How do you define a legitimate military target? How do you differentiate between an insurgent and a terrorist? If you attack a purely civilian target to achieve military ends (i.e. continued bombing of innocent civilians to convince a foreign power to cease the occupation of a country), does that not make the civilians a military target? Since insurgents are often used as a means of achieving a political end, does this not make anything a potentially legitimate military target? What defines an insurgency -- a group of people trained to use lethal force? someone sanctioned by a political body to use that force? al Qaeda is both of those, as is Hezbolah, yet most of the rest of the world considers them terrorist group.s
Was the attack on the Pentagon not an attack on a legitimate military target? Was it not also a terrorist attack?
If you can honestly answer these questions fully without contradicting yourself, then I shall cede that terrorists and insurgents are different.
There was a big spread on Kane & Lynch in Game Informer several months ago. I could've sworn it listed PS3 as one of the target platforms, but I can't seem to locate the issue now. Either way, it's not a big title. The only time exclusivity matters is if the game in question is a potential system seller. Gears of War moved some systems. So did Blue Dragon (in Japan). God of War II definitely sold some PS2s, and definitely kept some PS2s around (quite a few people traded in their PS2 after beating GoW2 and are upgrading to 360s and PS3s). Halo 3 will certainly be a huge system mover.
But the titles that are most troubling for Sony/MS to potentially lose are Final Fantasy XIII (S/E is refusing to confirm that it is PS3 only) and Devil May Cry 4 (which is now 360/PC). There have been rumors of Metal Gear Solid 4's exclusivity being up in the air, but nothing confirmed yet.
The number of exclusives on either platform is going to be small this time around. In fact, only the Wii will have a lot of exclusives, simply by nature of the control scheme and the difficulty in properly porting games between the Wii and anything else.
Some have commented that the "three platforms" should be Wii/360/PS3. This is simply not the case. The Wii is not the same sort of platform as the 360/PS3/PC. Games cannot easily and should not be ported to the Wii. Games must be redesigned from the ground up to work well on the Wii, because as the handful of games out so far have shown, generic ports don't work right on the Wii - they need to fully embrace the new control scheme. The PSP is a fine example of what happens when you don't develop specifically for the platform and instead port simply because you can - you wind up with a lackluster library of games.
I hate to nitpick, but the games released on Sunday, the 22nd. Not today. Not Monday. If you tried to buy them Monday or today, you probably couldn't without a pre-order, since most stores sold out.
I disagree. There is, at this time, no compelling reason to upgrade to Vista. If your employees/IT staff are trained on XP, but not on Vista, you aren't going to be buying Vista machines. As a home user, what do you have to dislike about XP? 95, 98 and ME were all pretty crappy (relatively few people ran Windows 2000 on their home machine), so XP provided a significant improvement. People are generally resistant to change. Vista is change for the sake of change for most home users. Eventually, DX10 gaming will provide reason to upgrade. Linux isn't even on the radar for most home users, and that's largely thanks to XP not being horrible. If it had been a failure of an OS, Linux (and the Mac) would've gained significant traction as users became fed up with Microsoft's buggy software--but it wasn't a failure, and XP was actually pretty stable.
DirectX 10 is the only reason I bothered to get Vista. But it appears that games taking advantage of DX10 are at least a few months away, and games that *require* DX10 are likely not going to show up for a couple of years at least. So until DX10 becomes necessary for a mainstream game, I don't see much interest in a majority of home users for Vista.
Actually a number of developers are looking at the consoles as the primary profit driver thanks to increased piracy on the PC. id has shifted their development focus to the 360/PC, whereas it always used to be the PC, with ports for the consoles being made available later on by third party companies. Now id is talking about simultaneous release on both PC and 360, with the PS3 being a possibility (though last I heard, it wasn't Carmack's focus). Valve is expected to do the same starting with HL 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2. Same for Epic (and many of the myriad games using UE3).
Microsoft isn't losing money on the 360 anymore, either. Sony is the only one losing money on their shiny new console.
Now, the XBOX division itself is still losing money, but that has more to do with the incredible amount of money thrown at developers for support and marketing than it does the hardware. Microsoft didn't make any money from Gears of War, I'd bet. No, they offered Epic a great deal - the best marketing money can buy, and no royalty fees. (That is speculative, but it is not uncommon for deals like that to be made in exchange for exclusives that can help move consoles--which in turn move more software.)
Several months ago, I was waiting to turn left at an intersection. It was a fairly busy one, and there were two left turn lanes (I was in the leftmost, with cars to my right). About 200 meters ahead on the other side of the road were an ambulance and two police cars with lights flashing, attending to an accident. The light never changed from red for nearly fifteen minutes, and the other lights never cycled thanks to the sensor picking up the ambulance and police vehicles with the lights flashing. I was the lead car in the left hand lane, so I finally decided to just make my turn as soon as traffic was clear enough for it. I'm not sure the cops sitting there even noticed, but after looking back, a lot of other cars started to go as well.
Times when running a red light is ok are pretty rare. If the police want to do it in a non-emergency situation, it better be because of fluke occurrences like what many of us have described here.
Because in "the rest of the world" (by which you I suspect you actually mean Europe and parts of Asia), public transportation is much more viable and widely used. In the US, public transportation only works for a small percentage of the populous because most people don't (or can't) live near their jobs, or the bus/subway routes don't align with their workplace or home.
If so many changes are needed just to eliminate DST, why the bloody hell would you eliminate DST anyway? I mean seriously, if it cost untold millions for businesses to transition to changing DST by three weeks, what gain is there from eliminating it entirely? You'd now totally invalidate all that money that was just spent and cause everyone to have to do it all over again.
For the love of God, leave DST as it is and don't change it again.
The GBA SP and DS Lite (all colors) are sold out at pretty much all retailers in the greater DC area, and I believe this is the case in many of the larger metropolitan areas.
In regards to the person who mentioned the GameBoy Micro, this is a dead system in the US. The GameBoy Advance SP, however, is still a good seller, though it has little further growth potential with the DS/Lite getting so many new titles.
I would like to say it's not a case of "holding out" on shipments. But it's not just the Wii. The DS and GBA SP are nearly as scarce (taking hours to a day or two to sell out at most stores vs. minutes to an hour or two for the Wii).
A person like Dan DeMatteo doesn't make those kind of statements unless he has legitimate reason to believe them. GameStop is a pretty large corporation, and CEO's of Fortune 400 companies don't blindly make that sort of accusation without there being some truth to it.
There is no real preparing for this. You can prepare for an asteroid, in that you can see it coming, calculate when it will hit, and figure out a way to intercept/divert it (presuming there is enough time).
You can't stop a volcano. At least not with any known technology, and the consequences of altering a volcano could be worse than it going off in the first place.
Preparing for a supervolcano eruption is like preparing for full-out nuclear war. There is no effective recovery plan that isn't a lot of local efforts. The world doesn't have the resources to clean up a disaster of that magnitude in a short amount of time. New Orleans still hasn't been fully cleaned up (let alone rebuilt), and it's been 19 months since Katrina.
Have you been outside of the city? In other parts of the state, the alternative is a very slow Verizon connection or a small-time cable company with HORRIBLE connection speeds. You might think you have it bad there, but really, there are places in the state with much worse options than Comcast and Verizon. In fact, when I moved from the southern part of Lancaster county into the city, my Comcast connection doubled in speed because there was more bandwidth being offered up. Now that I'm out of PA, the options are still pretty limited. But my Comcast speed has doubled again (being in one of the most expensive to live in counties in the country has at least one perk).
I agree that state governments should do more to encourage competition, but many of the alternatives that exist are not able to offer better or faster service. Verizon and Comcast have the capital to directly compete, and when Verizon decides to roll out FIOS on a wider scale, Comcast is going to uncap their bandwidth in a big way.
To be quite honest, selling the PS3 hurts the bottom line more than not selling right now. The last estimate I heard was that 30 software titles or accessories must be sold per system to break even (on the 60GB). This would require purchasing every single title currently available, three extra controllers, and a dozen Blu-Ray movies.
While the long-term view says that they need to sell as many PS3s as possible before the 360 runs away with the game, there is a need to see production costs come down to prevent very substantial financial loss.
Personally, I think that Sony is in serious trouble this year. There are so many very highly anticipated titles coming for the 360 that will almost certainly be system sellers (Halo 3 being the ultimate), and so few coming this year for the PS3. If it takes another year for a system-selling title to come out on PS3, Sony might not even be able to get close to the market share of the 360.
(I don't consider the Wii to be a direct competitor, as it will almost certainly be the #1 selling system by the end of the year. However, for many people it will be a second system. For blockbuster games, the 360 and PS3 are the competitors.)
The reasons so many people are going with consoles instead of computers are:
Multiplayer on one system (thus more directly social) Larger screen (and increasingly, equal resolution to PC) Easy setup/compatibility (plug it in, put the disc in, it works) Simple controls Easy online play (at least for the Xbox/360.. PS3 is still a question mark)
Consoles are not aimed at "people who can not afford full fledged open hardware", they are aimed at people who want an easy, fun gaming experience. No matter what your personal experience, the PC is the most complicated gaming platform there is. There is still no easy way for a mother who knows nothing about games to walk into a store and know if their computer can play any given PC game. On the other hand, they know that a game for PS2 will always play on PS2.
My thoughts exactly. It would be exceedingly useful to have a Wikipedia-linked device that is compact and portable, just like the H2G2. And as long as "do not panic" is written across the front, it would sell quite well (even if 90% of the world's population didn't get the joke).
When we reach the level of cheap/free worldwide wireless internet connectivity (whether it be cellular, satellite or WiFi), a device like this would be extremely useful and practical. We're not there yet, but the basic technologies exist. Sometime in the next few years, we're going to see this sort of device arrive. The savings potential for schools is substantial, as the hardware likely would be relatively cheap within a couple of cycles, and licensing the textbooks would almost certainly be cheaper than buying hundreds of hard copies that get lost, stolen, or beaten up within a year or two.
The really surprising thing is that while we have music and movies on portable electronic devices, books (the oldest recorded media format) still haven't been digitized in any significant numbers.
Not to be off topic, but that makes me think the PS3 will be an even harder sell in Europe than it's been in North America. The marketing here focuses so much on the technology that if it weren't displayed in the video game section of your local retailer, most people wouldn't even know it was meant for games. People don't care about the technology, as long as it works.
The Zune is certainly a more technologically capable device than the iPod, but it's not marketed well and isn't getting very good market penetration as a result. For those who have actually had a lot of hands-on experience with it, it's a really great device. Microsoft is firmly committed to the Zune, and will keep improving it and forcing the market to take it seriously over time. With the money that they have, they can afford multi-billion dollar pet projects like this, especially when they view a competitor as a possible "integration" threat. Nobody has really been able to oppose Apple's domination with not just a superior device, but the commitment to keep it updated and market it. I welcome the competition.
If you need to think about trigonometric functions to determine how much milk you're going to drink, maybe the problem is somewhere other than metric vs. imperial.
I do believe that is because the post was entirely true, and not in any way intended to be funny. It was perhaps the most accurately modded comment ever on slashdot.
Given that there is definitive proof of North Korean WMDs (they didn't fake that nuke test), there won't be a traditional land invasion of that country. If it comes time to take out Kim Jong Il, the attack will consist of special forces and a nuclear backup plan.
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How do you define a legitimate military target? How do you differentiate between an insurgent and a terrorist? If you attack a purely civilian target to achieve military ends (i.e. continued bombing of innocent civilians to convince a foreign power to cease the occupation of a country), does that not make the civilians a military target? Since insurgents are often used as a means of achieving a political end, does this not make anything a potentially legitimate military target? What defines an insurgency -- a group of people trained to use lethal force? someone sanctioned by a political body to use that force? al Qaeda is both of those, as is Hezbolah, yet most of the rest of the world considers them terrorist group.s
Was the attack on the Pentagon not an attack on a legitimate military target? Was it not also a terrorist attack?
If you can honestly answer these questions fully without contradicting yourself, then I shall cede that terrorists and insurgents are different.
There was a big spread on Kane & Lynch in Game Informer several months ago. I could've sworn it listed PS3 as one of the target platforms, but I can't seem to locate the issue now. Either way, it's not a big title. The only time exclusivity matters is if the game in question is a potential system seller. Gears of War moved some systems. So did Blue Dragon (in Japan). God of War II definitely sold some PS2s, and definitely kept some PS2s around (quite a few people traded in their PS2 after beating GoW2 and are upgrading to 360s and PS3s). Halo 3 will certainly be a huge system mover.
But the titles that are most troubling for Sony/MS to potentially lose are Final Fantasy XIII (S/E is refusing to confirm that it is PS3 only) and Devil May Cry 4 (which is now 360/PC). There have been rumors of Metal Gear Solid 4's exclusivity being up in the air, but nothing confirmed yet.
The number of exclusives on either platform is going to be small this time around. In fact, only the Wii will have a lot of exclusives, simply by nature of the control scheme and the difficulty in properly porting games between the Wii and anything else.
Some have commented that the "three platforms" should be Wii/360/PS3. This is simply not the case. The Wii is not the same sort of platform as the 360/PS3/PC. Games cannot easily and should not be ported to the Wii. Games must be redesigned from the ground up to work well on the Wii, because as the handful of games out so far have shown, generic ports don't work right on the Wii - they need to fully embrace the new control scheme. The PSP is a fine example of what happens when you don't develop specifically for the platform and instead port simply because you can - you wind up with a lackluster library of games.
I hate to nitpick, but the games released on Sunday, the 22nd. Not today. Not Monday. If you tried to buy them Monday or today, you probably couldn't without a pre-order, since most stores sold out.
I disagree. There is, at this time, no compelling reason to upgrade to Vista. If your employees/IT staff are trained on XP, but not on Vista, you aren't going to be buying Vista machines. As a home user, what do you have to dislike about XP? 95, 98 and ME were all pretty crappy (relatively few people ran Windows 2000 on their home machine), so XP provided a significant improvement. People are generally resistant to change. Vista is change for the sake of change for most home users. Eventually, DX10 gaming will provide reason to upgrade. Linux isn't even on the radar for most home users, and that's largely thanks to XP not being horrible. If it had been a failure of an OS, Linux (and the Mac) would've gained significant traction as users became fed up with Microsoft's buggy software--but it wasn't a failure, and XP was actually pretty stable.
DirectX 10 is the only reason I bothered to get Vista. But it appears that games taking advantage of DX10 are at least a few months away, and games that *require* DX10 are likely not going to show up for a couple of years at least. So until DX10 becomes necessary for a mainstream game, I don't see much interest in a majority of home users for Vista.
Actually a number of developers are looking at the consoles as the primary profit driver thanks to increased piracy on the PC. id has shifted their development focus to the 360/PC, whereas it always used to be the PC, with ports for the consoles being made available later on by third party companies. Now id is talking about simultaneous release on both PC and 360, with the PS3 being a possibility (though last I heard, it wasn't Carmack's focus). Valve is expected to do the same starting with HL 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2. Same for Epic (and many of the myriad games using UE3).
Microsoft isn't losing money on the 360 anymore, either. Sony is the only one losing money on their shiny new console.
Now, the XBOX division itself is still losing money, but that has more to do with the incredible amount of money thrown at developers for support and marketing than it does the hardware. Microsoft didn't make any money from Gears of War, I'd bet. No, they offered Epic a great deal - the best marketing money can buy, and no royalty fees. (That is speculative, but it is not uncommon for deals like that to be made in exchange for exclusives that can help move consoles--which in turn move more software.)
Several months ago, I was waiting to turn left at an intersection. It was a fairly busy one, and there were two left turn lanes (I was in the leftmost, with cars to my right). About 200 meters ahead on the other side of the road were an ambulance and two police cars with lights flashing, attending to an accident. The light never changed from red for nearly fifteen minutes, and the other lights never cycled thanks to the sensor picking up the ambulance and police vehicles with the lights flashing. I was the lead car in the left hand lane, so I finally decided to just make my turn as soon as traffic was clear enough for it. I'm not sure the cops sitting there even noticed, but after looking back, a lot of other cars started to go as well.
Times when running a red light is ok are pretty rare. If the police want to do it in a non-emergency situation, it better be because of fluke occurrences like what many of us have described here.
Oh, it's easy to get the enemy to close their eyes. Just get set their Slashdot comment filter to only show trolls.
I'm sorry, but the "Head-On" commercials are vastly more annoying than the Vonage ones.
However, I now have that Vonage theme song stuck in my head as a result of all these comments. Thanks a lot guys!
Stores change their hours by generally being open longer, not by shifting those hours forward or back.
The only people it screws up are the employees, who then have to get up significantly earlier or get out of work significantly later.
Because in "the rest of the world" (by which you I suspect you actually mean Europe and parts of Asia), public transportation is much more viable and widely used. In the US, public transportation only works for a small percentage of the populous because most people don't (or can't) live near their jobs, or the bus/subway routes don't align with their workplace or home.
If so many changes are needed just to eliminate DST, why the bloody hell would you eliminate DST anyway? I mean seriously, if it cost untold millions for businesses to transition to changing DST by three weeks, what gain is there from eliminating it entirely? You'd now totally invalidate all that money that was just spent and cause everyone to have to do it all over again.
For the love of God, leave DST as it is and don't change it again.
The GBA SP and DS Lite (all colors) are sold out at pretty much all retailers in the greater DC area, and I believe this is the case in many of the larger metropolitan areas.
In regards to the person who mentioned the GameBoy Micro, this is a dead system in the US. The GameBoy Advance SP, however, is still a good seller, though it has little further growth potential with the DS/Lite getting so many new titles.
I would like to say it's not a case of "holding out" on shipments. But it's not just the Wii. The DS and GBA SP are nearly as scarce (taking hours to a day or two to sell out at most stores vs. minutes to an hour or two for the Wii).
A person like Dan DeMatteo doesn't make those kind of statements unless he has legitimate reason to believe them. GameStop is a pretty large corporation, and CEO's of Fortune 400 companies don't blindly make that sort of accusation without there being some truth to it.
There is no real preparing for this. You can prepare for an asteroid, in that you can see it coming, calculate when it will hit, and figure out a way to intercept/divert it (presuming there is enough time).
You can't stop a volcano. At least not with any known technology, and the consequences of altering a volcano could be worse than it going off in the first place.
Preparing for a supervolcano eruption is like preparing for full-out nuclear war. There is no effective recovery plan that isn't a lot of local efforts. The world doesn't have the resources to clean up a disaster of that magnitude in a short amount of time. New Orleans still hasn't been fully cleaned up (let alone rebuilt), and it's been 19 months since Katrina.
Have you been outside of the city? In other parts of the state, the alternative is a very slow Verizon connection or a small-time cable company with HORRIBLE connection speeds. You might think you have it bad there, but really, there are places in the state with much worse options than Comcast and Verizon. In fact, when I moved from the southern part of Lancaster county into the city, my Comcast connection doubled in speed because there was more bandwidth being offered up. Now that I'm out of PA, the options are still pretty limited. But my Comcast speed has doubled again (being in one of the most expensive to live in counties in the country has at least one perk).
I agree that state governments should do more to encourage competition, but many of the alternatives that exist are not able to offer better or faster service. Verizon and Comcast have the capital to directly compete, and when Verizon decides to roll out FIOS on a wider scale, Comcast is going to uncap their bandwidth in a big way.
What, you mean we should multi-task? What do you think this is, Vista?
Possibly the greatest off-topic on-topic post on Slashdot ever.
Possibly.
To be quite honest, selling the PS3 hurts the bottom line more than not selling right now. The last estimate I heard was that 30 software titles or accessories must be sold per system to break even (on the 60GB). This would require purchasing every single title currently available, three extra controllers, and a dozen Blu-Ray movies.
While the long-term view says that they need to sell as many PS3s as possible before the 360 runs away with the game, there is a need to see production costs come down to prevent very substantial financial loss.
Personally, I think that Sony is in serious trouble this year. There are so many very highly anticipated titles coming for the 360 that will almost certainly be system sellers (Halo 3 being the ultimate), and so few coming this year for the PS3. If it takes another year for a system-selling title to come out on PS3, Sony might not even be able to get close to the market share of the 360.
(I don't consider the Wii to be a direct competitor, as it will almost certainly be the #1 selling system by the end of the year. However, for many people it will be a second system. For blockbuster games, the 360 and PS3 are the competitors.)
The reasons so many people are going with consoles instead of computers are:
Multiplayer on one system (thus more directly social)
Larger screen (and increasingly, equal resolution to PC)
Easy setup/compatibility (plug it in, put the disc in, it works)
Simple controls
Easy online play (at least for the Xbox/360.. PS3 is still a question mark)
Consoles are not aimed at "people who can not afford full fledged open hardware", they are aimed at people who want an easy, fun gaming experience. No matter what your personal experience, the PC is the most complicated gaming platform there is. There is still no easy way for a mother who knows nothing about games to walk into a store and know if their computer can play any given PC game. On the other hand, they know that a game for PS2 will always play on PS2.
Apparently, so are spelling lessons.
My thoughts exactly. It would be exceedingly useful to have a Wikipedia-linked device that is compact and portable, just like the H2G2. And as long as "do not panic" is written across the front, it would sell quite well (even if 90% of the world's population didn't get the joke).
When we reach the level of cheap/free worldwide wireless internet connectivity (whether it be cellular, satellite or WiFi), a device like this would be extremely useful and practical. We're not there yet, but the basic technologies exist. Sometime in the next few years, we're going to see this sort of device arrive. The savings potential for schools is substantial, as the hardware likely would be relatively cheap within a couple of cycles, and licensing the textbooks would almost certainly be cheaper than buying hundreds of hard copies that get lost, stolen, or beaten up within a year or two.
The really surprising thing is that while we have music and movies on portable electronic devices, books (the oldest recorded media format) still haven't been digitized in any significant numbers.
Not to be off topic, but that makes me think the PS3 will be an even harder sell in Europe than it's been in North America. The marketing here focuses so much on the technology that if it weren't displayed in the video game section of your local retailer, most people wouldn't even know it was meant for games. People don't care about the technology, as long as it works.
The Zune is certainly a more technologically capable device than the iPod, but it's not marketed well and isn't getting very good market penetration as a result. For those who have actually had a lot of hands-on experience with it, it's a really great device. Microsoft is firmly committed to the Zune, and will keep improving it and forcing the market to take it seriously over time. With the money that they have, they can afford multi-billion dollar pet projects like this, especially when they view a competitor as a possible "integration" threat. Nobody has really been able to oppose Apple's domination with not just a superior device, but the commitment to keep it updated and market it. I welcome the competition.
If you need to think about trigonometric functions to determine how much milk you're going to drink, maybe the problem is somewhere other than metric vs. imperial.
I do believe that is because the post was entirely true, and not in any way intended to be funny. It was perhaps the most accurately modded comment ever on slashdot.
Given that there is definitive proof of North Korean WMDs (they didn't fake that nuke test), there won't be a traditional land invasion of that country. If it comes time to take out Kim Jong Il, the attack will consist of special forces and a nuclear backup plan.