I find it vaguely amusing that Madden is beset with glitches right after EA won the big contract with Microsoft to secure XBox Live! support. I find it much more amusing that ESPN NFL 2K5 is a superior football game for much less. At the game store I work at, we've sold a roughly equal number of the two games. But most of the Madden sales were on release night and in the two days following. I've not heard a single person say that they liked Madden over ESPN after having played both. Not one. That's pretty surprising when you consider how picky a lot of gamers are, especially with football games.
Of course, I enjoy seeing EA Sports suffer a bit, because they pushed out all other competitors, and had a near defacto monopoly on sports titles. It looks like ESPN's $20 gamble has worked, however.
When I received the e-mail confirming the release date at GameStop, I immediately told my boss I needed August 5th and 6th off because of Doom 3. I was actually considering asking off for some additional days, but I kind of need the money, and I'm taking off the week prior to hang out with my best friend in celebration of her 21st birthday.
My cell phone will be off, the windows will be sealed up to prevent any light from getting in, and my 100x5 Sony receiver cranked up, pushing out the wonderful sounds of hell, overcome only by my screams of terror.
The customer is not always right. There are customers who will find loopholes in a company's policy and exploit them, or who will take advantage of the courtesy's of a company. I work at GameStop, and we've had a couple of customers who routinely trade in games a day or two after their public release for cash. Now, we always suggest getting store credit, because the cash is going to be 20% less. But these same people always want the cash, and eventually we found out that they were trading in the same games at multiple stores. They were quite obviously stolen, so we cut them off. Customer always right? I think not.
My only real technical complaint was the tritium stuff. The quantity shown being used was impossible to obtain. No one, including the US or former Soviet government, has ever had that much tritium in one place like that. A few hundred milligrams is probably the most anyone has ever had. Let alone a sphere that probably had a mass of around 1-2kg. And for damn sure, if anyone did have it, the price would be so high as to be somewhere around the collective budget of the US government.
But then, what good is a microscopic amount of tritium going to be as a plot device?
A parent came in to my store (GameStop) the other day to buy a PS2 and a couple of games, and mentioned wanting to buy GTA: Vice City for his 4 year old son when he had some more money. I told him that was a Mature rated game and not something I'd recommend for a kid of that age. Quite frankly, I don't think I could sell it to someone who had just told me they were going to let their 4-year-old play it. That's just plain wrong, and at that age, there can still be very permanent damage done to the child's sense of right and wrong, especially with a game such as Vice City.
Responsibility for the games played by anyone under 17 is up to the parents. Video game makers put ratings on their games, and if parents refuse to care about it (as so many do), then it's not fair to blame the makers.
Unlike microwavable dinners, we can't just nuke it to heat it up. Or can we? While massive use of nuclear detonations on Earth would chill the planet ("nuclear winter"), would the immense release of various gasses and energies actually increase the average temperature of Mars? Not that I would seriously suggest we start our first off-planet colonies with an interplanetary nuclear barrage or anything.
Are you sure you weren't confusing the process of putting the new disc into the display game box? Because no game store in its right mind is going to leave the disc in the box that's on the shelf. At the Gamestop I work at we still have a lot of boxes stolen from the shelves, despite the fact that there is no disc in them. We can write off the loss of the box/instructions (and we give the customer 10% off), but the company isn't going to accept the theft of a couple hundred titles a month. When putting the discs into their cases, the employees are supposed to be careful about it and ensure that it doesn't get scratched up.
The reason that Gamestop and EB always recommend used games? Simple. At Gamestop, if you don't like the game, or have any problem with it, you have seven days to return it. If it's new, and the package has been opened, your only option is to trade it in then, which is going to leave you mad at us because you won't get nearly what you spent. Well, we told you to buy it used, but you didn't listen. Don't blame us. Sheesh.
You can say that EB and Gamestop rip you off all you want, but these companies exist to make a profit. Would you rather not have the option of buying cheaper games? Would you rather not have the option of trading in titles that you're tired of or don't play anymore?
The reason we only give you $20-25 in store credit when you trade in a game that was just recently released is because if we gave you $35-$40, it becomes little more than a really really cheap 1-month rental. Sure, that's not true for a lot of people, but you know, there's enough people out there who abuse the system like that and hence why we have such policies.
For a bunch of geeks and nerds, I'm surprised more people here don't know how game stores function and turn a profit.
I'm sorry, but you're either lying about working for Gamestop or you are just really clueless. As a current employee of Gamestop myself, I can tell you that it should be common knowledge that EB and Gamestop are not the same company. Yes, the POS system is ancient, but you know what? It works.
I don't know what store you worked at, but none of the ones in this district allow any of the ludicrous selling behavior to go on that you described. My manager would chew me out hardcore for forcing a subscription on someone who refused it. And when we don't know the answer to a question, we find out for the customer. We never intentionally mislead a customer. You must have really worked in a seriously messed up store, because that just doesn't happen at any of the local stores.
The reason the PS2/XBOX/Gamecubes are stored in the bathroom is because I believe that's company policy. The bathroom can be locked easily while not preventing access to the back room (which is a pain to get into when it's locked).
In this district, when we have product that isn't moving off the shelves, we ship it to a store that does sell a lot of that product.
As for the subject matter at hand, though, we track the serial numbers of all systems we buy and sell, and while we don't hold merchandise (that wouldn't be very reasonable to do given the volume of trade-ins we get), we do have fairly strict policies regarding suspected stolen merchandise. We get contact information on everyone when they do a trade-in, so in the event of something like this, we could track down the individual and report them to the police. I'm pretty sure EB has the same policy here.
No, Microsoft has kept the NT kernel running on PPC architecture for awhile, but they haven't been releasing it -- there's no reason or need to. It's easy to do it, since the rest of the OS is actually rather flexible. I believe they kept up with the Alpha compatible kernel through 2000 (last official release was 4.0), but stopped doing so because of the lack of new Alpha's. I may be wrong about that, though, as they might have continued to update the kernel as needed for XP.
MS didn't need Virtual PC to do it. MS may, however, use Virtual PC technology to allow the system to be backwards compatible with the first XBOX. Given the rumour of three dual-core PPC processors, it would have more than enough power to emulate a 733MHz P3.
The whole trilogy? Are you out of your mind? Getting anybody in Hollywood to greenlight the film adaptation of the three parts of Lord of the Rings was hard enough, let alone the five books of the H2G2 trilogy.
Not that I wouldn't be lining up for the first showing of each film, mind you.
Excuse me, but if you install such a device in any car that I buy, I will remove it. I don't care if there's a $1000 fine for removing it, because this is by far the most assanine proposal for dealing with drunk drivers I've ever heard of. You want us to do re-tests while driving? Then repeal all laws regarding cell phone usage while driving, because that's probably just as bad. I will not, under any circumstances, wait an extra 30 seconds to start my car. What if it stalls in the middle of an intersection? Then what am I supposed to do? If you want to make it mandatory for DUI offenders, fine, but I don't think it's going to help. But if you expect law-abiding citizens to have to deal with this hassle, you can kiss my ass.
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 11 -- Intel scientists say that they have made silicon chips that can switch light like electricity, blurring the line between computing and communications and presenting a vision of the digital future that will allow computers themselves to span cities or even the entire globe.
Great! I was getting so tired of my computer being only 5lbs and man-portable! I can't wait for these new planet-sized computers. Mine's going to be called the Death Star.
One other thing - the Opteron outselling the Itanium doesn't even consider the sales of the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX, which if combined into the Opteron number probably increase the AMD64 to IA64 ratio to a rediculous level. If current sales trends continue, by the end of 2004, there will be more AMD64 processors than Itaniums in the hands of users. Intel would be wise not to miss the last train out of 32-bit town.
No, Microsoft has done enough development work on this that Intel is being forced to use AMD64. There is no "Intel variant". It's all the same, because Microsoft doesn't like developing for new platforms, and MS has been rumored to have pushed Intel towards this approach. Unlike 3DNow! (which was a great extension, but suplanted by SSE when Intel realized that MMX wasn't that helpful), Intel can't just bring out their own version and expect to get anywhere. For one, there's no technical advantage, but even without considering that, there are far too many users, applications, and other developments that work with AMD64. The Opteron is already outselling the Itanium by better than 2 to 1, and the Itanium has had plenty of time to develop a solid application/support base.
AMD and Intel have cross-licensing out the wazzoo, so there's no concern over that aspect of it.
The only question is whether or not Intel will admit to it being "AMD64" rather than just "x86-64".
In all seriousness, though, this is one of the best ideas I've heard of for dealing with land mine detection and removal. Presuming the color change is visible from the air, aerial recon. photos would give engineers enough detail to know exactly where the mines are, then via GPS, locate and remove them with impressive speed.
Of course, the article didn't say if the coloration was visible from the air or not, so that may not even be possible.
Unfortunately, the Hubble is broken, and it is only though a series of extraordinary shuttle missions that it is even still alive. IIRC, it has already surpassed the projected life span, and has been running on borrowed time for awhile now anyway. Rather than gripe about a great piece of hardware coming to an end, why not celebrate the fact that, unlike some of the more recent space ventures, this one has outperformed its design goals many times over?
Keeping the HST alive beyond the 2008 timeframe would require an aweful lot of money and resources that are just plain better spent elsewhere. The science and images we get from the Webb telescope will make the Hubble look like a child's telescope in comparison.
It is vital to the future of humanity that we have an alternative to living on this planet. The science and technology we develop along the way is going to provide more benefit for society than many people like to acknowledge.
Why would you want to ruin a perfectly good planet like Mars by sending that buffoon there? Wouldn't the Sun be a better location? Or we could let him be the first human to confirm the gravitational pull of a black hole first hand. Er.. wait, I guess he already did that when he stuck his head that far up his ass.
Who's stupid, the guy who "can't write the date", or the guy who can't realize there are so many different ways to write it?
europe: dd/mm/yyyy (eg. 4th of january 2004) us: mm/dd/yyyy (eg. january 4th 2004) iso: yyyy/mm/dd (doesn't read so nicely) us military: yyyymmdd (just to look confusing for civies i think)
There are many ways to write out the date, and if you're going to gripe about something, I believe there are many other issues that are far more worthy of getting a hernia over.
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Er, that analogy sucks. I mean, I get the point, but seriously.. a sex offender?
According to the Game Informer article, it will be for PS3, XBOX 2, and PC.
I find it vaguely amusing that Madden is beset with glitches right after EA won the big contract with Microsoft to secure XBox Live! support. I find it much more amusing that ESPN NFL 2K5 is a superior football game for much less. At the game store I work at, we've sold a roughly equal number of the two games. But most of the Madden sales were on release night and in the two days following. I've not heard a single person say that they liked Madden over ESPN after having played both. Not one. That's pretty surprising when you consider how picky a lot of gamers are, especially with football games.
Of course, I enjoy seeing EA Sports suffer a bit, because they pushed out all other competitors, and had a near defacto monopoly on sports titles. It looks like ESPN's $20 gamble has worked, however.
And thanks for all the awesome images.
When I received the e-mail confirming the release date at GameStop, I immediately told my boss I needed August 5th and 6th off because of Doom 3. I was actually considering asking off for some additional days, but I kind of need the money, and I'm taking off the week prior to hang out with my best friend in celebration of her 21st birthday.
My cell phone will be off, the windows will be sealed up to prevent any light from getting in, and my 100x5 Sony receiver cranked up, pushing out the wonderful sounds of hell, overcome only by my screams of terror.
Am I obsessed? Probably.
Do I care? Nope.
The customer is not always right. There are customers who will find loopholes in a company's policy and exploit them, or who will take advantage of the courtesy's of a company. I work at GameStop, and we've had a couple of customers who routinely trade in games a day or two after their public release for cash. Now, we always suggest getting store credit, because the cash is going to be 20% less. But these same people always want the cash, and eventually we found out that they were trading in the same games at multiple stores. They were quite obviously stolen, so we cut them off. Customer always right? I think not.
My only real technical complaint was the tritium stuff. The quantity shown being used was impossible to obtain. No one, including the US or former Soviet government, has ever had that much tritium in one place like that. A few hundred milligrams is probably the most anyone has ever had. Let alone a sphere that probably had a mass of around 1-2kg. And for damn sure, if anyone did have it, the price would be so high as to be somewhere around the collective budget of the US government.
But then, what good is a microscopic amount of tritium going to be as a plot device?
Maybe you have forgotten that this is meant to be used against aircraft, which can very well have line-of-sight as far as 250 miles off.
Thusly, [b]by definition[/b] the gun does not have to use indirect fire to achieve that range.
A parent came in to my store (GameStop) the other day to buy a PS2 and a couple of games, and mentioned wanting to buy GTA: Vice City for his 4 year old son when he had some more money. I told him that was a Mature rated game and not something I'd recommend for a kid of that age. Quite frankly, I don't think I could sell it to someone who had just told me they were going to let their 4-year-old play it. That's just plain wrong, and at that age, there can still be very permanent damage done to the child's sense of right and wrong, especially with a game such as Vice City.
Responsibility for the games played by anyone under 17 is up to the parents. Video game makers put ratings on their games, and if parents refuse to care about it (as so many do), then it's not fair to blame the makers.
What's really impressive about this is that despite the normal effects of Slashdot, I still got over 300kb/s off that direct video link!
It's "please excuse my dear aunt sally". Clearly you don't remember it correctly.
Unlike microwavable dinners, we can't just nuke it to heat it up. Or can we? While massive use of nuclear detonations on Earth would chill the planet ("nuclear winter"), would the immense release of various gasses and energies actually increase the average temperature of Mars? Not that I would seriously suggest we start our first off-planet colonies with an interplanetary nuclear barrage or anything.
Are you sure you weren't confusing the process of putting the new disc into the display game box? Because no game store in its right mind is going to leave the disc in the box that's on the shelf. At the Gamestop I work at we still have a lot of boxes stolen from the shelves, despite the fact that there is no disc in them. We can write off the loss of the box/instructions (and we give the customer 10% off), but the company isn't going to accept the theft of a couple hundred titles a month. When putting the discs into their cases, the employees are supposed to be careful about it and ensure that it doesn't get scratched up.
The reason that Gamestop and EB always recommend used games? Simple. At Gamestop, if you don't like the game, or have any problem with it, you have seven days to return it. If it's new, and the package has been opened, your only option is to trade it in then, which is going to leave you mad at us because you won't get nearly what you spent. Well, we told you to buy it used, but you didn't listen. Don't blame us. Sheesh.
You can say that EB and Gamestop rip you off all you want, but these companies exist to make a profit. Would you rather not have the option of buying cheaper games? Would you rather not have the option of trading in titles that you're tired of or don't play anymore?
The reason we only give you $20-25 in store credit when you trade in a game that was just recently released is because if we gave you $35-$40, it becomes little more than a really really cheap 1-month rental. Sure, that's not true for a lot of people, but you know, there's enough people out there who abuse the system like that and hence why we have such policies.
For a bunch of geeks and nerds, I'm surprised more people here don't know how game stores function and turn a profit.
I'm sorry, but you're either lying about working for Gamestop or you are just really clueless. As a current employee of Gamestop myself, I can tell you that it should be common knowledge that EB and Gamestop are not the same company. Yes, the POS system is ancient, but you know what? It works.
I don't know what store you worked at, but none of the ones in this district allow any of the ludicrous selling behavior to go on that you described. My manager would chew me out hardcore for forcing a subscription on someone who refused it. And when we don't know the answer to a question, we find out for the customer. We never intentionally mislead a customer. You must have really worked in a seriously messed up store, because that just doesn't happen at any of the local stores.
The reason the PS2/XBOX/Gamecubes are stored in the bathroom is because I believe that's company policy. The bathroom can be locked easily while not preventing access to the back room (which is a pain to get into when it's locked).
In this district, when we have product that isn't moving off the shelves, we ship it to a store that does sell a lot of that product.
As for the subject matter at hand, though, we track the serial numbers of all systems we buy and sell, and while we don't hold merchandise (that wouldn't be very reasonable to do given the volume of trade-ins we get), we do have fairly strict policies regarding suspected stolen merchandise. We get contact information on everyone when they do a trade-in, so in the event of something like this, we could track down the individual and report them to the police. I'm pretty sure EB has the same policy here.
No, Microsoft has kept the NT kernel running on PPC architecture for awhile, but they haven't been releasing it -- there's no reason or need to. It's easy to do it, since the rest of the OS is actually rather flexible. I believe they kept up with the Alpha compatible kernel through 2000 (last official release was 4.0), but stopped doing so because of the lack of new Alpha's. I may be wrong about that, though, as they might have continued to update the kernel as needed for XP.
MS didn't need Virtual PC to do it. MS may, however, use Virtual PC technology to allow the system to be backwards compatible with the first XBOX. Given the rumour of three dual-core PPC processors, it would have more than enough power to emulate a 733MHz P3.
The whole trilogy? Are you out of your mind? Getting anybody in Hollywood to greenlight the film adaptation of the three parts of Lord of the Rings was hard enough, let alone the five books of the H2G2 trilogy.
Not that I wouldn't be lining up for the first showing of each film, mind you.
Excuse me, but if you install such a device in any car that I buy, I will remove it. I don't care if there's a $1000 fine for removing it, because this is by far the most assanine proposal for dealing with drunk drivers I've ever heard of. You want us to do re-tests while driving? Then repeal all laws regarding cell phone usage while driving, because that's probably just as bad. I will not, under any circumstances, wait an extra 30 seconds to start my car. What if it stalls in the middle of an intersection? Then what am I supposed to do? If you want to make it mandatory for DUI offenders, fine, but I don't think it's going to help. But if you expect law-abiding citizens to have to deal with this hassle, you can kiss my ass.
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 11 -- Intel scientists say that they have made silicon chips that can switch light like electricity, blurring the line between computing and communications and presenting a vision of the digital future that will allow computers themselves to span cities or even the entire globe.
Great! I was getting so tired of my computer being only 5lbs and man-portable! I can't wait for these new planet-sized computers. Mine's going to be called the Death Star.
One other thing - the Opteron outselling the Itanium doesn't even consider the sales of the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX, which if combined into the Opteron number probably increase the AMD64 to IA64 ratio to a rediculous level. If current sales trends continue, by the end of 2004, there will be more AMD64 processors than Itaniums in the hands of users. Intel would be wise not to miss the last train out of 32-bit town.
No, Microsoft has done enough development work on this that Intel is being forced to use AMD64. There is no "Intel variant". It's all the same, because Microsoft doesn't like developing for new platforms, and MS has been rumored to have pushed Intel towards this approach. Unlike 3DNow! (which was a great extension, but suplanted by SSE when Intel realized that MMX wasn't that helpful), Intel can't just bring out their own version and expect to get anywhere. For one, there's no technical advantage, but even without considering that, there are far too many users, applications, and other developments that work with AMD64. The Opteron is already outselling the Itanium by better than 2 to 1, and the Itanium has had plenty of time to develop a solid application/support base.
AMD and Intel have cross-licensing out the wazzoo, so there's no concern over that aspect of it.
The only question is whether or not Intel will admit to it being "AMD64" rather than just "x86-64".
Well, now we can do both.
In all seriousness, though, this is one of the best ideas I've heard of for dealing with land mine detection and removal. Presuming the color change is visible from the air, aerial recon. photos would give engineers enough detail to know exactly where the mines are, then via GPS, locate and remove them with impressive speed.
Of course, the article didn't say if the coloration was visible from the air or not, so that may not even be possible.
Unfortunately, the Hubble is broken, and it is only though a series of extraordinary shuttle missions that it is even still alive. IIRC, it has already surpassed the projected life span, and has been running on borrowed time for awhile now anyway. Rather than gripe about a great piece of hardware coming to an end, why not celebrate the fact that, unlike some of the more recent space ventures, this one has outperformed its design goals many times over?
Keeping the HST alive beyond the 2008 timeframe would require an aweful lot of money and resources that are just plain better spent elsewhere. The science and images we get from the Webb telescope will make the Hubble look like a child's telescope in comparison.
It is vital to the future of humanity that we have an alternative to living on this planet. The science and technology we develop along the way is going to provide more benefit for society than many people like to acknowledge.
Why would you want to ruin a perfectly good planet like Mars by sending that buffoon there? Wouldn't the Sun be a better location? Or we could let him be the first human to confirm the gravitational pull of a black hole first hand. Er.. wait, I guess he already did that when he stuck his head that far up his ass.
Who's stupid, the guy who "can't write the date", or the guy who can't realize there are so many different ways to write it?
europe: dd/mm/yyyy (eg. 4th of january 2004)
us: mm/dd/yyyy (eg. january 4th 2004)
iso: yyyy/mm/dd (doesn't read so nicely)
us military: yyyymmdd (just to look confusing for civies i think)
There are many ways to write out the date, and if you're going to gripe about something, I believe there are many other issues that are far more worthy of getting a hernia over.
They can cure cancer but they can't cure the common cold?!