The map design is better, the graphics are improved (espe lighting), some of the "fight your way through a building" which in HL2 were... well, not tedious, but samey, now have more tension in them simply through the way the levels are designed.
You end up with some very panoramic or otherwise impressive views because of the way they are designed as well, and Episode 2 seems like it will continue that.
The gameplay is less varied, mostly because HL2 had several "episodes" to it (eg the driving), and this is smaller, but what is there, is better. It feels like the environment interacts more (more audio, especially the tannoy system announcements), more atmosphere. And rather than meeting a whole variety of characters, the play is more about you and Alex exploring together - the AI is very good both at playing Alex in gunfights, and making her interaction with you seem genuine, and warm as ever.
If you liked HL2, you'll find more beautiful environments, neat puzzles, good atmosphere, higher quality than the original HL2. (I replayed it just before EP1 came out so it was fresh, and recommend that)
It's short(ish), but don't race through it, savour it. It's certainly good value for money.
A common argument for the high price of the PS3 is that "hey, it includes a blu-ray player!" Which is true, and changes something.
The PS3 isn't the most expensive console, rather, it is the cheapest available Blu-ray player.
So not only does Sony have part of the market for the next-gen console market with the PS3, but it also has the vast majority of the HD-video market as well.
The sales figures are testament more to the fact that nobody wants HD video at the moment, and forcing people to take it in a bundle is crucifying them. The PS3 may be better than the 360 (the games look about the same to me), but it costs $300 more (at least here in the UK) - that's a lot to a gamer. You can make a car with a gold steering wheel for an extra $50,000, but if nobody *wants* a gold steering wheel, then your car isn't going to sell at all, as good as it is, unless you can sell if without the steering wheel.
I suggest you ask Nouveau whether that is as easy as you make it sound.;)
Anyone who pays attention to the video market knows that drivers can make or break a card, and often driver updates cause significant performance increases. Look at some of the early Detonator releases, or the alternative drivers released for 3d cards (such as OmegaDrivers). They are not simplistic or simple.
This is exactly the attitude I'm talking about - the notion that anything you don't like is "oppressing" you, keeping you down. Yeah, stick it to the man!
So you don't like the license a piece of software is released under? You think you have the right to it under a license of your choice. You don't like the DVD with ads in it. So perhaps you should "tinker, duplicate, share" it, as you put it, by removing them and spreading the DVD without them? What about the boring bit in the middle of the movie, perhaps remove that to? After all, it's oppressing you, and you're not going to be bound by the contract. You're coming across like some kid who goes into McDonalds and wants the Happy Meal, but insists on a quarter pounder instead of nuggets, an icecream instead of fries, and a large milkshake, because that is the way you want it, so they MUST give it to you.
No-one is stopping you having an open source 3d driver for your nVidia card. You can write one yourself. But you're telling some company that they have to sell you their product on your terms. And then probably support your driver after you've hacked it to bits. By all means, vote with your wallet, if they don't cater to your tastes, don't buy their product. I hate DVD adverts as much as the next guy, but I understand that it's their business model, and I can either buy it or not. To tell them to not do it because I don't like it is tantamount to telling a musician they HAVE to sell me their new album without tracks 2, 3 and 5 because I don't like them.
I'd like to see you become a creator of content that your livelihood (and that of your family) depends on, then accept someone trying to rip up the way you want to sell it, because it doesn't suit them. You have *choice*, and you have the ability to do your own thing. Your demands others behave the way you want is spectacularily similar to the worst company attitudes about how they want their consumers to behave.
As for how long I've been on Slashdot? If you can't work that out, you MUST be new here.
You're saying that it will cost NVidia (and others) money to open source their drivers.
Not exactly - that it cost them money to develop the drivers, including their own R&D into how to best squeeze performance out of their cards, and gain an edge over their competitors. This is highly sensitive information and undoubtedly cost them a lot to develop. To open source their drivers would be to give this all away to their competitors, who you can be sure would be the first to look at the code.
As good as the open source environment is, they do not have the specialists or the resources to develop a cutting-edge product which is, after all, exactly what the video card market is.
The fact that there are a lot of people out there who want nothing but OSS on their machines is only one issue. I would _prefer_ an OSS driver, but I _want_ a working driver that's at least up to par with the Windows version.
Which is the boat I'm in. I'm thankful they spent the effort to make (closed) Linux drivers at all, but I'm finding it hard understanding seriously gimping your system rather than run a closed-source driver, which was the attitude of the original post I responded to.
Why do you _expect_ a company to do business according to your own rules?
Sure, you can vote with your wallet, but it seems to me demanding that a company release their drivers in open source (and let's not forget, that probably contains a vast amount of work they spent their own R&D budget on) is expecting a huge amount of work from them, in return for a small amount of convenience for you.
I'm just wondering why so many open source users have disdain for companies not open sourcing their software when it is potentially against their aims to do so. I mean, to the exclusion of actually using the software which could make their computer experience better. Surely we haven't got that many mini-RMSes?
...which was yesterday. If anyone had a problem with content for any of the photos they had taken, they would remove it on request.
What they're doing is not illegal, as other posters have pointed out, and they seem pretty receptive to the privacy concerns. Kudos to them for doing something very useful with some sort of conscience.
Ever since the PS2 (that seems to be the watershed for me), the damn things have become stupidly unwieldy. I hate the analogue sticks on the PS2 Dual Shock. Not per se, but they just make the whole thing so cramped. As for shoulder buttons... one each side is permissable, but what idiot decided TWO could fit on there comfortably? The damn thing feels more like a chinese finger-trap than a fun controller.
I also don't like the 4-button diamond layout that started with the SNES controller and has persisted. The thumb has one comfortable axis to play with and keep uniform button-pressing movement - side to side. Thus the three-buttons-in-a-row structure is far better.
Certainly large amounts of buttons are more easily accessible on arcade games (I've never had a problem with Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, etc), but as you're using your fingers, palm-down to access them, that's far better than trying to hit 4 - or even 6! As per the Saturn for instance - with one thumb.
I play PC games more than console games, so I'm familiar with using a good 15-20 buttons to play Counter strike, World of Warcraft, what have you - but the layout of a keyboard is so much better for that than a cramp-inducing controller. It's not the complexity of what's involved, but the fact that your most useful digits are tucked away gripping the controller, and you're expected to hit 12 buttons and 3 directional pads/sticks with your two thumbs that is dumb.
Having said that, I love the Wiimote. Aside from the jumping-about-waving aspect, its design limits you by necessity to not using more than 2-3 buttons, which is great. The Nunchuk could use one mess "shoulder button", but it's forgivable.
I'm seeing a lot of games here that have one enduring factor - and very few games have more than one. So I have a choice of a few for each sort of entertainment I'd want.
Half-life, with CS/TFC - Action. The best AI, the best ever multiplayer mods (with bots if no internet access). I'd be tempted to go for HL2 for the improved physics and obviously graphics, but I'll wait to see whether TF2 is any good first.
Tribes 2 - Action. For the most sublime CTF style gameplay ever.
Sid Meier's Pirates - Adventure. In particular, I like games where it isn't possible to complete the whole thing in one go, and you have to pick and choose your route. This has everything though, from strategy and management to arcade-style action and exploration/discovery in an ever-changing world. And even RPG style elements! I'd actually take this over Civilisation, as while less deep, it covers more ground and feels more complete to me as a result.
Kick Off 2, with my old Quickshot II Turbo joystick on the Amiga.
If online play is a possibility, it'd have to be World of Warcraft. It's possible to spend so much time in that you may as well be on a desert island anyway! It's unparallelled in MMORPG stakes, with the perfect learning curve (so much so that it's actually worth playing other classes up), variation in play between roles, the most enormous world to explore, many different routes through the game, both PvE and PvP.
yeah, now you pay $10 a month to do the exact same thing you described. at least in DQ you didn't get pestered by gold sellers and noobs begging for a "boost".
A company using money gained from another field in order to price something artificially low so as to stifle competition - i thought that was monopolistic and anti-competitive. Certainly supermarkets (here in the Uk at least) are prohibited from selling things artificially lower than cost in order to force out small businesses - why doesn't the same apply here?
If Apple happened to ONLY make iPods, and Microsoft subsidised the Zune's sales, wouldn't they be trying to force Apple out of the market, by using their huge capital gained from software? That sounds illegal to me.
...with "Internet browsing". Of course, they MEANT using a web browser to view web pages, but the act of "browsing" is not explicit to the web. So, it can apply to any activity of searching and sampling content from the Internet. I think everything from Usenet to BitTorrent would be covered by that.
I agree with you entirely, but it doesn't take much muscle power to do 95% of the functionality 95% of this software's users will require. crop, resize, brightness/contrast, red-eye removal, etc. i don't think people are talking about trying to fully process 100-layer 600dpi posters with stacks of filters through this. i'd pity anyone who tries:)
fwiw, I'm a flex/as3 and java developer, and find the two comparable in performance when written well. make of that what you will;)
Between this and the other threads talking about Photoshop moving "online", there is a hell of a lot of misconception that surprises me from this crowd.
No, these clients don't do the image processing on the remote server. Yes, it would take masses of bandwidth. They use simple, easy to implement algorithms that run on the client machine. Most of these are written in Flash, hell, Photoshop Online will be written in Flex. Why bother making a heavyweight client app, then send the images to the server for processing each time?
that's on launch. the ipod was pretty expensive when it first came out too.
almost all phones do mp3 playback already. went shopping for a new phone for my girl just yesterday, and the entry level pay as you go one that cost £10 (yes, £10!) did it. probably badly, but it did it.
when they're shifting tons of these things, the costs will come down significantly. it doesn't cost much for the phone electronics, as the above example shows. i suspect it will be absorbed into the price and size of the ipod at some point - one quarter or year, rather than get a price and physical size cut in the ipod, you'll get a phone added in. it will be the only device they make, and that'll be it.
personally i'll be happy for the convenience.
people will bitch that "i don't need a phone" or "i don't need an mp3 player", but most people need a phone, and most people need an mp3 player. i'd really like a single device that can do both *well*. if you're one of those, who's probably complaining right now about extra ipod functionality that you wouldn't use, you don't have to buy it.
I could work for google, have a google wife, 2.5 google kids, live in a google house, drive to google in my google car, drop of my laundry of google brand clothes at the google dry cleaners, eat at the googleteria, taking a break at 5 to go to the google bar to share a few drinks with my google friends, pick the kids up from google school, and head out for a night at the google opera with my google wife.
this reminds me of a woefully uneducated american couple who visited my family, in italy, several years ago. the wife was a fashion victim, so spent the whole time there shopping at fashionable places, picking up armani, valentino, gucci, and the like. except she pronounced gucci "gookie". so one day, she came over saying "...and we went to the via veneto and i picked up a gookie bag and some gookie shoes, then...."
One day won't there be little nanobots floating around with 512 bytes of memory and a 1 mhz processor that need to buzz around your body and eat up your precancerous cells?
Now I'm picturing something like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, only with ZX81s.
I've been wanting to do this for a while too. I'm in the same situation with about 10 gigs of MP3s (r3mix or preset extreme) I have about 2,000 CDs I want to (re-)encode, and only want to do it once.
My ideal setup would be: Have a bunch of lossless files on a portable harddrive Have a portable media player that can play high-quality lossy files Have an "update" process, that when I move music to the portable media player, automatically encodes it to the lossy system, so I can fit more onto it, but keep the lossless files on the harddrive for reference.
now, iTunes seemed to do that for me, with Apple Lossless/AAC, and from what I've read (I've not tried it out), it seemed to have a transcoding setting as above too. What I'd like to know is, confirmation of whether it does or not, and whether any other solutions have the ease-of-use and convenience of doing the lot automagically when I want. When I want to sync my music, I want to drag a bunch of files and have it know i want it to change it from lossless to lossy, and not have to fiddle with shell scripts or anything else like that. I'm all for low-maintenance solutions.
And hi to any PJB-100 users out there, I'm finally outgrowing mine and going for a player smaller than a brick:)
With 1/4 of the market, Sony is not going to attract many exclusives - if they had 60% of the market, they probably could. But right now it would be folly to ignore 75% of your market by going exclusive to the console maker with the smallest target audience.
This is absolutely correct, and the parent's parent is as exactly woefully mistaken as Coke wanted them to be.
Coke did not go from Coke to New Coke and then go "oh noes, we are losing all the profits" and change back to Coke Classic for the consumer - that's exactly what they wanted to happen, to have people think - to think they had "won" and got old Coke back. Coke won, and they didn't get old Coke back.
The change in formula the parent refers to is a simple one - replacing sugar with corn syrup. A slight change in taste, but a much cheaper product, saving Coke somewhere around a cent a can - a HUGE amount of money. They couldn't just foist this on people, as it did taste slightly different, and people would notice the change, and complain.
So, they changed the formula of Coke to new Coke (I'm not sure whether New Coke had corn syrup or sugar in it), then waited a few years for all the Coke to disappear, for people to forget what it was exactly like... then brought in Coke Classic, aka Old Coke but Cheaper. Consumers get to feel like the won and get their "old" product back, Coke gets to gloat smugly and quietly and rake in the profits. And credit to them, it was a brave and amazigly shrewd bit of business.
I don't think this has anything to do with the original thread anymore, but it's a good thing to know:)
Slashdot Mirror
The map design is better, the graphics are improved (espe lighting), some of the "fight your way through a building" which in HL2 were... well, not tedious, but samey, now have more tension in them simply through the way the levels are designed.
You end up with some very panoramic or otherwise impressive views because of the way they are designed as well, and Episode 2 seems like it will continue that.
The gameplay is less varied, mostly because HL2 had several "episodes" to it (eg the driving), and this is smaller, but what is there, is better. It feels like the environment interacts more (more audio, especially the tannoy system announcements), more atmosphere. And rather than meeting a whole variety of characters, the play is more about you and Alex exploring together - the AI is very good both at playing Alex in gunfights, and making her interaction with you seem genuine, and warm as ever.
If you liked HL2, you'll find more beautiful environments, neat puzzles, good atmosphere, higher quality than the original HL2. (I replayed it just before EP1 came out so it was fresh, and recommend that)
It's short(ish), but don't race through it, savour it. It's certainly good value for money.
A common argument for the high price of the PS3 is that "hey, it includes a blu-ray player!" Which is true, and changes something.
The PS3 isn't the most expensive console, rather, it is the cheapest available Blu-ray player.
So not only does Sony have part of the market for the next-gen console market with the PS3, but it also has the vast majority of the HD-video market as well.
The sales figures are testament more to the fact that nobody wants HD video at the moment, and forcing people to take it in a bundle is crucifying them. The PS3 may be better than the 360 (the games look about the same to me), but it costs $300 more (at least here in the UK) - that's a lot to a gamer. You can make a car with a gold steering wheel for an extra $50,000, but if nobody *wants* a gold steering wheel, then your car isn't going to sell at all, as good as it is, unless you can sell if without the steering wheel.
I suggest you ask Nouveau whether that is as easy as you make it sound. ;)
Anyone who pays attention to the video market knows that drivers can make or break a card, and often driver updates cause significant performance increases. Look at some of the early Detonator releases, or the alternative drivers released for 3d cards (such as OmegaDrivers). They are not simplistic or simple.
This is exactly the attitude I'm talking about - the notion that anything you don't like is "oppressing" you, keeping you down. Yeah, stick it to the man!
So you don't like the license a piece of software is released under? You think you have the right to it under a license of your choice. You don't like the DVD with ads in it. So perhaps you should "tinker, duplicate, share" it, as you put it, by removing them and spreading the DVD without them? What about the boring bit in the middle of the movie, perhaps remove that to? After all, it's oppressing you, and you're not going to be bound by the contract. You're coming across like some kid who goes into McDonalds and wants the Happy Meal, but insists on a quarter pounder instead of nuggets, an icecream instead of fries, and a large milkshake, because that is the way you want it, so they MUST give it to you.
No-one is stopping you having an open source 3d driver for your nVidia card. You can write one yourself. But you're telling some company that they have to sell you their product on your terms. And then probably support your driver after you've hacked it to bits. By all means, vote with your wallet, if they don't cater to your tastes, don't buy their product. I hate DVD adverts as much as the next guy, but I understand that it's their business model, and I can either buy it or not. To tell them to not do it because I don't like it is tantamount to telling a musician they HAVE to sell me their new album without tracks 2, 3 and 5 because I don't like them.
I'd like to see you become a creator of content that your livelihood (and that of your family) depends on, then accept someone trying to rip up the way you want to sell it, because it doesn't suit them. You have *choice*, and you have the ability to do your own thing. Your demands others behave the way you want is spectacularily similar to the worst company attitudes about how they want their consumers to behave.
As for how long I've been on Slashdot? If you can't work that out, you MUST be new here.
You're saying that it will cost NVidia (and others) money to open source their drivers.
Not exactly - that it cost them money to develop the drivers, including their own R&D into how to best squeeze performance out of their cards, and gain an edge over their competitors. This is highly sensitive information and undoubtedly cost them a lot to develop. To open source their drivers would be to give this all away to their competitors, who you can be sure would be the first to look at the code.
As good as the open source environment is, they do not have the specialists or the resources to develop a cutting-edge product which is, after all, exactly what the video card market is.
The fact that there are a lot of people out there who want nothing but OSS on their machines is only one issue. I would _prefer_ an OSS driver, but I _want_ a working driver that's at least up to par with the Windows version.
Which is the boat I'm in. I'm thankful they spent the effort to make (closed) Linux drivers at all, but I'm finding it hard understanding seriously gimping your system rather than run a closed-source driver, which was the attitude of the original post I responded to.
Why do you _expect_ a company to do business according to your own rules?
Sure, you can vote with your wallet, but it seems to me demanding that a company release their drivers in open source (and let's not forget, that probably contains a vast amount of work they spent their own R&D budget on) is expecting a huge amount of work from them, in return for a small amount of convenience for you.
I'm just wondering why so many open source users have disdain for companies not open sourcing their software when it is potentially against their aims to do so. I mean, to the exclusion of actually using the software which could make their computer experience better. Surely we haven't got that many mini-RMSes?
Fair point, have to say I hadn't seen that.
...which was yesterday. If anyone had a problem with content for any of the photos they had taken, they would remove it on request.
What they're doing is not illegal, as other posters have pointed out, and they seem pretty receptive to the privacy concerns. Kudos to them for doing something very useful with some sort of conscience.
Ever since the PS2 (that seems to be the watershed for me), the damn things have become stupidly unwieldy. I hate the analogue sticks on the PS2 Dual Shock. Not per se, but they just make the whole thing so cramped. As for shoulder buttons... one each side is permissable, but what idiot decided TWO could fit on there comfortably? The damn thing feels more like a chinese finger-trap than a fun controller.
I also don't like the 4-button diamond layout that started with the SNES controller and has persisted. The thumb has one comfortable axis to play with and keep uniform button-pressing movement - side to side. Thus the three-buttons-in-a-row structure is far better.
Certainly large amounts of buttons are more easily accessible on arcade games (I've never had a problem with Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, etc), but as you're using your fingers, palm-down to access them, that's far better than trying to hit 4 - or even 6! As per the Saturn for instance - with one thumb.
I play PC games more than console games, so I'm familiar with using a good 15-20 buttons to play Counter strike, World of Warcraft, what have you - but the layout of a keyboard is so much better for that than a cramp-inducing controller. It's not the complexity of what's involved, but the fact that your most useful digits are tucked away gripping the controller, and you're expected to hit 12 buttons and 3 directional pads/sticks with your two thumbs that is dumb.
Having said that, I love the Wiimote. Aside from the jumping-about-waving aspect, its design limits you by necessity to not using more than 2-3 buttons, which is great. The Nunchuk could use one mess "shoulder button", but it's forgivable.
There is a cute "family tree" of controllers available here: http://www.axess.com/twilight/console/
I'm seeing a lot of games here that have one enduring factor - and very few games have more than one. So I have a choice of a few for each sort of entertainment I'd want.
Half-life, with CS/TFC - Action. The best AI, the best ever multiplayer mods (with bots if no internet access). I'd be tempted to go for HL2 for the improved physics and obviously graphics, but I'll wait to see whether TF2 is any good first.
Tribes 2 - Action. For the most sublime CTF style gameplay ever.
Sid Meier's Pirates - Adventure. In particular, I like games where it isn't possible to complete the whole thing in one go, and you have to pick and choose your route. This has everything though, from strategy and management to arcade-style action and exploration/discovery in an ever-changing world. And even RPG style elements! I'd actually take this over Civilisation, as while less deep, it covers more ground and feels more complete to me as a result.
Kick Off 2, with my old Quickshot II Turbo joystick on the Amiga.
If online play is a possibility, it'd have to be World of Warcraft. It's possible to spend so much time in that you may as well be on a desert island anyway! It's unparallelled in MMORPG stakes, with the perfect learning curve (so much so that it's actually worth playing other classes up), variation in play between roles, the most enormous world to explore, many different routes through the game, both PvE and PvP.
yeah, now you pay $10 a month to do the exact same thing you described. at least in DQ you didn't get pestered by gold sellers and noobs begging for a "boost".
But my crystal ball says...
Doesn't that jingle against your keys when you walk?
A company using money gained from another field in order to price something artificially low so as to stifle competition - i thought that was monopolistic and anti-competitive. Certainly supermarkets (here in the Uk at least) are prohibited from selling things artificially lower than cost in order to force out small businesses - why doesn't the same apply here?
If Apple happened to ONLY make iPods, and Microsoft subsidised the Zune's sales, wouldn't they be trying to force Apple out of the market, by using their huge capital gained from software? That sounds illegal to me.
...with "Internet browsing". Of course, they MEANT using a web browser to view web pages, but the act of "browsing" is not explicit to the web. So, it can apply to any activity of searching and sampling content from the Internet. I think everything from Usenet to BitTorrent would be covered by that.
Optimist: The thumb drive is half empty! Pessimist: The thumb drive is half full...
Engineer: The capacity of the thumb drive is inconsistent with data retention requirements.
I agree with you entirely, but it doesn't take much muscle power to do 95% of the functionality 95% of this software's users will require. crop, resize, brightness/contrast, red-eye removal, etc. i don't think people are talking about trying to fully process 100-layer 600dpi posters with stacks of filters through this. i'd pity anyone who tries :)
;)
fwiw, I'm a flex/as3 and java developer, and find the two comparable in performance when written well. make of that what you will
Between this and the other threads talking about Photoshop moving "online", there is a hell of a lot of misconception that surprises me from this crowd.
No, these clients don't do the image processing on the remote server. Yes, it would take masses of bandwidth. They use simple, easy to implement algorithms that run on the client machine. Most of these are written in Flash, hell, Photoshop Online will be written in Flex. Why bother making a heavyweight client app, then send the images to the server for processing each time?
They're not.
It runs on the client-side.
This isn't difficult to understand.
that's on launch. the ipod was pretty expensive when it first came out too.
almost all phones do mp3 playback already. went shopping for a new phone for my girl just yesterday, and the entry level pay as you go one that cost £10 (yes, £10!) did it. probably badly, but it did it.
when they're shifting tons of these things, the costs will come down significantly. it doesn't cost much for the phone electronics, as the above example shows. i suspect it will be absorbed into the price and size of the ipod at some point - one quarter or year, rather than get a price and physical size cut in the ipod, you'll get a phone added in. it will be the only device they make, and that'll be it.
personally i'll be happy for the convenience.
people will bitch that "i don't need a phone" or "i don't need an mp3 player", but most people need a phone, and most people need an mp3 player. i'd really like a single device that can do both *well*. if you're one of those, who's probably complaining right now about extra ipod functionality that you wouldn't use, you don't have to buy it.
I could work for google, have a google wife, 2.5 google kids, live in a google house, drive to google in my google car, drop of my laundry of google brand clothes at the google dry cleaners, eat at the googleteria, taking a break at 5 to go to the google bar to share a few drinks with my google friends, pick the kids up from google school, and head out for a night at the google opera with my google wife.
this reminds me of a woefully uneducated american couple who visited my family, in italy, several years ago. the wife was a fashion victim, so spent the whole time there shopping at fashionable places, picking up armani, valentino, gucci, and the like. except she pronounced gucci "gookie". so one day, she came over saying "...and we went to the via veneto and i picked up a gookie bag and some gookie shoes, then...."
One day won't there be little nanobots floating around with 512 bytes of memory and a 1 mhz processor that need to buzz around your body and eat up your precancerous cells?
Now I'm picturing something like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, only with ZX81s.
...they just grabbed another one sitting on the store shelves, glad to be able to shift it ;)
I've been wanting to do this for a while too. I'm in the same situation with about 10 gigs of MP3s (r3mix or preset extreme) I have about 2,000 CDs I want to (re-)encode, and only want to do it once.
:)
My ideal setup would be:
Have a bunch of lossless files on a portable harddrive
Have a portable media player that can play high-quality lossy files
Have an "update" process, that when I move music to the portable media player, automatically encodes it to the lossy system, so I can fit more onto it, but keep the lossless files on the harddrive for reference.
now, iTunes seemed to do that for me, with Apple Lossless/AAC, and from what I've read (I've not tried it out), it seemed to have a transcoding setting as above too. What I'd like to know is, confirmation of whether it does or not, and whether any other solutions have the ease-of-use and convenience of doing the lot automagically when I want. When I want to sync my music, I want to drag a bunch of files and have it know i want it to change it from lossless to lossy, and not have to fiddle with shell scripts or anything else like that. I'm all for low-maintenance solutions.
And hi to any PJB-100 users out there, I'm finally outgrowing mine and going for a player smaller than a brick
farm out all these tasks to people playing The Sims online, who will pay money in order to do them!
Gentlemen, I think we have found the notorious Step 2 that comes before profit.
January's sales were:
Wii 45%
360 30%
PS3 25%
With 1/4 of the market, Sony is not going to attract many exclusives - if they had 60% of the market, they probably could. But right now it would be folly to ignore 75% of your market by going exclusive to the console maker with the smallest target audience.
This is absolutely correct, and the parent's parent is as exactly woefully mistaken as Coke wanted them to be.
:)
Coke did not go from Coke to New Coke and then go "oh noes, we are losing all the profits" and change back to Coke Classic for the consumer - that's exactly what they wanted to happen, to have people think - to think they had "won" and got old Coke back. Coke won, and they didn't get old Coke back.
The change in formula the parent refers to is a simple one - replacing sugar with corn syrup. A slight change in taste, but a much cheaper product, saving Coke somewhere around a cent a can - a HUGE amount of money. They couldn't just foist this on people, as it did taste slightly different, and people would notice the change, and complain.
So, they changed the formula of Coke to new Coke (I'm not sure whether New Coke had corn syrup or sugar in it), then waited a few years for all the Coke to disappear, for people to forget what it was exactly like... then brought in Coke Classic, aka Old Coke but Cheaper. Consumers get to feel like the won and get their "old" product back, Coke gets to gloat smugly and quietly and rake in the profits. And credit to them, it was a brave and amazigly shrewd bit of business.
I don't think this has anything to do with the original thread anymore, but it's a good thing to know