...to most people that Sony have simply got themselves into trouble by spending the past few years designing and developing the most powerful piece of gaming hardware that they could, and are now faced with a market which is not ready for it, or indeed particularly interested. In this round, having the latest, greatest, most powerful thing is not a sure fire way to win market share.
The games industry has seen major changes since they started developing their new baby, and most of those changes do not help Sony at all, so they're in risky territory. So much so, that they've pretty much had to bundle two major products (their latest games console and their play for the future of HD home cinema) into one and hedge their bets, pooling the marketing cash and hoping that the success of one will bring success for the other. It is however as likely that the failure of one will take the other down with it, or certainly hurt it bad.
Right now, they're battling to convince us that the future of gaming is a piece of hardware which is insanely expensive to produce (their initial losses at launch, and for at least the first twelve months will be by far the highest ever for a games console), extremely expensive and troublesome to develop for (leading to higher cost games, just you wait and see) and has some rather risky choices in terms of the hardware - Cell and Blu-Ray - the latter of which could simply fail miserably within a short period of time in the same way as UMD did. I don't think anyone is genuinely convinced by what they're saying though.
I personally don't think the console is anywhere near ready to ship, but Sony are at that shit-or-bust stage, where if they don't release something *very* soon, no matter how buggy the hardware is, or how few titles are available at launch, then they'll not only lose this round of the games console war, but their Blu-Ray format will also be dead on its arse. Rememeber, they need to get the thing out there and in the homes of early adopters right now for Blu-Ray to even have a 50-50 chance of coming out on top of HD-DVD.
The number of confirmed reports of serious perfomance bottlenecks with the hardware, developers tearing their hair out to get the current development kits working properly, and the last minute changes Sony are still making (e.g. adding motion sensing in the controller) all smack of a system roughly a year or more away from release. They're pretty much screwed, and they know it, but there's just no way they can say it.
Their marketing budget is no smaller as a result of all these problems though, and they're doing all they can to convince you that what they have in the PS3, is the future of gaming. Give it a month or so and there'll be glowing, raving previews of the hardware and first batch of games in the lads-mags and newspapers, these will all be paid for of course, and based upon press releases and canned footage rather than the actual console and games. Right now, you can believe the Sony marketing machine or not, but all the indications so far, are that this is looking like it'll be their biggest flop (and they have quite a history of such things) to date. With every Sony press release, the picture gets bleaker, and if they had even the smallest piece of good news right now, you can bet they'd be shouting it from the rooftops.
You may point to the games developers and their respective companies who are being very positive about the new console and its potential, and claim that surely they are in the best position to know what it's all about, but that's only because like Sony, they've invested a lot of time and money into the console and they desperately need it to succeed or face millions in losses. However, at the same time they're hailing it the best thing ever, they themselves are very worried and fearing the worst. And I know that for a fact.
I'm getting a little tired of analysts telling us how the next generation console war is going to play out over the next few years, especially when what they're suggesting seems to all but ignore the level of interest shown by the general public in each product.
Whilst a good handful of people I know are very happy with their Xbox360s, and a one or two are even looking forward to getting their hands on a PS3, without exception everyone I've spoken to about the Wii is very excited about it, and has every intention of buying one soon after release. There's a genuine enthusiasm for the product, which isn't dampened by a high console price like the PS3.
I mean, even Microsoft and Sony are expecting people to buy a Wii as a second machine. If we're talking basic number of units sold, it's hard to see how Nintendo aren't going to quickly take the lead.
The Gamecube had few real world advantages over the other consoles in the last/current generation of consoles, and without the help of a huge Microsoft or Sony scale marketing campaign, it's not hard to see why it was a relative failure.
This time around, there's the (expected) significantly lower price point, the fact that it truly offers something different in the form of a new controller, a download service with a good solid 20 year back catalogue of games, and of course interraction with the DS. Any one of these could made quite a difference, but together, I think we're looking at a definite reclaiming of ground by Nintendo in this round.
It's only been available in Japan for a little over a month, it just seems like it's been available for a while due to the product's media profile, which does rather back-up my point. You're right however, there was only around a 2-3 month wait for those able to get one on launch day, certainly not a year, but then it's not really a brand new product, just a re-packaging and minor tweaking of the existing DS unit.
I was only really talking in general terms, not specifically about the DS Lite, and not even just about games consoles/technology products. That said, just think how long we've been drip-fed details of the 360/PS3/Revolution by the manufacturers themselves via the media.
Blame the media for teasing you with concept art and techinical details from the moment a new shiny toy comes off the drawing board and has the stamp of approval. The fact that it'll be a year until your new toy actually rolls off the production line *is* an annoyance, but it's simply that we know too much too early these days.
I've seen those prices in a couple of Slashdot articles, or at least in articles linked directly from Slashdot.
As I've said, I firmly believe Nintendo intend to clean up in the sub-$200 console market. A unit which is only roughly the price of 2 or 3 games for one of the current generation of consoles will likely sell phenominally well. The GameCube is selling at $60 or so, and by all accounts, aside from the controller, the technology incorporated in the Revolution is nothing special, keeping production costs down to a minimum, so it's not unreasonable to suppose they could sell the console at $149 or less.
They hardly do themselves a disservice by selling a console at a price point where it's easily within the reach of every gamer, especially those who've traditionally not been interested in gaming, who Nintendo have singled out as a very important target audience. In fact I strongly believe that it's very much part of the plan they've had all along. Ultimately, like Microsoft and Sony, they'll make their money on the games, and having as large an installed base as possible is therefore a good long term strategy.
The decision to buy a $400 or $700 console is quite a big one, and as the original article says, it means that owning both is going to be something relatively few people will do. But, at a low price point, the Revolution will be a perfect second console for the serious gamer, or an ideal low cost single console for those with less of a budget or lust for games.
From the hardware details released so far, I think it's very likely that they'll be able to sell the units at a sub $150 price point and still make a profit, maybe even sub-$100, although I do think that's pretty unlikely.
Increasing the graphics capabilities of your machine also means better performance for fundamental, non-game related things such as your desktop OS, watching movies, and doing any 3D or graphic design work. For music and computationally intensive software, off-loading much of the graphics processing to the card also frees up bus bandwidth (especially when compared to integrated graphics) and increases your machines ability to get on with the actual work it's supposed to be doing.
For months the only way to buy a 360 in our local stores here in the UK *was* to go for the premium pack. The retailers couldn't get the console on it's own, and due to the "worldwide shortage", people were naturally prepared to pay the extra if that's all that was available. Microsoft could advertise the console as costing £299, but you couldn't in fact buy one on its own, or therefore for that price.
You need to remember that Microsoft were, and still are losing money on the 360 base units, so it's not difficult to imagine they took the opportunity to reduce this loss by pretty much forcing consumers to buy specific games and extra controllers as part of a fixed pack. The "shortage" was a way to justify only making available the premium packs on which they were just about breaking even.
They missed the target somewhat with the PSP, and devlievered an all-singing, all-dancing handheld that people wanted but were bored of pretty quickly, and Nintendo with their somewhat less impressive, but much more novel DS were the main beneficiaries. Their much promoted new UMD format is now all but dead in the water, and it's not difficult to imagine the same thing happening with the PS3 giving market share to the Revolution. With current price points and the uptake of HDTV, Blu-Ray may well also be heading down the UMD route.
the days of multi-console ownership may be coming to an end for many gamers' based on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 prices
That may be true if you are only considering the PS3 and Xbox 360, but with a predicted price as low as 99 USD (although 149 USD is more likely) the Revolution is going to be the second, and indeed "must have" machine for those not wanting to miss out on the novel and exclusive games which it will bring to the party. And this is exactly why Nintedo has repeatedly stated that they are not competing with the Sony and Microsoft. Whilst the press seems to have a hard job believing this, it's very likely true. Nintendo won't care which if any of the other consoles players own, as long as they buy a Revolution.
It's may in fact be difficult for many people to justify paying out for Sony or Microsoft's latest offering, especially when you consider that you can buy a decent PC base unit from Dand just add a good powerful graphics card for around the same money. The Revolution on the other hand is a no brainer. It's a console that's actually priced like console, and people will be much more comfortable paying that kind of money.
Let's be honest, the graphical capabilities and raw processing power of the current generation consoles are largely going unused in most current titles. So do you really want to be paying four times the price just for the extra visual gloss on the same old games? Most gamers can easily see the potential in the Revolution's new controller, and so won't want to be without a Revolution. The question they'll be asking themselves, is do they really need any more than it's offering, and more importantly, are the other two actually worth the money?
Let's face it, with the development costs involved in producing games for the PS3 and 360, it'll be impractical financially for studios to release titles for just one of the two, which equates to very little exclusive content between them. However, with it's significantly lower development costs, both in terms of development tools and the man-hours required to master new hardware and produce games, and unique controller, the Revolution is going to be the only console the studios will really be able to afford to create original games for. It'll be the only console the smaller studios will be able to turn out good games for.
The Revolution is apparently being written off as being underpowered and not a massive leap in terms of power/architecture from their current generation console, but Nintendo themselves aren't stupid, and I suspect things are playing out exactly as they expected. They'll let the other two blow phenominal budgets on competing with each other to sell consoles which they've priced way outside the traditional console market, and then give the people what they want - a good low cost console with an excellent range of games. Add into the picture a massive range of downloadable legacy titles, and they'll clean up. How can they not?
My gut feeling is that much of the apparent "public" disappointment that is apparent from the media is in fact being seeded by Microsoft and Sony, who need to make people feel they need their new shiny consoles. I really can't see the Revolution being anything other than a phenominal success.
Yeah, it's very poor indeed. But the reason is primarily, that even though the language is BASIC, the structures behind it all are really Java-like, and that brings with it a whole host of baggage. Users presented with an environment for programming in BASIC, will naturally expect a simple and easily understood object model to work with. As it stands, to use the OOo object model, you have to write pages and pages of the ugliest code, if you want to do even the simplest of things, largely because it's stuff that BASIC just isn't well suited to.
Was doing some data analysis and automation work using VBA in Excel for a client recently, and as I had a little spare time on my hands, and use OOo exclusively myself, I decided that I'd re-implement everything using OOo. I gave up.
It's not because it was difficult, although it's absurdly convoluted and finding the info you need to use the API is a pain in the arse, but because it would have taken at least 10 times as long to achieve the same results, and that was way longer than I had spare.
I've developed in some God-awful systems over the last 20 years, and even I looked at it and thought "I just can't be arsed". Can you imagine what a regular end-user with no programming experience is going to think?
Show them VBA for automating MS Office however, and even though they'll probably never really understand the full implications of what the simple commands they are issuing do, or the full extent of the object model, it doesn't matter. They work, and the commands they type just seem to make sense, they "read" right, and are straightforward enough to memorise and re-use.
What's really needed is a full re-implementation and extensive simplification of the object model, but obviously for a product as far along the path as OOo, that's not going to be practical. So, I'd personally suggest either a set of macros, possibly even implemented in OOoBasic, or the creation of a parallel API hiding all the messy nonsense and allowing users to interact with the suite in a similar way to VBA in MS Office. You need to get rid of all those cryptic Sun-isms like "com.sun.star.frame.DispatchHelper" if you don't want to scare off casual users.
Until this happens, nobody in a business environment is going to take OpenOffice.org particularly seriously. It's fine for individual members of staff just adding up columns of numbers and typing letters, but being able to automate things when your requirements go beyond that, is such a major thing even for many small businesses, that OOo won't get a look in until its macro facilities become significantly easier to use.
The problem is, that unlike the DS, from a developers point of view, the PSP doesn't really have any "uniqueness" at all. It's the same thing as we had before, just smaller, faster and in a nicer box, which is why all we're seeing is the same old games over and over.
The gaming world is getting pretty tired of that sort of thing, and is crying out for innovation. The PSP is very much a fashion accessory, and simply another platform to port your games to, not a new platform which is going to encourage innovation.
When it came out, everyone went "Wooh, that thing looks amazing, the screen's brilliant!", but then they took a look at the games, and saw the often absurd loading times and decided not to bother buying one until there was something special released. So far, it hasn't happened, and I can't really see it happening either.
The lack of gaming innovation is down to the PSP.
on
PSP Devs Should Pony Up
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Lack of innovation is always going to be much more obvious on a handheld system which effectively offers nothing new beyond improved graphics capabilities and a shiny, and it must be said, rather lovely casing.
Yeah, it's got a nice screen, and whilst it's bigger than that of the Gameboy SP, and a more conventional format that that of the DS, it's too small to allow full console titles to be ported to it, so from a developers point of view, it's as much of a burden as an advantage. People are expecting better graphics and use of the screen real estate, but in the industry it's seen just another platform on which to release your games, and moving away from a conventional screen size is a real pain in the arse.
As I had been expecting from well before the PSP and DS were released, we're seeing some pretty innovative ideas using the dual screens, touch screen and microphone inputs on the Nintendo DS. These are all features which can be used to enhance gameplay, and bring a whole new experience to gamers, and they're even being used to enhancing more established genres. Developers love that kind of thing. New toys, bells and whistles to play with are always going to get the creative juices flowing, especially if using them is optional. You don't hear developers crying out with joy that they've come up with a groundbreaking game idea that uses the extra half inch of screen space available on the PSP.
The PSP just isn't groundbreaking at all. It certainly does what it does well enough, and as a piece of consumer electronics, it looks stunning, but underneath it all, it's just, well, a rather uninspiring, fairly boring handheld gaming machine.
I can easily see the same thing happening once all three next-gen consoles are on sale. Sony and Microsoft will be fighting each other purely on hardware performance and the odd exclusive title, but it'll all just be first person shooters, sports and driving games. There'll have to be some pretty sever price drops to ensure that they shift the number of units they have planned. The games will probably all look stunning, but will offer very little new.
Meanwhile, Nintendo will be happily shifting the Revolution, selling plenty of downloaded legacy titles, and showing the world truly innovative games. Having a full developer's kit priced at only $2K is going to bring many more developers to the party as well. I can't wait.
Hell, I live in the UK and went to play Bingo a couple of times not so long ago (long story, not interesting, let's leave it at that) and I tell you, those grannies (I don't think there was a single grandpa in the place) must be popping some serious amphetamines.
The speed they were calling out the numbers was too much for me - a young and agile 33 year old - and I was only playing four cards. Some of them were playing a dozen or more at once!
By the time she's bought the necessary drugs and paid for their bingo cards, it's no wonder grandma can't afford to eat on what little pension she gets.
I've never considered buying a Dell home/gaming PC, as there's plenty of competition in that area, and I usually find better and cheaper alternatives or simply build my own. However, for standard office workstations, the Dell kit is an absolute bargain. I've bought dozens of these machines over the years and have been very happy with them in terms of price, build & performance.
I work as a consultant for many small to medium businesses, and I recommend Dell for workstations and small workgroup servers in most cases, and as long as you don't actually have to speak to someone at Dell about units ordered via the Internet (don't get me started on that) the experience is very efficient, you can save a fortune, and end up with very good kit for peanuts.
I've never had reason to fault the quality of the build or components, and whilst I tend to find their add-on options a little more expensive than I can get them for seperately, it usually makes sense to order them at the same time to keep things nice and simple. Dell obviously know that, and with reported working margins of only around 10%, you can hardly blame them, it's a business not a charity after all.
For the past few years though, as many have already posted, the machines have arrived full of trial-ware and Dell cut down versions of commercial packages that nobody in a business environment is even vaguely interested in. My first job is always to remove this crud, which can take up to 30 minutes per machine. The reason? I'm pretty damn certain that there's a financial benefit to Dell by putting trial versions of commercial software from these companies on all their machines, and for the low-spec workstations would explain how they manage to achieve such low price points.
I guess you just have to ask yourself would you rather spend 30 minutes uninstalling the unwanted software and tidying things up the first time you boot the machine, or spend extra money getting/building a machine to save a little time?
It's a fair enough point, but when you're actually using the software, you'll probably find very little difference in terms of speed, and more importantly, productivity. It comes down to personal preference and past experience more than anything else, and software cost/cross platform capability are not going to be an issue for everyone. For those who feel it an issue, they're certainly not going to be upset wasting a few seconds a day when they know they've saved £250+ and can use the same software freely regardless of which OS they are swat in front of.
Let's say it takes OOo 15 seconds to load your first document of the day, and MS Office only takes 5 (which based on my experiences are about right) by the end of the working week you'll have saved yourself less than a minute. Big deal.
In practical terms, the fact that if I'm running OOo's Write and it has a 20Mb bigger memory footprint than MS Office's Word is of very little consequence for the average user running a machine with 128Mb or more of memory. Unless you've got half a dozen apps open at the same time, or you leave OOo idling in the background for long enough to let Windows swap it out to disk, you're not going to have a problem.
This whole news story smacks of FUD in the aftermath of the Mass. decision to only use open formats for their data and documents. Now, I wonder who could be behind such an effort?
Re:"Essentially" the same data?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Nope, the previous poster is right.
The reason MS Office performs well, seems to load quickly and use less memory is the fact that it uses mostly libraries that are loaded and used by Windows from startup.
A true cross-platform application like OOo won't make use of such platform specific features for the sake of portability, and pretty much all of the bloat you are refering can be attributed to this. Yeah, there's going to be some legacy code knocking around, but that's also true of MS Office.
However, once you're run *any* of the OOo apps for the first time after a reboot, subsequent startup/reload time is actually around the same as MS Office.
If you'd rather spend £250+ on software (or run illegal copies) just to save a few seconds when you open your first document of the day, then go ahead. I don't hate or have a problem with MS Office, but I genuinely prefer OOo for day to day use. To my mind and way of working (and the many others I've introduced to OOo), it's UI is more streamlined and better organised, so even if the MS apps were free, I'd still go with OO.
"It's not until that point that OS/2 becomes immediately unprofitable"
You really think IBM has made any money out of this?
It has been a cash drain for years. They are standing by it and providing support for the thing only because they ended up having to, as they managed to sell it into certain market areas where it is still being used today - ATM machines for example.
I used OS/2 quite a bit at the time, and whilst the vision was impressive and it was pretty good to use, in practical terms it really wasn't a whole lot better than Windows 3.1, and for 99% of users certainly not as good as 95 when that came along. Even ignoring all the business and "political" reasons for it's failure to succeed in the marketplace, it really wasn't as amazing as people around here are making out.
There is going to be a whole shed load of IP that went into OS/2 that is still being used today by IBM and others. You need to remember that this was a product of an age where Open Source didn't even exist, and trying to pull the thing apart to allow certain bits to be open sourced is pretty much going to be a non-starter. My guess is, that OS/2 will be an appalling mess of code that IBM would no doubt be ashamed to have the world see.
You also need to remember that this software isn't suitable for modern hardware, and that even if it were patched and enhanced accordingly, it wouldn't provide anywhere near the functionality of a modern version of Linux or BSD.
What we have here is a pretty small group of enthusiasts who love an outdated, and to be honest, barely alive OS, and this love has somehow interfered with their common sense. Much as I loved the good old Amiga, I accepted a long time ago that it had had its day, and even though I got a mild pang of nostalgia looking at the latest version of the AmigaOS recently, it would serve absolutely no purpose for me these days. They were great days, but they're gone my friends.
I remember as a kid at least 15 or so years ago, here in the UK there was a product called the "Hot Can" which was exactly the same as this, only it contained soup or if I remember rightly some rice-based thing.
I think they were about £5 (GBP) each, they were sold in regular shops, and were somewhat of a disappointment, mainly because the food was pretty dull, not because they didn't work well. There was also a coffee version at least 10 years ago, I remember my younger brother buying a load of them when he went camping one year.
The question therefore has to be, how the hell did it takes these guys 24 million and 10 years to develop what is to all intents and purposes the same thing? If I were to present you with a bicycle wheel and tell you it'd taken me 10 years to develop and that I'd spent 24 million doing so, you quite rightly laugh and point at me. Seems a surprise that no-one seems to be doing that to these guys.
The review is pretty poor, and tells you very little of any worth about the book itself, so it's not surprising people are ignoring it.
The language used is at times awkward, and you get the idea that the author has used a thesaurus to try and drop some interesting words in place of more commom ones. It suggests to me that he/she is actually quite young.
The review just way too vague, and reminded me very much of a school book review where it's obvious the student hadn't even read the book, just looked at the sleeve and contents pages.
OK, so anyone with an interest in the topics covered by the book will no doubt hop on over to Amazon to get more information, and in that sense, getting even this half-effort on Slashdot will have achieved something. Simply putting the title of the book and a link to the relevant Amazon page would also have achieved the same.
XP Home has a maximum of 5 simultaneous file-sharing connections, and XP Professional has 10, but there is no restriction on TCP/IP connections.
It's not something that I was aware of until recently, when I moved a load of files to a workstation for other users to share whilst I was carrying out work on a server. It's a real pain in the backside, but I can see why it's there - if it wasn't, for many small businesses, there'd be no real reason to go for a server edition of Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
...to most people that Sony have simply got themselves into trouble by spending the past few years designing and developing the most powerful piece of gaming hardware that they could, and are now faced with a market which is not ready for it, or indeed particularly interested. In this round, having the latest, greatest, most powerful thing is not a sure fire way to win market share.
The games industry has seen major changes since they started developing their new baby, and most of those changes do not help Sony at all, so they're in risky territory. So much so, that they've pretty much had to bundle two major products (their latest games console and their play for the future of HD home cinema) into one and hedge their bets, pooling the marketing cash and hoping that the success of one will bring success for the other. It is however as likely that the failure of one will take the other down with it, or certainly hurt it bad.
Right now, they're battling to convince us that the future of gaming is a piece of hardware which is insanely expensive to produce (their initial losses at launch, and for at least the first twelve months will be by far the highest ever for a games console), extremely expensive and troublesome to develop for (leading to higher cost games, just you wait and see) and has some rather risky choices in terms of the hardware - Cell and Blu-Ray - the latter of which could simply fail miserably within a short period of time in the same way as UMD did. I don't think anyone is genuinely convinced by what they're saying though.
I personally don't think the console is anywhere near ready to ship, but Sony are at that shit-or-bust stage, where if they don't release something *very* soon, no matter how buggy the hardware is, or how few titles are available at launch, then they'll not only lose this round of the games console war, but their Blu-Ray format will also be dead on its arse. Rememeber, they need to get the thing out there and in the homes of early adopters right now for Blu-Ray to even have a 50-50 chance of coming out on top of HD-DVD.
The number of confirmed reports of serious perfomance bottlenecks with the hardware, developers tearing their hair out to get the current development kits working properly, and the last minute changes Sony are still making (e.g. adding motion sensing in the controller) all smack of a system roughly a year or more away from release. They're pretty much screwed, and they know it, but there's just no way they can say it.
Their marketing budget is no smaller as a result of all these problems though, and they're doing all they can to convince you that what they have in the PS3, is the future of gaming. Give it a month or so and there'll be glowing, raving previews of the hardware and first batch of games in the lads-mags and newspapers, these will all be paid for of course, and based upon press releases and canned footage rather than the actual console and games. Right now, you can believe the Sony marketing machine or not, but all the indications so far, are that this is looking like it'll be their biggest flop (and they have quite a history of such things) to date. With every Sony press release, the picture gets bleaker, and if they had even the smallest piece of good news right now, you can bet they'd be shouting it from the rooftops.
You may point to the games developers and their respective companies who are being very positive about the new console and its potential, and claim that surely they are in the best position to know what it's all about, but that's only because like Sony, they've invested a lot of time and money into the console and they desperately need it to succeed or face millions in losses. However, at the same time they're hailing it the best thing ever, they themselves are very worried and fearing the worst. And I know that for a fact.
I'm getting a little tired of analysts telling us how the next generation console war is going to play out over the next few years, especially when what they're suggesting seems to all but ignore the level of interest shown by the general public in each product.
Whilst a good handful of people I know are very happy with their Xbox360s, and a one or two are even looking forward to getting their hands on a PS3, without exception everyone I've spoken to about the Wii is very excited about it, and has every intention of buying one soon after release. There's a genuine enthusiasm for the product, which isn't dampened by a high console price like the PS3.
I mean, even Microsoft and Sony are expecting people to buy a Wii as a second machine. If we're talking basic number of units sold, it's hard to see how Nintendo aren't going to quickly take the lead.
The Gamecube had few real world advantages over the other consoles in the last/current generation of consoles, and without the help of a huge Microsoft or Sony scale marketing campaign, it's not hard to see why it was a relative failure.
This time around, there's the (expected) significantly lower price point, the fact that it truly offers something different in the form of a new controller, a download service with a good solid 20 year back catalogue of games, and of course interraction with the DS. Any one of these could made quite a difference, but together, I think we're looking at a definite reclaiming of ground by Nintendo in this round.
It's only been available in Japan for a little over a month, it just seems like it's been available for a while due to the product's media profile, which does rather back-up my point. You're right however, there was only around a 2-3 month wait for those able to get one on launch day, certainly not a year, but then it's not really a brand new product, just a re-packaging and minor tweaking of the existing DS unit.
I was only really talking in general terms, not specifically about the DS Lite, and not even just about games consoles/technology products. That said, just think how long we've been drip-fed details of the 360/PS3/Revolution by the manufacturers themselves via the media.
Was just thinking that myself.
Blame the media for teasing you with concept art and techinical details from the moment a new shiny toy comes off the drawing board and has the stamp of approval. The fact that it'll be a year until your new toy actually rolls off the production line *is* an annoyance, but it's simply that we know too much too early these days.
I've seen those prices in a couple of Slashdot articles, or at least in articles linked directly from Slashdot.
As I've said, I firmly believe Nintendo intend to clean up in the sub-$200 console market. A unit which is only roughly the price of 2 or 3 games for one of the current generation of consoles will likely sell phenominally well. The GameCube is selling at $60 or so, and by all accounts, aside from the controller, the technology incorporated in the Revolution is nothing special, keeping production costs down to a minimum, so it's not unreasonable to suppose they could sell the console at $149 or less.
They hardly do themselves a disservice by selling a console at a price point where it's easily within the reach of every gamer, especially those who've traditionally not been interested in gaming, who Nintendo have singled out as a very important target audience. In fact I strongly believe that it's very much part of the plan they've had all along. Ultimately, like Microsoft and Sony, they'll make their money on the games, and having as large an installed base as possible is therefore a good long term strategy.
The decision to buy a $400 or $700 console is quite a big one, and as the original article says, it means that owning both is going to be something relatively few people will do. But, at a low price point, the Revolution will be a perfect second console for the serious gamer, or an ideal low cost single console for those with less of a budget or lust for games.
From the hardware details released so far, I think it's very likely that they'll be able to sell the units at a sub $150 price point and still make a profit, maybe even sub-$100, although I do think that's pretty unlikely.
Why?
I don't mean to start anything here, and I'm certainly not saying that you're in any way daft for wanting to buy one, I'm just curious.
Rubbish.
Increasing the graphics capabilities of your machine also means better performance for fundamental, non-game related things such as your desktop OS, watching movies, and doing any 3D or graphic design work. For music and computationally intensive software, off-loading much of the graphics processing to the card also frees up bus bandwidth (especially when compared to integrated graphics) and increases your machines ability to get on with the actual work it's supposed to be doing.
Oh screw it. I had my end-italic tag slash the wrong way around.
Actually, I was auditioning a "" for the part, but it just wasn't the same.
For months the only way to buy a 360 in our local stores here in the UK *was* to go for the premium pack. The retailers couldn't get the console on it's own, and due to the "worldwide shortage", people were naturally prepared to pay the extra if that's all that was available. Microsoft could advertise the console as costing £299, but you couldn't in fact buy one on its own, or therefore for that price.
You need to remember that Microsoft were, and still are losing money on the 360 base units, so it's not difficult to imagine they took the opportunity to reduce this loss by pretty much forcing consumers to buy specific games and extra controllers as part of a fixed pack. The "shortage" was a way to justify only making available the premium packs on which they were just about breaking even.
They missed the target somewhat with the PSP, and devlievered an all-singing, all-dancing handheld that people wanted but were bored of pretty quickly, and Nintendo with their somewhat less impressive, but much more novel DS were the main beneficiaries. Their much promoted new UMD format is now all but dead in the water, and it's not difficult to imagine the same thing happening with the PS3 giving market share to the Revolution. With current price points and the uptake of HDTV, Blu-Ray may well also be heading down the UMD route.
the days of multi-console ownership may be coming to an end for many gamers' based on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 prices
That may be true if you are only considering the PS3 and Xbox 360, but with a predicted price as low as 99 USD (although 149 USD is more likely) the Revolution is going to be the second, and indeed "must have" machine for those not wanting to miss out on the novel and exclusive games which it will bring to the party. And this is exactly why Nintedo has repeatedly stated that they are not competing with the Sony and Microsoft. Whilst the press seems to have a hard job believing this, it's very likely true. Nintendo won't care which if any of the other consoles players own, as long as they buy a Revolution.
It's may in fact be difficult for many people to justify paying out for Sony or Microsoft's latest offering, especially when you consider that you can buy a decent PC base unit from Dand just add a good powerful graphics card for around the same money. The Revolution on the other hand is a no brainer. It's a console that's actually priced like console, and people will be much more comfortable paying that kind of money.
Let's be honest, the graphical capabilities and raw processing power of the current generation consoles are largely going unused in most current titles. So do you really want to be paying four times the price just for the extra visual gloss on the same old games? Most gamers can easily see the potential in the Revolution's new controller, and so won't want to be without a Revolution. The question they'll be asking themselves, is do they really need any more than it's offering, and more importantly, are the other two actually worth the money?
Let's face it, with the development costs involved in producing games for the PS3 and 360, it'll be impractical financially for studios to release titles for just one of the two, which equates to very little exclusive content between them. However, with it's significantly lower development costs, both in terms of development tools and the man-hours required to master new hardware and produce games, and unique controller, the Revolution is going to be the only console the studios will really be able to afford to create original games for. It'll be the only console the smaller studios will be able to turn out good games for.
The Revolution is apparently being written off as being underpowered and not a massive leap in terms of power/architecture from their current generation console, but Nintendo themselves aren't stupid, and I suspect things are playing out exactly as they expected. They'll let the other two blow phenominal budgets on competing with each other to sell consoles which they've priced way outside the traditional console market, and then give the people what they want - a good low cost console with an excellent range of games. Add into the picture a massive range of downloadable legacy titles, and they'll clean up. How can they not?
My gut feeling is that much of the apparent "public" disappointment that is apparent from the media is in fact being seeded by Microsoft and Sony, who need to make people feel they need their new shiny consoles. I really can't see the Revolution being anything other than a phenominal success.
Yeah, it's very poor indeed. But the reason is primarily, that even though the language is BASIC, the structures behind it all are really Java-like, and that brings with it a whole host of baggage. Users presented with an environment for programming in BASIC, will naturally expect a simple and easily understood object model to work with. As it stands, to use the OOo object model, you have to write pages and pages of the ugliest code, if you want to do even the simplest of things, largely because it's stuff that BASIC just isn't well suited to.
Was doing some data analysis and automation work using VBA in Excel for a client recently, and as I had a little spare time on my hands, and use OOo exclusively myself, I decided that I'd re-implement everything using OOo. I gave up.
It's not because it was difficult, although it's absurdly convoluted and finding the info you need to use the API is a pain in the arse, but because it would have taken at least 10 times as long to achieve the same results, and that was way longer than I had spare.
I've developed in some God-awful systems over the last 20 years, and even I looked at it and thought "I just can't be arsed". Can you imagine what a regular end-user with no programming experience is going to think?
Show them VBA for automating MS Office however, and even though they'll probably never really understand the full implications of what the simple commands they are issuing do, or the full extent of the object model, it doesn't matter. They work, and the commands they type just seem to make sense, they "read" right, and are straightforward enough to memorise and re-use.
What's really needed is a full re-implementation and extensive simplification of the object model, but obviously for a product as far along the path as OOo, that's not going to be practical. So, I'd personally suggest either a set of macros, possibly even implemented in OOoBasic, or the creation of a parallel API hiding all the messy nonsense and allowing users to interact with the suite in a similar way to VBA in MS Office. You need to get rid of all those cryptic Sun-isms like "com.sun.star.frame.DispatchHelper" if you don't want to scare off casual users.
Until this happens, nobody in a business environment is going to take OpenOffice.org particularly seriously. It's fine for individual members of staff just adding up columns of numbers and typing letters, but being able to automate things when your requirements go beyond that, is such a major thing even for many small businesses, that OOo won't get a look in until its macro facilities become significantly easier to use.
This is just wishful thinking on the part of Microsoft me thinks. Most of you are talking as if they'll actually be able to do such a thing. Fools.
The problem is, that unlike the DS, from a developers point of view, the PSP doesn't really have any "uniqueness" at all. It's the same thing as we had before, just smaller, faster and in a nicer box, which is why all we're seeing is the same old games over and over.
The gaming world is getting pretty tired of that sort of thing, and is crying out for innovation. The PSP is very much a fashion accessory, and simply another platform to port your games to, not a new platform which is going to encourage innovation.
When it came out, everyone went "Wooh, that thing looks amazing, the screen's brilliant!", but then they took a look at the games, and saw the often absurd loading times and decided not to bother buying one until there was something special released. So far, it hasn't happened, and I can't really see it happening either.
Lack of innovation is always going to be much more obvious on a handheld system which effectively offers nothing new beyond improved graphics capabilities and a shiny, and it must be said, rather lovely casing.
Yeah, it's got a nice screen, and whilst it's bigger than that of the Gameboy SP, and a more conventional format that that of the DS, it's too small to allow full console titles to be ported to it, so from a developers point of view, it's as much of a burden as an advantage. People are expecting better graphics and use of the screen real estate, but in the industry it's seen just another platform on which to release your games, and moving away from a conventional screen size is a real pain in the arse.
As I had been expecting from well before the PSP and DS were released, we're seeing some pretty innovative ideas using the dual screens, touch screen and microphone inputs on the Nintendo DS. These are all features which can be used to enhance gameplay, and bring a whole new experience to gamers, and they're even being used to enhancing more established genres. Developers love that kind of thing. New toys, bells and whistles to play with are always going to get the creative juices flowing, especially if using them is optional. You don't hear developers crying out with joy that they've come up with a groundbreaking game idea that uses the extra half inch of screen space available on the PSP.
The PSP just isn't groundbreaking at all. It certainly does what it does well enough, and as a piece of consumer electronics, it looks stunning, but underneath it all, it's just, well, a rather uninspiring, fairly boring handheld gaming machine.
I can easily see the same thing happening once all three next-gen consoles are on sale. Sony and Microsoft will be fighting each other purely on hardware performance and the odd exclusive title, but it'll all just be first person shooters, sports and driving games. There'll have to be some pretty sever price drops to ensure that they shift the number of units they have planned. The games will probably all look stunning, but will offer very little new.
Meanwhile, Nintendo will be happily shifting the Revolution, selling plenty of downloaded legacy titles, and showing the world truly innovative games. Having a full developer's kit priced at only $2K is going to bring many more developers to the party as well. I can't wait.
Hell, I live in the UK and went to play Bingo a couple of times not so long ago (long story, not interesting, let's leave it at that) and I tell you, those grannies (I don't think there was a single grandpa in the place) must be popping some serious amphetamines.
The speed they were calling out the numbers was too much for me - a young and agile 33 year old - and I was only playing four cards. Some of them were playing a dozen or more at once!
By the time she's bought the necessary drugs and paid for their bingo cards, it's no wonder grandma can't afford to eat on what little pension she gets.
I've never considered buying a Dell home/gaming PC, as there's plenty of competition in that area, and I usually find better and cheaper alternatives or simply build my own. However, for standard office workstations, the Dell kit is an absolute bargain. I've bought dozens of these machines over the years and have been very happy with them in terms of price, build & performance.
I work as a consultant for many small to medium businesses, and I recommend Dell for workstations and small workgroup servers in most cases, and as long as you don't actually have to speak to someone at Dell about units ordered via the Internet (don't get me started on that) the experience is very efficient, you can save a fortune, and end up with very good kit for peanuts.
I've never had reason to fault the quality of the build or components, and whilst I tend to find their add-on options a little more expensive than I can get them for seperately, it usually makes sense to order them at the same time to keep things nice and simple. Dell obviously know that, and with reported working margins of only around 10%, you can hardly blame them, it's a business not a charity after all.
For the past few years though, as many have already posted, the machines have arrived full of trial-ware and Dell cut down versions of commercial packages that nobody in a business environment is even vaguely interested in. My first job is always to remove this crud, which can take up to 30 minutes per machine. The reason? I'm pretty damn certain that there's a financial benefit to Dell by putting trial versions of commercial software from these companies on all their machines, and for the low-spec workstations would explain how they manage to achieve such low price points.
I guess you just have to ask yourself would you rather spend 30 minutes uninstalling the unwanted software and tidying things up the first time you boot the machine, or spend extra money getting/building a machine to save a little time?
It's a fair enough point, but when you're actually using the software, you'll probably find very little difference in terms of speed, and more importantly, productivity. It comes down to personal preference and past experience more than anything else, and software cost/cross platform capability are not going to be an issue for everyone. For those who feel it an issue, they're certainly not going to be upset wasting a few seconds a day when they know they've saved £250+ and can use the same software freely regardless of which OS they are swat in front of.
Let's say it takes OOo 15 seconds to load your first document of the day, and MS Office only takes 5 (which based on my experiences are about right) by the end of the working week you'll have saved yourself less than a minute. Big deal.
In practical terms, the fact that if I'm running OOo's Write and it has a 20Mb bigger memory footprint than MS Office's Word is of very little consequence for the average user running a machine with 128Mb or more of memory. Unless you've got half a dozen apps open at the same time, or you leave OOo idling in the background for long enough to let Windows swap it out to disk, you're not going to have a problem.
This whole news story smacks of FUD in the aftermath of the Mass. decision to only use open formats for their data and documents. Now, I wonder who could be behind such an effort?
Nope, the previous poster is right.
The reason MS Office performs well, seems to load quickly and use less memory is the fact that it uses mostly libraries that are loaded and used by Windows from startup.
A true cross-platform application like OOo won't make use of such platform specific features for the sake of portability, and pretty much all of the bloat you are refering can be attributed to this. Yeah, there's going to be some legacy code knocking around, but that's also true of MS Office.
However, once you're run *any* of the OOo apps for the first time after a reboot, subsequent startup/reload time is actually around the same as MS Office.
If you'd rather spend £250+ on software (or run illegal copies) just to save a few seconds when you open your first document of the day, then go ahead. I don't hate or have a problem with MS Office, but I genuinely prefer OOo for day to day use. To my mind and way of working (and the many others I've introduced to OOo), it's UI is more streamlined and better organised, so even if the MS apps were free, I'd still go with OO.
"It's not until that point that OS/2 becomes immediately unprofitable"
You really think IBM has made any money out of this?
It has been a cash drain for years. They are standing by it and providing support for the thing only because they ended up having to, as they managed to sell it into certain market areas where it is still being used today - ATM machines for example.
I used OS/2 quite a bit at the time, and whilst the vision was impressive and it was pretty good to use, in practical terms it really wasn't a whole lot better than Windows 3.1, and for 99% of users certainly not as good as 95 when that came along. Even ignoring all the business and "political" reasons for it's failure to succeed in the marketplace, it really wasn't as amazing as people around here are making out.
There is going to be a whole shed load of IP that went into OS/2 that is still being used today by IBM and others. You need to remember that this was a product of an age where Open Source didn't even exist, and trying to pull the thing apart to allow certain bits to be open sourced is pretty much going to be a non-starter. My guess is, that OS/2 will be an appalling mess of code that IBM would no doubt be ashamed to have the world see.
You also need to remember that this software isn't suitable for modern hardware, and that even if it were patched and enhanced accordingly, it wouldn't provide anywhere near the functionality of a modern version of Linux or BSD.
What we have here is a pretty small group of enthusiasts who love an outdated, and to be honest, barely alive OS, and this love has somehow interfered with their common sense. Much as I loved the good old Amiga, I accepted a long time ago that it had had its day, and even though I got a mild pang of nostalgia looking at the latest version of the AmigaOS recently, it would serve absolutely no purpose for me these days. They were great days, but they're gone my friends.
I remember as a kid at least 15 or so years ago, here in the UK there was a product called the "Hot Can" which was exactly the same as this, only it contained soup or if I remember rightly some rice-based thing.
I think they were about £5 (GBP) each, they were sold in regular shops, and were somewhat of a disappointment, mainly because the food was pretty dull, not because they didn't work well. There was also a coffee version at least 10 years ago, I remember my younger brother buying a load of them when he went camping one year.
The question therefore has to be, how the hell did it takes these guys 24 million and 10 years to develop what is to all intents and purposes the same thing? If I were to present you with a bicycle wheel and tell you it'd taken me 10 years to develop and that I'd spent 24 million doing so, you quite rightly laugh and point at me. Seems a surprise that no-one seems to be doing that to these guys.
The review is pretty poor, and tells you very little of any worth about the book itself, so it's not surprising people are ignoring it.
The language used is at times awkward, and you get the idea that the author has used a thesaurus to try and drop some interesting words in place of more commom ones. It suggests to me that he/she is actually quite young.
The review just way too vague, and reminded me very much of a school book review where it's obvious the student hadn't even read the book, just looked at the sleeve and contents pages.
OK, so anyone with an interest in the topics covered by the book will no doubt hop on over to Amazon to get more information, and in that sense, getting even this half-effort on Slashdot will have achieved something. Simply putting the title of the book and a link to the relevant Amazon page would also have achieved the same.
XP Home has a maximum of 5 simultaneous file-sharing connections, and XP Professional has 10, but there is no restriction on TCP/IP connections.
It's not something that I was aware of until recently, when I moved a load of files to a workstation for other users to share whilst I was carrying out work on a server. It's a real pain in the backside, but I can see why it's there - if it wasn't, for many small businesses, there'd be no real reason to go for a server edition of Windows.