This is why I also included the emulator option. By the time Sony stops offering replacements, PCSX2 and various other emulators should run more or less any game the PS2 can with better upscaling options than PS3 will ever have.
That's a rather worn our argument. Sure Nintendo may have better compatibility from system to system, but they don't necessarily have games everyone would want to play. As an example I'll use the games you mentioned in your post. The PS3 might have problems with the FF series, but that brings up the point, at least the PS family of products HAS the FF series. If you happen to be someone who likes the more recent entries to Final Fantasy then even 100 percent Nintendo backwards compatibility won't help you much. At the same time the PS3 can at least play all of the FF games since VII.
Despite incredible Wii sales and an obviously stronger install base, the major FF titles will still be for the more powerful systems. First, the Wii is marketed for the casual crowd, and without a doubt the casual crowd is the one showing such strong sales. Unfortunately these aren't the people who buy FF. The majority of FF fans on the other hand simply care too much about presentation to accept the loss in quality a weaker system would bring. Sure, Square Enix will likely make a few Wii entries, but unless you're happy with playing the I-VI games and spinoffs from the real major title, you'll still have a PS3 or 360.
That said, I would say the best idea would be to buy the system that will have the most games you want to play. If said system has backwards compatibility then you get a nice bonus of having access to may old games. If, on the other hand, the system does not play quite as nice then go to the other room, take the PS2 out to get the optical drive replaced, or even get a new one (or perhaps just go get an emulator that plays just as well).
As a matter of fact, you are entirely correct. The virtual world really is non-dependent of telecom fiber lays that ISPs and in turn both consumers and providers of the virtual world pay taxes on. The virtual world provider also pays their fair share of the taxes that pay for your subsidized power. Of course let us not ignore that those roads to move the servers take in taxes from each delivery made, and let us not forget the taxes the business pays by virtue of making money from the consumers.
As for your government laying down arms, and rolling out of [Insert Current Terrorist Target Here]. That would surely lead to your country being invaded instantly, as you suggest. Much like so many other countries in the world that only maintain a small self defense force and have no interest in funding an active invading army while taking away huge sums from academia and research. I mean, god help us, don't suggest we try to cure cancer, there are BROWN PEOP... TERRORISTS TO BOMB. And once we're done, oh, look, there's oil here, however did that happen.
There are several points to consider there. First, their fiscal year ends in April, they aren't loosing much by holding back for a month. Certainly they'll make it back fast when the production ramps up. Remember, this article only concerns March. Second, even if they were producing at full volume they are still at around half the Xbox 360 install base, if their momentum holds, and that is a VERY big if, they aren't set to be #1 for a while yet. In fact them holding back could be seen as a clever move by Nintendo to raise demand in a time when demand may start to drop. As for developer support. Nintendo already made their point, the Wii is selling fast and will continue to for at least a few more months. It's safe to say that most developers are sufficiently forced as it is.
Actually the article makes a rather valid point. Sure Nintendo could make a bajillion dollars right now selling all the consoles it could. Then come the end of their fiscal year they report all the high profit, get a few more investors. Come next year they suddenly find that they can't maintain the profit they did this year. All the investors see this, get pissed off, and a large number walk out.
On the other hand if they hold back, they are already making a decent profit. The growth wouldn't be as high as it would have with option 1, but there will still be some. Now comes next year, they ramp up production and make an even better profit at the end of that year. Now the investors they'll gain this year will be happy, and in fact they'll probably get a few more. Sure they can't guarantee what will happen after that, but in this world two years is a long time and I'm sure Nintendo has plenty of smart financial types thinking these things though.
Not only have we already seen plenty of these articles, but a lot of the add-ons included in the article are at best superfluous and at worst plain useless not to mention outdated.
For instance take the Gmail/Yahoo notifiers; while both are a good idea, a lot of people might have a mail application open to check their company/school email as well as the free variety. Most of the eye candy certainly looks nice, but will just serve to increase your crash rate while occasionally being used to showcase all the purdy features to your friends. All-in-One gestures provides several services that are already implemented in the browser, and done a lot better there, I would suggest Mouse Gestures instead. As for the Answers add-on, there's a search bar built in to the browser for a reason.
There is also a several popular add-ons missing from the list; Adblock, NoScript, VideoDownloader, not to mention any developer add-ons such as Web Developer and Firebug. Though these are not included for obvious reasons the list feels woefully incomplete without.
The way I read it wasn't as a general "Everyone should stop using Opera." Instead it seemed more as advice for this particular situation where the person in question should not use Opera for the site since his computer has problems with it.
If you have the money for an 8 core Opteron box then surely you can just buy 10 cheap dual core boxes, make a cluster and throw on distcc for even faster compilation.
Jumping from C/C++ to Java may be quite trivial, and same can be said for many languages. But to claim anyone should be able to jump into any language and code is just ridiculous. What of languages with completely different concepts behind them?
Jumping from say, Python and a rather open data access model, into Lisp with its list oriented approach is likely to give any coder who does not regularly work with both at least a bit of culture shock. True, most people would not need to make such a drastic change, but to say that any decent coder should be able to do so is a bit naive.
Part of America's involvement in WW2 was an ohshit! response to Russia starting to push Germans back. It wouldn't serve a lot of interests if Russia had ended up controlling all of Europe instead of the eastern bloc.
You are absolutely wrong. PKI was designed with the purpose of preventing man-in-the-middle attacks. The virus writer would include the public key in the virus with an associated encryption algorithm. The problem arised with decryption. In order to decrypt a file you would need an associated private key. Now if this key is available inside the virus it would be just as easy to find as the password within the article.
In fact the whole idea of cryptography revolves around the encryption algorithm telling you nothing about a method to decrypt the data it encrypts (At least without a certain key). These are called trapdoor one-way functions.
The most realistic way I can think of writing such a virus would be to provide and encryption algo in the virus and then provide a decryption program when the intended victim has paid you the money. Now aren't you glad I'm not writing viruses?
This also creates the problem of how many different kitten images you have to work with. It you have 10 kittens you can choose from it would take a few minutes to see them all, and write a program to recognise each (And this would work on all the forums with lazy admins who won't change default images). If you have a few thousand then you're using a few MB for the sole purpose of authentication.
Actually they are really acting within the best interest of most of the people involved. If you go out of your way to create a 'GLBT' guild and advertise it for all to see, then you, and your guild members are certain to become prime target for the rest of the server that are not quite as ok with the alternate sexuality as the guild members.
I'm sure if such a person wanted to create a 'GLBT' guild they could go to one of those forums mentioned in TFA and announce it there, having the effect of reaching a large fraction of the people they wanted to reach while keeping those who have no business with it out. Anything else is just asking for pure grief from the vast majority of the community.
When you consider how many players blizzard may have lost had such a guild come to exist, became publicized, then had all of the members harassed versus the few they will lose over this announcement you should see where I'm coming from.
You would perhaps make the most hardcore of the loyal fans happy, but the majority of the fans out there would not be willing to blow that extra money, though they still consider themselves loyal fans. Considering MS has been harping endlessly about the price of the console suddenly going back on their words would generate a lot more negative PR than the current shortage is generating.
The people raising a stink right now will buy a console anyway when it becomes more common, then the majority of them will go to their friends and prattle on like loyal fan boys/girls totally ignoring their screaming from before. If on the other hand the price suddenly exploded to $700 then you'd have a lot of mighty pissed of fans (Not to mention plenty of companies ready to jump on the bandwagon) yelling for blood. MS probably doesn't want the next CNN headline to be "Microsoft backs on price promise to raise profits" or something of that theme, especially if it's followed by a few nice articles to the tune of "Sony and Nintendo promise to give customers consistent prices."
Law of supply and demand works well for established products, but there is more to consider to this situation than you Economics 101 class taught you.
Unfortunately many American politicians always seem to forget that freedom is also freedom from RIAA, MPAA, and oh so many other groups with more money than sense.
Only problem is any time you wish to make use of said freedom you better be damn ready to go to court and argue with a multi-billion dollar company/overly bribed government agency that you should in fact have said freedom. I'm sorry to tell you this, but this freedom thing you and your kind keeps toting really doesn't exist anywhere except your head. Moving things to the UN would at least allow the corrupt polliticians to take bribes form an entire world of rich companies, instead of restricting them from taking bribes from US companies. Perhaps we'd even have a few more nicer things slip by.
You mean theorecially twice as many customers. Of those 10 million, obviously very couth, girls perhaps 1 million would be even remotely interested in any game that would have such an ammount of cleavage (Fighting games and the like). Of those half wouldn't particularly care since they would by now be used to these portrayals.
Now considering the uncouth boys you mentioned. For how many of them would the game be an impulse buy based on the prettiness of the cover work and in game screenshots on the back. Something tells me it would be a slightly larger number than girls turned off by the same.
There are plenty of sites that operate without resorting to advertisement. People want to get the information out there, regardless of if they get paid or not.
These days you can get quite a decent chunk of bandwidth from your run of the mill hosting provider. Enough to host a rather decent site for under $10 US a month. The one I use for my site gives 80GB/month for $8.
Of course if your site reaches the magnitude of/. or other high traffic sites the cost may start to be prohibitive, but at that time your site would be popular enough to sell the service it provides and actually have people pay for it.
Re:Private and public are not mutually exclusive
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Open Source Molecules
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· Score: 1
A rather large percentage of people who use the data in question are researchers on government grants so your tax money will end up paying for the services anyway.
By having an open database an average citizen with some curiocity on the topic (Though I can't imagine there being lots of those in this area) could get access to this information.
2. It may take years, but they also try to develop for the hardware that should be out around the release date. The final release of Half-Life 2 wasn't really meant to run on a geforce 2 after all.
3. We are getting there, but not at the speed you seem to suggest. I'd imagine at least one or two generations of consoles before we even get truly close to that point.
4. If we're talking about ability to output to a certain resolution, the latest generation of graphic cards can do 2048x1536 (More then 1080p) and that's just going to grow. By the time Xbox 360 and PS3 come out I wouldn't be surprised if graphic cards can do 1.5 times the resolution. As for monitors, the monitors that can do that sort of resolution would cost as much if not less then TVs that can do 1080p.
5. And you may have noticed more companies are coming out with gamer oriented cars for said laptops. Dell's been doing pretty well with their XPS systems, and I have several friends who play the latest games on their laptops.
6. Ever heard of a modchip? If you can't do it yourself, you can usually find some second hand game store that will do it for you for a price.
Perhaps someday PC gaming really will come to an end, but be assured that's not going to be for a while. Sure the demographics will change a bit but not to the magnitude that you predict.
Also, most people who don't want to figure out the diffrence between nVidia and ATI or AMD and Intel will just buy from Dell or some other mass manufacturing company.
There are several problems with FM radio. One of the most important being ads. When I want to relax listening to music I don't particularly care for some guy trying to sell used cars. Also with FM I can't guarantee I will always get a song I can tolerate as I can with MP3s. There is also the fact that most of the time I use my player in the subway, which as you may imagine could impete radio signal just a tad. Finally, it's just another piece of bloat that I don't particularly need on my player. Sure for some it could be a useful feature, you being one of those people. For the rest though it's fluff.
Also, if you get bored of listening to your MP3s I do wonder at the size of your library. These days, many people (Legally or not) have more music then then can listen to in a year. Your assumption that people not sharing your views on music variety are "cloistered and stuffy" is rather insulting too. I, as many others, know what I like and don't need to waste my time surfing around trying to fit into the latest fad.
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This is why I also included the emulator option. By the time Sony stops offering replacements, PCSX2 and various other emulators should run more or less any game the PS2 can with better upscaling options than PS3 will ever have.
That's a rather worn our argument. Sure Nintendo may have better compatibility from system to system, but they don't necessarily have games everyone would want to play. As an example I'll use the games you mentioned in your post. The PS3 might have problems with the FF series, but that brings up the point, at least the PS family of products HAS the FF series. If you happen to be someone who likes the more recent entries to Final Fantasy then even 100 percent Nintendo backwards compatibility won't help you much. At the same time the PS3 can at least play all of the FF games since VII.
Despite incredible Wii sales and an obviously stronger install base, the major FF titles will still be for the more powerful systems. First, the Wii is marketed for the casual crowd, and without a doubt the casual crowd is the one showing such strong sales. Unfortunately these aren't the people who buy FF. The majority of FF fans on the other hand simply care too much about presentation to accept the loss in quality a weaker system would bring. Sure, Square Enix will likely make a few Wii entries, but unless you're happy with playing the I-VI games and spinoffs from the real major title, you'll still have a PS3 or 360.
That said, I would say the best idea would be to buy the system that will have the most games you want to play. If said system has backwards compatibility then you get a nice bonus of having access to may old games. If, on the other hand, the system does not play quite as nice then go to the other room, take the PS2 out to get the optical drive replaced, or even get a new one (or perhaps just go get an emulator that plays just as well).
As a matter of fact, you are entirely correct. The virtual world really is non-dependent of telecom fiber lays that ISPs and in turn both consumers and providers of the virtual world pay taxes on. The virtual world provider also pays their fair share of the taxes that pay for your subsidized power. Of course let us not ignore that those roads to move the servers take in taxes from each delivery made, and let us not forget the taxes the business pays by virtue of making money from the consumers.
As for your government laying down arms, and rolling out of [Insert Current Terrorist Target Here]. That would surely lead to your country being invaded instantly, as you suggest. Much like so many other countries in the world that only maintain a small self defense force and have no interest in funding an active invading army while taking away huge sums from academia and research. I mean, god help us, don't suggest we try to cure cancer, there are BROWN PEOP... TERRORISTS TO BOMB. And once we're done, oh, look, there's oil here, however did that happen.
There are several points to consider there. First, their fiscal year ends in April, they aren't loosing much by holding back for a month. Certainly they'll make it back fast when the production ramps up. Remember, this article only concerns March. Second, even if they were producing at full volume they are still at around half the Xbox 360 install base, if their momentum holds, and that is a VERY big if, they aren't set to be #1 for a while yet. In fact them holding back could be seen as a clever move by Nintendo to raise demand in a time when demand may start to drop. As for developer support. Nintendo already made their point, the Wii is selling fast and will continue to for at least a few more months. It's safe to say that most developers are sufficiently forced as it is.
Actually the article makes a rather valid point. Sure Nintendo could make a bajillion dollars right now selling all the consoles it could. Then come the end of their fiscal year they report all the high profit, get a few more investors. Come next year they suddenly find that they can't maintain the profit they did this year. All the investors see this, get pissed off, and a large number walk out.
On the other hand if they hold back, they are already making a decent profit. The growth wouldn't be as high as it would have with option 1, but there will still be some. Now comes next year, they ramp up production and make an even better profit at the end of that year. Now the investors they'll gain this year will be happy, and in fact they'll probably get a few more. Sure they can't guarantee what will happen after that, but in this world two years is a long time and I'm sure Nintendo has plenty of smart financial types thinking these things though.
Ahh, perhaps it is. I was so disappointed with the article I did not actually notice there was still a page to go.
Not only have we already seen plenty of these articles, but a lot of the add-ons included in the article are at best superfluous and at worst plain useless not to mention outdated.
For instance take the Gmail/Yahoo notifiers; while both are a good idea, a lot of people might have a mail application open to check their company/school email as well as the free variety. Most of the eye candy certainly looks nice, but will just serve to increase your crash rate while occasionally being used to showcase all the purdy features to your friends. All-in-One gestures provides several services that are already implemented in the browser, and done a lot better there, I would suggest Mouse Gestures instead. As for the Answers add-on, there's a search bar built in to the browser for a reason.
There is also a several popular add-ons missing from the list; Adblock, NoScript, VideoDownloader, not to mention any developer add-ons such as Web Developer and Firebug. Though these are not included for obvious reasons the list feels woefully incomplete without.
The way I read it wasn't as a general "Everyone should stop using Opera." Instead it seemed more as advice for this particular situation where the person in question should not use Opera for the site since his computer has problems with it.
If you have the money for an 8 core Opteron box then surely you can just buy 10 cheap dual core boxes, make a cluster and throw on distcc for even faster compilation.
Jumping from C/C++ to Java may be quite trivial, and same can be said for many languages. But to claim anyone should be able to jump into any language and code is just ridiculous. What of languages with completely different concepts behind them?
Jumping from say, Python and a rather open data access model, into Lisp with its list oriented approach is likely to give any coder who does not regularly work with both at least a bit of culture shock. True, most people would not need to make such a drastic change, but to say that any decent coder should be able to do so is a bit naive.
Part of America's involvement in WW2 was an ohshit! response to Russia starting to push Germans back. It wouldn't serve a lot of interests if Russia had ended up controlling all of Europe instead of the eastern bloc.
You know... This is a very good question.
You are absolutely wrong. PKI was designed with the purpose of preventing man-in-the-middle attacks. The virus writer would include the public key in the virus with an associated encryption algorithm. The problem arised with decryption. In order to decrypt a file you would need an associated private key. Now if this key is available inside the virus it would be just as easy to find as the password within the article.
In fact the whole idea of cryptography revolves around the encryption algorithm telling you nothing about a method to decrypt the data it encrypts (At least without a certain key). These are called trapdoor one-way functions.
The most realistic way I can think of writing such a virus would be to provide and encryption algo in the virus and then provide a decryption program when the intended victim has paid you the money. Now aren't you glad I'm not writing viruses?
This also creates the problem of how many different kitten images you have to work with. It you have 10 kittens you can choose from it would take a few minutes to see them all, and write a program to recognise each (And this would work on all the forums with lazy admins who won't change default images). If you have a few thousand then you're using a few MB for the sole purpose of authentication.
Actually they are really acting within the best interest of most of the people involved. If you go out of your way to create a 'GLBT' guild and advertise it for all to see, then you, and your guild members are certain to become prime target for the rest of the server that are not quite as ok with the alternate sexuality as the guild members.
I'm sure if such a person wanted to create a 'GLBT' guild they could go to one of those forums mentioned in TFA and announce it there, having the effect of reaching a large fraction of the people they wanted to reach while keeping those who have no business with it out. Anything else is just asking for pure grief from the vast majority of the community.
When you consider how many players blizzard may have lost had such a guild come to exist, became publicized, then had all of the members harassed versus the few they will lose over this announcement you should see where I'm coming from.
You would perhaps make the most hardcore of the loyal fans happy, but the majority of the fans out there would not be willing to blow that extra money, though they still consider themselves loyal fans. Considering MS has been harping endlessly about the price of the console suddenly going back on their words would generate a lot more negative PR than the current shortage is generating.
The people raising a stink right now will buy a console anyway when it becomes more common, then the majority of them will go to their friends and prattle on like loyal fan boys/girls totally ignoring their screaming from before. If on the other hand the price suddenly exploded to $700 then you'd have a lot of mighty pissed of fans (Not to mention plenty of companies ready to jump on the bandwagon) yelling for blood. MS probably doesn't want the next CNN headline to be "Microsoft backs on price promise to raise profits" or something of that theme, especially if it's followed by a few nice articles to the tune of "Sony and Nintendo promise to give customers consistent prices."
Law of supply and demand works well for established products, but there is more to consider to this situation than you Economics 101 class taught you.
Unfortunately many American politicians always seem to forget that freedom is also freedom from RIAA, MPAA, and oh so many other groups with more money than sense.
Yeah, freedom of just about everything.
Only problem is any time you wish to make use of said freedom you better be damn ready to go to court and argue with a multi-billion dollar company/overly bribed government agency that you should in fact have said freedom. I'm sorry to tell you this, but this freedom thing you and your kind keeps toting really doesn't exist anywhere except your head. Moving things to the UN would at least allow the corrupt polliticians to take bribes form an entire world of rich companies, instead of restricting them from taking bribes from US companies. Perhaps we'd even have a few more nicer things slip by.
Now considering the uncouth boys you mentioned. For how many of them would the game be an impulse buy based on the prettiness of the cover work and in game screenshots on the back. Something tells me it would be a slightly larger number than girls turned off by the same.
Before someone jumps in, that should be IN Britain and THAN many other countries.
You are mistaken. Common law is quite popular is Britain much more so then many other countries.
There are plenty of sites that operate without resorting to advertisement. People want to get the information out there, regardless of if they get paid or not. These days you can get quite a decent chunk of bandwidth from your run of the mill hosting provider. Enough to host a rather decent site for under $10 US a month. The one I use for my site gives 80GB/month for $8. Of course if your site reaches the magnitude of /. or other high traffic sites the cost may start to be prohibitive, but at that time your site would be popular enough to sell the service it provides and actually have people pay for it.
A rather large percentage of people who use the data in question are researchers on government grants so your tax money will end up paying for the services anyway. By having an open database an average citizen with some curiocity on the topic (Though I can't imagine there being lots of those in this area) could get access to this information.
You should rethink some of your arguments.
2. It may take years, but they also try to develop for the hardware that should be out around the release date. The final release of Half-Life 2 wasn't really meant to run on a geforce 2 after all.
3. We are getting there, but not at the speed you seem to suggest. I'd imagine at least one or two generations of consoles before we even get truly close to that point.
4. If we're talking about ability to output to a certain resolution, the latest generation of graphic cards can do 2048x1536 (More then 1080p) and that's just going to grow. By the time Xbox 360 and PS3 come out I wouldn't be surprised if graphic cards can do 1.5 times the resolution. As for monitors, the monitors that can do that sort of resolution would cost as much if not less then TVs that can do 1080p.
5. And you may have noticed more companies are coming out with gamer oriented cars for said laptops. Dell's been doing pretty well with their XPS systems, and I have several friends who play the latest games on their laptops.
6. Ever heard of a modchip? If you can't do it yourself, you can usually find some second hand game store that will do it for you for a price.
Perhaps someday PC gaming really will come to an end, but be assured that's not going to be for a while. Sure the demographics will change a bit but not to the magnitude that you predict.
Also, most people who don't want to figure out the diffrence between nVidia and ATI or AMD and Intel will just buy from Dell or some other mass manufacturing company.
There are several problems with FM radio. One of the most important being ads. When I want to relax listening to music I don't particularly care for some guy trying to sell used cars. Also with FM I can't guarantee I will always get a song I can tolerate as I can with MP3s. There is also the fact that most of the time I use my player in the subway, which as you may imagine could impete radio signal just a tad. Finally, it's just another piece of bloat that I don't particularly need on my player. Sure for some it could be a useful feature, you being one of those people. For the rest though it's fluff.
Also, if you get bored of listening to your MP3s I do wonder at the size of your library. These days, many people (Legally or not) have more music then then can listen to in a year. Your assumption that people not sharing your views on music variety are "cloistered and stuffy" is rather insulting too. I, as many others, know what I like and don't need to waste my time surfing around trying to fit into the latest fad.