan here).
However, assuming the XBox360 is somewhere around $300, being backwards compatible is a big deal to me. It's the difference between me getting one around launch, or after the first price drop, or not at all. If I can buy one for about the price of 2 Xbox's, AND play this latest/last round of XBox games in addition to the launch titles, I'll bite.
My other reason for wanting to see backwards compatibility is so that I can buy the "Xbox Classics" series as it begins to get larger and new XBox games stop to come out. There are some gems out there that I never played, and picking them up for $20 (or less, used) appeals to the cheapskate in me. But having to buy an additional $100+ XBox isn't very value added.
Hope that sheds some light onto why some of us care about backards compatibility.
I hate Buffy. And Angel. Pure rubbish. I even tried to watch it after Firefly was canceled, to see if my opinion had changed. It hadn't, it's still rubbish.Firefly, though, was excellent. It was good on TV, and GREAT on DVD.
Fact 1. The universe is extremely intricate and complicated
Fact 2. We design things such as automobiles or aircraft that are intricate and complicated.
Which leads to the conclusion:
Conclusion 1: Everything that is intricate and complicated must have a designer.
Ok, this is where your whole thing breaks down. There are amazingly complex things that clearly aren't designed by anyone. Snowflakes come to mind immediately, along with any other crystaline structure. We can watch them form from blobs of fluid into intricate patterns of iterconnected solids without any sort of predesigned plan. It just happens.
A theory supported purely by logic can be completely disproven by deconstrcuting that logic and finding a fallacy, and this one just doesn't hold up.
I tend to think that the problem with the console market is the complete lack of any decent controllers. The only thing a console controller is good for is sports games and driving games.
The addition of a keyboard and mouse would make so many games so much more playable on a console.
Is it too much to ask for a keyboard and mouse as an official, or even standard, control setup on a console? I would even settle for a mouse and a numeric keypad setup...
I enjoy PC gaming much more than consoles mostly becuase of the flexability and level of control in the interace.
I like console gaming, however, for the low cost of entry. $600+ for a decent gaming computer vs. $300 and under for a console that will play every game designed for it without issue. I like that the game purchses subsidize the hardware, I think it gives me a greater value for my money.
I work for a company who sells and installs digital camers asystems in state DMVs, to include the signiture digitizer. The old system we used to sell used a signiture reader similar to UPS's, and pretty much sucked (By the way, California is one of our customers, and you probably used the euipment that I am talking about. From a technical stand point, the machine DOES NOT CARE about how you sign the name, any restrictions you encountered were from the CA DMV).
Anyways, our NEW system uses a small cardboard card that you sign in black or dark blue ink, slip into a box and then a black and white webcam captures a picture of. It then compares that picture to a reference shot of a blank card and removes everything but the signiture. This results in a very high quality signiture being captured, as a result of both the fact that you are signing with a pen and it is mreo natural and the machine reading it is a much higher resolution device.
California's DMV is supposed to be getting these systems in the next couple of years.
Re:Still no word from the pr0n industry
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Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
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· Score: 2, Informative
The backward compatibility they are talking about is in the manufacturing, not in the player. The players for either BR or HDDVD will likely be built to play standard DVDs, but wouldn't necessarily have to.
As mentioned elsewhere, HDDVD can be made in a way that it has a standard DVD layer and a HDDVD layer, but that isn't an official format, as far as I know.
I think there may be a market here. Say, for example, that the next generation of Unreal or Doom engine is designed around something like this. The SOFTWARE vendor could potentially, assuming they could get the cost down far enough, offer some sort of PCI or even better USB2/FW hardware accelerator bundled WITH the game.
Think of it like this... Unreal 4 or whatever the next next gen will be decides to partner up with these guys. They develop an engine that runs at 60fps with amazing graphics, etc. You can buy the USB3 or FW1600 or whatever add-on needed for the game for, say, $50, or a bundle for $75 that has the addon and the game. The development cycle would be much easier as there is only one type of hardware to worry about, and the consumer would win as they could get the new hottness game without having to drop $300 on a new new video card.
It could also serve as an amazingly effective copy protection scheme. Can't very well play the game without the required accelerator.
Then play games that you have to pay separately for? If ad-based revenue works for some games then great, let the people who don't care play them for free. If it bothers you then play a game that requires a monthly subscription.
I'm working under the assumption that this model will only be relevant in MMO games, as advertising in regular, stand alone games is old news (see Tony Hawk and Gran Turismo for examples). Those are usually called/considered market tie-ins.
Something I would like to see is a system for game mod creation teams to sign up for some sort of GoogleAds type system, so that their mods have some billboards and whatnot of advertisers placed in them automatically and they get a check for each exposure. It would really help some of these extraordinarily talented people get some reward for their labors.
You know that's probably a really good idea... With EQ2 doing the/pizza thing, I could see other games with other clients doing similar stuff. Maybe you Amazon.com account gets linked into your WoW account and when you are shopping with a vender, the first item on eery 'page' is something from the the Amazon "store made for you" page or your wishlist or something. Right click it and it launches an in game browser window to give you more info and complete your purchase (billed right to you WoW account card). Blizzard gets a cut and everyones fees go down.
Also, I think that product placement has a much bigger future in MMORPGs than just billboard style ads. You WoW players will know what I mean when I say "I want DEANS Ice Cold Milk", etc. All in all, if it helps cut subscription fees then I'd be all for it as long as it is integrated with the game and not, say, ads placed trailer stye before it launches, etc.
I'm in the same boat... I'm hoping they drop the price of a new Xbox1 to $99 when the XBox2 comes out, so that the used units will be in the $80 range. I'll get one then, as long as Live! is still supported and active.
I've got to agree with you that most mono bootlegs sound better, on headphones, than stereo ones.
When I'm at a concert, it is generally loud enough, and the band is usually clumped togther enough, that I doubt I am getting any appreciable stereophonic effect anyways.
I'm a Mac head, so I don't mean this as a knock against apple, buuuut:
Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor (2.80GHz, 533 FSB)
Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition
256MB DDR SDRAM at 400MHz
40GB Ultra ATA/100 7200RPM Hard Drive
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$539 ($609 w/ XP Pro)
Apple can't touch that level of performance for that price. That said, if it weren't for the CRT in the eMac, I would still call the eMac the better buy. Apple needs to take the old LCD iMac G4's, change the case design a little (to make it cheaper to manufacure) and call them eMacs and sell them for under $800. That would be a Dell killer.
That's really interesting. I knew that in MI the first character is the first letter of your last name, and the first three digits vary based on your last name as well. I never stopped to think wether the rest of the number holds some significance based on name. The link you provided was very fascinating.
As it turns out, for those of you who don't want to read it, common first/middle or the first couple letters of more uncommon names are encoded in the DL number, and a very rough approximation of the last name. The name encoded from my DL # could be McPatterson, Megabit, or any number of things, none of which are my name. It would be very difficult to figure out my actual name from just the DL number. Getting my DL number from my name and DOB would be easy, of course, but it's the other way around that privacy concerns would come from.
Either way, I am still not concerned about lettign someone swipe my ID, as the amount of information they collect is still far less than what they could get with a simple freeze frame and some basic image enhancement of a security camera tape as I pulled out my wallet to pay for something.
In Michigan anyway, and I am assuming most states, the mag stripe contains a very limited amount of info. There's your DL number, your DOB, and a couple of SMALL numeric codes that, from what I can tell, correlate to the office where your ID was proccessed at, and the type of license/endorsements you have (regular driver, CDL, School Bus, HazMat, motorcycle, etc).
I am involved in a project to install new ID systems in the Sec. of State offices here, and I have personally scanned my licence into a text editor and looked at the information on there. It's something like 45 characters or so.
If you are worried about someone getting all that iformation, it would be much more effective and much easier to have a cheap camera installed at teh point of sale (cashier register, self checkout lane, in the black light of the door bouncer types of bars) and grab medium resolution 5 fps video of everything that goes by. All that info that you are paranoid about giving up through an electronic reader is actually on the front of your license.
Actually, if you managed to kill their revenue enough from defacing like this, they would have to fire all their lawyers and hence would loose the case.
I don't think you fully understand how the SCO works. If they started to lose money becuase of website defacement, they would simply shut the site down and take whatever funds were allocated for running it to sue the bajeezus out of whoever they could find that may or may not actually be responsable, facts be damned.
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This would also allow them to limit the damage that a malicious or flaky indie game could do to the Revolution (I'm thinking: deleted save games, trojan-infected zombie consoles sending spam over the 'net...)
What would be sweet is if Nintendo released a cheap/free (OSS!) devkit for NES, SNES and N64. Let indie developers make games that are aimed at those platforms, perhaps even a tiered setup with the NES/SNES environments are free, and the N64 kit is reasonably priced ($49 or $99 or something). The entire development process for these systems could be done on a relatively fast PC nowadays, as long as the software was done well for the N64 emu.
After the GCN was fully phased out they could offer those kits to the larger indie dev houses (or very passionate small ones :) at a discounted price as well. S'pose it would depend on how popular these smaller games were and how much money N felt they could make on keeping that platform alive.
Setup an online distribution system similar to Cafe Press where you upload your app and set a price. That price would include a base fee for Nintendo, based on the platform of the game and it's size. So a new NES game may have an 'overhead' of $.75 so you opt to make it available for download for $1.75. Nintendo gets their 75cents and you get a buck for each copy sold. SNES games might be $1 for Nintendo and the rest for you. And so on with N64 games.
The upside here is that Nintendo can make the money back on the free kits pretty quickly with just a few smallish hits, and with the amount of OSS compilers, emulators, libraries, etc, there wouldn't be a whole lot of work involved packaging it all up for a download. Making an N64 emulator and programming environment, including, hopefully, some sort of simple modeler or at least a way to easily import models from a variety of standard formats would b more difficult, and so they could get some of that cash back in way of sales for the software kit (and maybe some sort of adaptor for the Revolution controller to a PC) and then again in sales of games.
Plus, any independent non-big studio game could be run safely in a sandbox type emulator environment, and if the only way to get them was through Nintendo's download service, they could yank games that were reported (and then verified) as being buggy, malicious, etc.
It would be easy to knock these games as being based on outdated systems and non-relevant, but I think there is tremendous possibility for some of these older system still. Especially the N64. It was capable of some very GOOD graphics, even by todays standards, and was powerful enough to handle some impressive games. The lower detail of the textures and limited resolutions will help keep development costs and time down and hopefully push designers to do something original, fun, exciting, etc which is what indie gaming is supposed to be about!
Oh yes, because PARIS HILTON works so farking hard. She works so much more than I do, I feel so bad for her. Her billions have come at great personal cost. Fark that.
Even on a smaller scale, lets say that you have Joe the factory worker who drive 20 miles each way to his job, and Jim the lawyer who drives 20 miles to his firms office. If you pay a flat rate per mile/gallon/whatever, it will effect Joe substancially more that Jim. Yet, I would arue that since Joe actually produces something his going to work is more benificial to the economy than Jim, the lawyer, who just sucks cash from the economy.
Now I come back to the game and I cannot for the life of me remember what it is I am supposed to be doing there. I can't remember where I am headed, where I have already been, etc. So I just spend my first session back at the game running around being lost, not having any fun, and I just quit and don't go back.
Games need to be broken up into smaller bits, that you can complete in a couple sessions, and that are entirely distinct from past parts, either by merit of geography or story. They should have their own independent story, that while related to previous installments, can still stand on their own.
In short games should be like a good TV show. You can watch any episode you want at any point in the series and it will make sense and be enjoyable. BUT, if you have seen all the previous episodes you will get more out of it... things will be revealed about storylines and characters that only makes sense/are apparent if you have have seen the previous episodes.
With the built in broadband connectivity of each of the new consoles, and with, hopefully, harddrives at least readily available for them, I hope to see episodic content available for direct download, or better yet subscription. Pay $5-10 and get this months episode of the new Zelda game, or whatever. If you play episode one and don't care for it, your done, and you only spent a few bucks. However, if you like it, you can play a new game every month for a year; one that you can beat over the course of a week or two (or a weekend for the hardcore). Plus the developer can start to see revenue faster (no need to drop $100 million on creating a game right up front), which will lower the barrier for entry, giving us better variety in games.
That's not entirely true. The satellites power down on the edges of their orbits in order to recharge. So, event though they are physically over all of that area, they aren't necessarily broadcasting. They DO work pretty far outside of the states though. The reception in Cuba is pretty good according to some of my military buddies who were stationed in GTMO.
Hm, are you sure about that? I'm pretty certain that POTS phone lines have separate trans and receive lines. I used to work for a telecom company, and the signal coming into the telco office is separate. So unless the phone combines the signal and then it is split somewhere before it enters the telephone office there should be a line for Rx, Tx, and a ground wire.
I think the OP was suggesting that the music be only accessable within the PodCast, but the meta data include iTunes links to purchase the songs indiviually. So you could, in theory, listen to any of the songs in the PodCast, but they wouldn't be individually serachable or selectable in your iTunes library. You would have to find that particular PodCast and then scan to the song you were looking for... or you could look in that PodCasts meta data for the name/artist of that song and pay $.99 to download it from iTunes to have full (DRMed) access to it... I think it's a good idea that just might work!
That's somewhere around $2/ episode, plus your getting extra's like deleted scenes and commentaries, etc. However, by the time a show makes it to DVD they've already made the money on it from advertising, so the DVD sales are just gravy.
I think there is a market for either direct to DVD or downloadable new syndicated content, though. Throw in some clever product placement, charge $2.50 an episode, or $40 for a season pass, make them available weekly, and keep old episodes available for purchase during the whole season. After the first 6 or 8 weeks make the first episode available for free, DRM-less as well, so it can get swapped around, and I think you could probably do pretty well. Couldn't sell one of the very popular/expensive to produce shows that way, but you could sell a lot of niche content.
Doing business this way wouldn't even preclude DVD sales either. Take the season offline when the new one is going to begin, and sell DVD sets with bonus features, etc, to people who missed it or to really big fans who want everything to do with the show. The bonuses would have to be really good though. Well produced behind the scene's stuff, deleted scenes tat have been finished in post-production and re-inserted where they belong in the episode (as an optional playback feature) and the first episode of the next season or a free download of it a week before it is available to the public, etc.
Good news about Futurama tho! Great show. I think Fox discussed doing a direct to DVD 24 spin off that would sell in the summer months. Eight one hour episodes on DVD that would come out 2 to a disc every other week or something for about $12, with some behind the scenes stuff and special sneak peeks at next seasons 24, etc. Dunno what happened to that idea. Maybe they will make this a regular trend for the summers, when TV is down but DVD sales generally seem to be up (due to having nothing good on TV?)?
That's a very good idea. I think that it's highly possible a combination of the two would be used. They may included some emulation in the 360, enough so that alot of game work pretty much of the time. Especially older games that may not have been as demanding or used certain difficult to emulate functions. Then for other games, especially very popular ones, they could release new binaries as you suggest.
:) download that also includes added features, like better anti-aliasing and light effects and what not. Something more than the original, but not quite the quality of a new 360 game. Think Halo 2 on this one. It would be an easy way to make a few bucks, and add some "new" launch titles.
Another benefit would be for VERY popular games, the re-released binary could be a $5 (or free
Come to think of it, $5 upgrades to say 10 very popular games could be counted as 10 extra release titles, which would make the marketing drones VERY happy. ("XBox360 launched with 25 titles, more than the Revolution and PS3 combined").
Well, I had an XBox briefly, while I was traveling alot for work and wanted to play some games and watch DVDs in a hotel. I bought it around launch time. About 8 months later I returned home and back to my gaming PC and decided that I didn't really need to XBox (plus I wasn't, at that point, impressed with the games at all).
Now, I am looking at this last year or so worth of XBox games, and the MUCH improved Live! games that are available, and am impressed. I have also switched to a Mac, so my gaming selection is a bit smaller now. My wife is also starting to get into video games, so we bought a GameCube (she's a Linux user, and it's also so much easier to play mulitplayer on a console).
Because of all these things, I have decided to buy a next gen system. I was leaning towards the Revolution as I generally enjoy the Nintendo first party games immensely (Zelda fan here).
However, assuming the XBox360 is somewhere around $300, being backwards compatible is a big deal to me. It's the difference between me getting one around launch, or after the first price drop, or not at all. If I can buy one for about the price of 2 Xbox's, AND play this latest/last round of XBox games in addition to the launch titles, I'll bite.
My other reason for wanting to see backwards compatibility is so that I can buy the "Xbox Classics" series as it begins to get larger and new XBox games stop to come out. There are some gems out there that I never played, and picking them up for $20 (or less, used) appeals to the cheapskate in me. But having to buy an additional $100+ XBox isn't very value added.
Hope that sheds some light onto why some of us care about backards compatibility.
I hate Buffy. And Angel. Pure rubbish. I even tried to watch it after Firefly was canceled, to see if my opinion had changed. It hadn't, it's still rubbish.Firefly, though, was excellent. It was good on TV, and GREAT on DVD.
Fact 2. We design things such as automobiles or aircraft that are intricate and complicated.
Which leads to the conclusion:
Conclusion 1: Everything that is intricate and complicated must have a designer.
Ok, this is where your whole thing breaks down. There are amazingly complex things that clearly aren't designed by anyone. Snowflakes come to mind immediately, along with any other crystaline structure. We can watch them form from blobs of fluid into intricate patterns of iterconnected solids without any sort of predesigned plan. It just happens.
A theory supported purely by logic can be completely disproven by deconstrcuting that logic and finding a fallacy, and this one just doesn't hold up.
I tend to think that the problem with the console market is the complete lack of any decent controllers. The only thing a console controller is good for is sports games and driving games.
The addition of a keyboard and mouse would make so many games so much more playable on a console.
Is it too much to ask for a keyboard and mouse as an official, or even standard, control setup on a console? I would even settle for a mouse and a numeric keypad setup...
I enjoy PC gaming much more than consoles mostly becuase of the flexability and level of control in the interace.
I like console gaming, however, for the low cost of entry. $600+ for a decent gaming computer vs. $300 and under for a console that will play every game designed for it without issue. I like that the game purchses subsidize the hardware, I think it gives me a greater value for my money.
I work for a company who sells and installs digital camers asystems in state DMVs, to include the signiture digitizer. The old system we used to sell used a signiture reader similar to UPS's, and pretty much sucked (By the way, California is one of our customers, and you probably used the euipment that I am talking about. From a technical stand point, the machine DOES NOT CARE about how you sign the name, any restrictions you encountered were from the CA DMV).
Anyways, our NEW system uses a small cardboard card that you sign in black or dark blue ink, slip into a box and then a black and white webcam captures a picture of. It then compares that picture to a reference shot of a blank card and removes everything but the signiture. This results in a very high quality signiture being captured, as a result of both the fact that you are signing with a pen and it is mreo natural and the machine reading it is a much higher resolution device.
California's DMV is supposed to be getting these systems in the next couple of years.
The backward compatibility they are talking about is in the manufacturing, not in the player. The players for either BR or HDDVD will likely be built to play standard DVDs, but wouldn't necessarily have to.
As mentioned elsewhere, HDDVD can be made in a way that it has a standard DVD layer and a HDDVD layer, but that isn't an official format, as far as I know.
Rob
I think there may be a market here. Say, for example, that the next generation of Unreal or Doom engine is designed around something like this. The SOFTWARE vendor could potentially, assuming they could get the cost down far enough, offer some sort of PCI or even better USB2/FW hardware accelerator bundled WITH the game.
Think of it like this... Unreal 4 or whatever the next next gen will be decides to partner up with these guys. They develop an engine that runs at 60fps with amazing graphics, etc. You can buy the USB3 or FW1600 or whatever add-on needed for the game for, say, $50, or a bundle for $75 that has the addon and the game. The development cycle would be much easier as there is only one type of hardware to worry about, and the consumer would win as they could get the new hottness game without having to drop $300 on a new new video card.
It could also serve as an amazingly effective copy protection scheme. Can't very well play the game without the required accelerator.
Seems possible to me.
I'm working under the assumption that this model will only be relevant in MMO games, as advertising in regular, stand alone games is old news (see Tony Hawk and Gran Turismo for examples). Those are usually called/considered market tie-ins.
Something I would like to see is a system for game mod creation teams to sign up for some sort of GoogleAds type system, so that their mods have some billboards and whatnot of advertisers placed in them automatically and they get a check for each exposure. It would really help some of these extraordinarily talented people get some reward for their labors.
Also, I think that product placement has a much bigger future in MMORPGs than just billboard style ads. You WoW players will know what I mean when I say "I want DEANS Ice Cold Milk", etc. All in all, if it helps cut subscription fees then I'd be all for it as long as it is integrated with the game and not, say, ads placed trailer stye before it launches, etc.
Rob
Anyone know for sure if this works with the Mac version of BF1942?
Rob
I'm in the same boat... I'm hoping they drop the price of a new Xbox1 to $99 when the XBox2 comes out, so that the used units will be in the $80 range. I'll get one then, as long as Live! is still supported and active.
I've got to agree with you that most mono bootlegs sound better, on headphones, than stereo ones.
When I'm at a concert, it is generally loud enough, and the band is usually clumped togther enough, that I doubt I am getting any appreciable stereophonic effect anyways.
I'm a Mac head, so I don't mean this as a knock against apple, buuuut: Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor (2.80GHz, 533 FSB) Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition 256MB DDR SDRAM at 400MHz 40GB Ultra ATA/100 7200RPM Hard Drive FREE 2-Day Shipping! FREE 15" Flat Panel Monitor Upgrade - Online only! FREE Dell Printer! $539 ($609 w/ XP Pro) Apple can't touch that level of performance for that price. That said, if it weren't for the CRT in the eMac, I would still call the eMac the better buy. Apple needs to take the old LCD iMac G4's, change the case design a little (to make it cheaper to manufacure) and call them eMacs and sell them for under $800. That would be a Dell killer.
As it turns out, for those of you who don't want to read it, common first/middle or the first couple letters of more uncommon names are encoded in the DL number, and a very rough approximation of the last name. The name encoded from my DL # could be McPatterson, Megabit, or any number of things, none of which are my name. It would be very difficult to figure out my actual name from just the DL number. Getting my DL number from my name and DOB would be easy, of course, but it's the other way around that privacy concerns would come from.
Either way, I am still not concerned about lettign someone swipe my ID, as the amount of information they collect is still far less than what they could get with a simple freeze frame and some basic image enhancement of a security camera tape as I pulled out my wallet to pay for something.
I am involved in a project to install new ID systems in the Sec. of State offices here, and I have personally scanned my licence into a text editor and looked at the information on there. It's something like 45 characters or so.
If you are worried about someone getting all that iformation, it would be much more effective and much easier to have a cheap camera installed at teh point of sale (cashier register, self checkout lane, in the black light of the door bouncer types of bars) and grab medium resolution 5 fps video of everything that goes by. All that info that you are paranoid about giving up through an electronic reader is actually on the front of your license.
I don't think you fully understand how the SCO works. If they started to lose money becuase of website defacement, they would simply shut the site down and take whatever funds were allocated for running it to sue the bajeezus out of whoever they could find that may or may not actually be responsable, facts be damned.