I thought it quite a considerate move considering that by definition, a slashdotting means bye bye website for at least a few hours. How is that going to help people trying to make donations?
I used to work for a major advertising agency in London. One of the account groups in our agency was responsible for the European launch of a particular console several years ago for one of the big manufacturers at the time. I won't name them, but if I say they're responsible for the blue hedgehog, you'll know who I mean.
Anyway, an email went out around the agency asking for people who were available and didn't mind "helping out" on launch night. After responding, I discovered that the company were asking for staff to go out to the midnight openings around town and buy up consoles, games and peripherals. They wanted to make sure that at least London (which is where the media would be doing all their reports) would sell-out nice and quickly. We were told, if we brought the receipts into the office the next day we would be given a full refund and would be able to do whatever we wanted with the hardware itself. I ended up buying 6 consoles, which were given away to various friends and family.
In all seriousness, the Microsoft story would be more newsworthy if they actually made an effort to provide satisfactory stock for everyone. Seems pretty par-for-the-course to me.
I appreciate your clarification and I understand your point. I think the issue was with the word 'plausible' which at first sight would suggest you had difficulty in believing that the London terrorist attacks were genuine (i.e. that they actually happened) and that the cat story was more likely to be true (he actually found the cat). However from your later clarification, I can see that your comment on the superficiality of news reporting was a valid one.
Than I'd suggest you mean something other than "plausable" (sic).
In the context you used it, your comments don't make any sense. And your reply doesn't seem to answer my question either.
>For me i find this more plausable then "terroist attack in london"
Errr... Care to explain why you give more credibility to some guy bringing back a tail of unknown origin, than a recent atrocity in which more than 50 people died, hundreds were injured and thousands affected.
I recently received a card through my door from NTT asking if I wouldn't mind staying in my house for a couple of hours one afternoon while their engineer visited to upgrade my 100 Mb connection to 1 Gb (free of charge).
Google's engineers have decreed that familiar email practices are no longer useful, and have substituted approaches they prefer, arrogantly denying users any choice.
Uhh... the choice is: use it, or don't use it. It's free dude... no one's forcing you.
The Revolution was seriously looking like it could dead on arrival. Later than the other consoles, perhaps without the raw power, no one was giving it much attention. 1 day has changed all that. Nintendo is now the company that everyone is talking about again. If you'd asked me last week if I was going to buy a Revolution, I'd have said "unlikely". Now I'm very very interested.
Even if we've gone out and already bought a 360 or a PS3, Revolution will be everyone's 'second console' because it offers something different, and that's a decent enough market in itself.
100 songs? And that's probably at a bitrate of 128kbps (or less). Let's be honest, so far manufacturers have shown how they just luuurve to inflate figures by quoting some total based on something lousy like 64kbps encoding. Want anything approaching decent sound and it could well drop down to 3 or 4 albums.
Man... he reads/. and he's suggesting that he may have some kind of relationship with a woman. Isn't that an achievement in itself? Or maybe Liz is his mom.
I've always had serious issues with this guy. Everything you read from him reeks of self-promotion and ego rather than an genuine understanding of the industry.
If you've ever read his personal website it talks about how long he's been working with technology, how he's influenced the course of I.T. (has he crap!) and how he has this amazing ability to understand new technologies faster than most 'normal' people. And yet a few weeks ago he wrote the most ill-informed, ignorant piece I've ever read from a 'commentator' about how he couldn't port his email from Windows to Mac OS X (and of course he blamed Microsoft for his own lack of ability). Not surprisingly in the BBC feedback section, dozens of people suggested solutions which he could easily have identified from 5 minutes research on Google. Even less surprisingly, the feedback section was remove shortly afterwards.
I've barely if ever agreed with anything he's ever written. I think the fact that he has to have his face and name plastered all over his column, when every other respected BBC journalist lets their writing do the talking, says it all.
I'm also sitting in my Japanese apartment on my 100mbit (OCN B-FLETS) connection.
Sure it doesn't work quite so well for sites outside Japan, but for bittorrent with multiple sources routed from different geographic locations I can regularly download files at several megabytes (bytes not bits) per second. A full feature length Divx movie comes down in a matter of a few minutes.
Inside Japan its simply awesome. I downloaded a 7.5 megabyte application a few weeks ago, which appeared on my harddisk in its entirity before Firefox had even managed to pop up its download window.
I disagree. I think its not beyond the reaches of the government to pander to the greed vote... "Why pay 120 quid a year when you can have it for free if we introduce a few ads?"
Of course anyone with any intelligence knows that this would be a disaster. One of the great things about the BBC is that it is well funded allowing it to show high quality programming without annoying ad breaks every ten minutes. It would be too late before people realised what they had lost for a palty tenner every month. The point is, there are enough greedy people in the UK for whom paying for anything (regardless of whether or not it maintains a level of quality) is against their belief system.
It would appear that most of the commentators who have posted so far, are a fair degree wide of the truth.
The fact is that the BBC is a state broadcaster. It is funded by the license fee, (read: television tax) paid for by the general public, and maintained by government charter. Every so often this charter comes up for renewal. This gives the government of the day a chance to push its own agenda and influence the future of the BBC to its own advantage. If the BBC doesn't play along, the government can ensure that the threat of charter non-renewal hangs over the organization (effectively the end of the BBC as we know it).
The current government (the Blair administration as our American cousins may call it) is blatantly in love with private industry and wishes to ensure that the BBC does nothing to infringe on areas in which the private-sector could otherwise profit. The Blair government believes that the BBC has an unfair advantage in that it has guaranteed funding via the license fee and does not need to compete with other private-sector companies to maintain its profitability. Therefore the government has decreed that in order for the BBC to receive charter renewal, it has to relinquish anything that is not a "core public service function".
In a nutshell, the government argument to the BBC is: "If you're providing something that the private sector could do, it doesn't matter how useful, beneficial, or loved by the public it is... Kill it... We want our friends in big business to line their pockets with some half-assed imitation of what you do so well".
Sadly this has resulted in a severe over-reaction on the part of BBC management, who have subsquently decided to close down anything which doesn't fit this "core public service function" and have a demonstrable benefit to the license payer. Cult TV just doesn't cut it as far as they're concerned.
On the subject of [the island of] Hokkaido, where I live: The government recently announced that they're going to start laying track for our own Shinkansen service in the near future. It's going to be interesting to see how they deal with the 4-5 months of the year that we are under a seriously heavy blanket of snow.
Get a life dude... If a company does something that's newsworthy, it should be reported. Period.
The day Slashdot starts editing its news output to appease the petty whining of individuals who don't like seeing anyone get positive press, will be a sad day for us all.
Google isn't perfect, but they're doing a lot of pretty good things right now. We're all ready to jump on companies when they screw up, so why shouldn't we give them credit when its due.
Someone may well have made this point, but with respect to our American cousins, a few stats (source: Wikipedia):
European Union:
Number of countries: 25,
Population: 460 million,
Number of Zombies (May figure): 1320985
USA:
Number of countries: 1,
Population: 295 million,
Number of Zombies (May figure): 964020
So, the EU has a fair few more zombies than the US, but the US is the single country with the largest number of zombies, and has more zombies per head of population than any other country (including the EU as a single block).
I'm sure it's just as easy to knock down my stats as it is to undermine the ideas presented in the article, but then as Churchill once said, "there are lies, damn lies... and statistics".
Regardless of my first comment, personally I think it's not the coding difficulty per se that's the issue. It's the scale of the production process for what (if the hype is to be believed) is going to take us to within touching distance of the often promised (and so far never delivered) movie-like quality of visuals.
Look at the budget for any CGI motion picture (a la Pixar, Dreamworks Animation etc.) and we're talking tens of millions for what is a pre-rendered straight through storyline. Then look at the closing credits and see how many people it took just to achieve that.
Now think about how much more work will be involved in developing something which has a similar standard of visuals (although I think realistically we're talking next-next-gen before we really even get close) and adding an interactive element to it with a non-linear plot.
Instead of just seeing the movie set from a fixed camera perspective (as you do in the cinema), you get to walk around it and interact with everything in it. It's not going to take long before the production of a game is going to surpass the effort required for a movie.
One of the senior Sony execs (I can't remember who - it may even have been Kutaragi) has been on record in Japan saying that they are deliberately making the hardware even more difficult to code for than PS2, because this will force only the strongest and well-funded dev shops to work on the console. Their justification was that this will somehow raise the overall quality of games. Seems a bit optimistic (and misguided to me) and they might just be blowing smoke to disguise the fact that they've designed a bloody impossible beast to work with.
Middleware and tool developers must be licking their lips at the prospect.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it quite a considerate move considering that by definition, a slashdotting means bye bye website for at least a few hours. How is that going to help people trying to make donations?
Anyway, an email went out around the agency asking for people who were available and didn't mind "helping out" on launch night. After responding, I discovered that the company were asking for staff to go out to the midnight openings around town and buy up consoles, games and peripherals. They wanted to make sure that at least London (which is where the media would be doing all their reports) would sell-out nice and quickly. We were told, if we brought the receipts into the office the next day we would be given a full refund and would be able to do whatever we wanted with the hardware itself. I ended up buying 6 consoles, which were given away to various friends and family.
In all seriousness, the Microsoft story would be more newsworthy if they actually made an effort to provide satisfactory stock for everyone. Seems pretty par-for-the-course to me.
I appreciate your clarification and I understand your point. I think the issue was with the word 'plausible' which at first sight would suggest you had difficulty in believing that the London terrorist attacks were genuine (i.e. that they actually happened) and that the cat story was more likely to be true (he actually found the cat). However from your later clarification, I can see that your comment on the superficiality of news reporting was a valid one.
Than I'd suggest you mean something other than "plausable" (sic). In the context you used it, your comments don't make any sense. And your reply doesn't seem to answer my question either.
Errr... Care to explain why you give more credibility to some guy bringing back a tail of unknown origin, than a recent atrocity in which more than 50 people died, hundreds were injured and thousands affected.
Or are you just the world's biggest dumbass?
I recently received a card through my door from NTT asking if I wouldn't mind staying in my house for a couple of hours one afternoon while their engineer visited to upgrade my 100 Mb connection to 1 Gb (free of charge).
Uhh... the choice is: use it, or don't use it. It's free dude... no one's forcing you.
Even if we've gone out and already bought a 360 or a PS3, Revolution will be everyone's 'second console' because it offers something different, and that's a decent enough market in itself.
I believe you meant "the sole cause". But then who cares about semantics when correct English usage is apparently so undervalued these days.
Not to mention the uncredited copies of Pac-Man, Breakout and Frogger.
100 songs? And that's probably at a bitrate of 128kbps (or less). Let's be honest, so far manufacturers have shown how they just luuurve to inflate figures by quoting some total based on something lousy like 64kbps encoding. Want anything approaching decent sound and it could well drop down to 3 or 4 albums.
Great... A backwards theocracy with nukes...
Man... he reads /. and he's suggesting that he may have some kind of relationship with a woman. Isn't that an achievement in itself? Or maybe Liz is his mom.
If you've ever read his personal website it talks about how long he's been working with technology, how he's influenced the course of I.T. (has he crap!) and how he has this amazing ability to understand new technologies faster than most 'normal' people. And yet a few weeks ago he wrote the most ill-informed, ignorant piece I've ever read from a 'commentator' about how he couldn't port his email from Windows to Mac OS X (and of course he blamed Microsoft for his own lack of ability). Not surprisingly in the BBC feedback section, dozens of people suggested solutions which he could easily have identified from 5 minutes research on Google. Even less surprisingly, the feedback section was remove shortly afterwards.
I've barely if ever agreed with anything he's ever written. I think the fact that he has to have his face and name plastered all over his column, when every other respected BBC journalist lets their writing do the talking, says it all.
Sure it doesn't work quite so well for sites outside Japan, but for bittorrent with multiple sources routed from different geographic locations I can regularly download files at several megabytes (bytes not bits) per second. A full feature length Divx movie comes down in a matter of a few minutes.
Inside Japan its simply awesome. I downloaded a 7.5 megabyte application a few weeks ago, which appeared on my harddisk in its entirity before Firefox had even managed to pop up its download window.
Of course anyone with any intelligence knows that this would be a disaster. One of the great things about the BBC is that it is well funded allowing it to show high quality programming without annoying ad breaks every ten minutes. It would be too late before people realised what they had lost for a palty tenner every month. The point is, there are enough greedy people in the UK for whom paying for anything (regardless of whether or not it maintains a level of quality) is against their belief system.
The fact is that the BBC is a state broadcaster. It is funded by the license fee, (read: television tax) paid for by the general public, and maintained by government charter. Every so often this charter comes up for renewal. This gives the government of the day a chance to push its own agenda and influence the future of the BBC to its own advantage. If the BBC doesn't play along, the government can ensure that the threat of charter non-renewal hangs over the organization (effectively the end of the BBC as we know it).
The current government (the Blair administration as our American cousins may call it) is blatantly in love with private industry and wishes to ensure that the BBC does nothing to infringe on areas in which the private-sector could otherwise profit. The Blair government believes that the BBC has an unfair advantage in that it has guaranteed funding via the license fee and does not need to compete with other private-sector companies to maintain its profitability. Therefore the government has decreed that in order for the BBC to receive charter renewal, it has to relinquish anything that is not a "core public service function".
In a nutshell, the government argument to the BBC is: "If you're providing something that the private sector could do, it doesn't matter how useful, beneficial, or loved by the public it is... Kill it... We want our friends in big business to line their pockets with some half-assed imitation of what you do so well".
Sadly this has resulted in a severe over-reaction on the part of BBC management, who have subsquently decided to close down anything which doesn't fit this "core public service function" and have a demonstrable benefit to the license payer. Cult TV just doesn't cut it as far as they're concerned.
Go to the London Transport Museum. You already have one!
(albeit sitting on display)
On the subject of [the island of] Hokkaido, where I live: The government recently announced that they're going to start laying track for our own Shinkansen service in the near future. It's going to be interesting to see how they deal with the 4-5 months of the year that we are under a seriously heavy blanket of snow.
Uhh... of course not.
How else can I kill time at work? My boss seems reluctant to buy me a Playstation 3.
The day Slashdot starts editing its news output to appease the petty whining of individuals who don't like seeing anyone get positive press, will be a sad day for us all.
Google isn't perfect, but they're doing a lot of pretty good things right now. We're all ready to jump on companies when they screw up, so why shouldn't we give them credit when its due.
European Union:
Number of countries: 25, Population: 460 million, Number of Zombies (May figure): 1320985
USA:
Number of countries: 1, Population: 295 million, Number of Zombies (May figure): 964020
So, the EU has a fair few more zombies than the US, but the US is the single country with the largest number of zombies, and has more zombies per head of population than any other country (including the EU as a single block).
I'm sure it's just as easy to knock down my stats as it is to undermine the ideas presented in the article, but then as Churchill once said, "there are lies, damn lies... and statistics".
Look at the budget for any CGI motion picture (a la Pixar, Dreamworks Animation etc.) and we're talking tens of millions for what is a pre-rendered straight through storyline. Then look at the closing credits and see how many people it took just to achieve that.
Now think about how much more work will be involved in developing something which has a similar standard of visuals (although I think realistically we're talking next-next-gen before we really even get close) and adding an interactive element to it with a non-linear plot.
Instead of just seeing the movie set from a fixed camera perspective (as you do in the cinema), you get to walk around it and interact with everything in it. It's not going to take long before the production of a game is going to surpass the effort required for a movie.
Middleware and tool developers must be licking their lips at the prospect.