And if you believe a publicly traded corporation, one that many would argue has gotten nastier WRT to identity and free speech as they go along, won't manipulate this when the "facts" go against their corporate agenda? I have some magic beans you might be interested in.
Uhhh...unless I'm mistaken the USA hasn't used RTGs as power sources except in deep space for precisely this very reason, too risky if something goes BOOM!
OTOH the Soviets had a serious love affair with RTGs, they used 'em on LEO sats, used 'em in their arctic bases, even ran lighthouses with RTGs. They cranked out so many RTGs they honestly no longer know where they are all located, so many were used in the former USSR that there is no telling how many abandoned stations in Bumfuckistan have RTGs lying around waiting for some fool to kill himself trying to steal the metals in the casing.
Interesting? Really mods? Everybody forget Occam's razor? This thing was the OLDEST one the military had that was still "functioning" and by functioning they meant it was parked as a back up for the last NINE YEARS.
So you have a device in one of the most inhospitable places we know of, WELL past its prime, sitting in a holding pattern with minimal power strictly as a backup. So what would one say most likely using Occam's razor? That the thing has been deteriorating for over a decade and that when somebody fired up the engines they went BOOM! and took the bird with it. Considering how old it was? Not only is this most likely it really isn't even surprising, after all you ARE talking about trying to perform a controlled release of highly pressurized gas from a sat that has been beaten by micro meteors and exposed to insane temp variations since Clinton was POTUS.
Now which is more likely, the US military risked setting off a chain reaction and fucking up their satnav network just to test a laser, or they tried to move the thing and it ripped itself apart?
When most legit sites are accused of corruption? They show what steps they have taken to show they are not. Kotaku says we are just for entertainment so it doesn't matter which frankly says all anybody who ISN'T an SJW needs to know.
As for the rest of the "la la la, you are wrong, no proof you are wrong" all you have shown is you are a hardcore SJW and therefor there is no point even bothering to waste a few minutes to speak to you, you already believe your political narrative and if Jesus Christ came down and said "you are wrong" you would accuse him of being gender biased, good day.
Then you have only yourself to blame as Sony TRIED that, offering to sell its Viao line 100% bloatware free, you only had to pay $50 difference to make up what they were losing by not including the bloatware, what happened?
OMG get out of the way, here comes the waaaambulance as everyone ran to bitch and moan about actually having to pay full price for things, ZOMG the bastards! After 6 months where less than 3% actually paid the difference Sony quietly gave up, realizing that if given the choice between bloatware and cheaper or clean and more expensive? Well screw that $50, bring on the crapware...sigh.
Ya know, its that kind of stupid shit that keeps guys like me in business and ya know what? I really wish it didn't. I'd happily do something else if we could wipe that kind of dumbshit attitude from the world but as Sony found out "stupid is as stupid does"...ugh.
I'll just leavethishere, but feel free to go back to Kotaku, which came out and actually BRAGGED about how corrupt they were, ignore the chat logs of GameJournoPro, where they literally got together to formulate a response when they got caught accepting both monetary and sexual favors (which is why no less than 13 different websites all printed the EXACT SAME ARTICLE about how "gamers are dead" within an 18 minute span of each other) and listen to AS who is literally a living breathing sockpuppet of the guy who runs feminist theory (she literally retweeted entire articles word for word he wrote nearly a decade ago as her own, when nobody would listen to a "CIS male" saying his crap he found her shilling real estate and hired her, funny shit) but that is the thing about people living a political narrative, they ignore any and all reality that doesn't fit their political agenda.
I find it funny how many of the radical feminists identify as social marxists, as they do seem to be stealing whole cloth from classical communist media manipulation, especially the old And you are lynching Negroes tactic of derailing a conversation from where they are weak (such as corruption and free speech) to some place where they believe they can control the narrative. I guess those that forget their history are doomed to use failed policies of the past over and over.
So you ADMIT that Linux can't even KEEP ITS OWN DRIVERS FUNCTIONING for a lousy 5 years, just HALF the life cycle of Windows?
I don't know what is more sad and pathetic, the fact that you consider basic functionality "stupid" or that you are so drunk on the koolaid that you actually consider such piss poor support to be an acceptable situation. And you wonder why Linux has been stuck at under 2% for 24 fricking years?
Why don't you just try finding some backing tracks on YouTube, like this one? They have dozens in all genres and its certainly easier to play with an on demand backup band in a box than it is to get time for everybody to meet.
That is not it, as I have been having the same issue and I'm on an all AMD rig. I don't know what it is, maybe they changed the buffer, but I've noticed that VLC is a LOT more choppy and stutters whereas MPC HC plays the files smooth as butter. The OS is on an SSD while the media files are on a 2TB HDD attached to the same system, maybe VLC doesn't like the speed difference?
The problem with those kinds of things is they just teach the kid to be a glorified MP3 player, that's it. There is a vid online of some kid being brought up on stage with Steel Panther I believe and as long as all the kid has to do is play Van Halen note for note? The kid plays perfectly. The second the kid is told to just shred? Deer in the headlights.
I've gotten on stage with those kinds of players and even though they could totally slaughter me when it came to playing a cover tune note perfect? I'd end up with the crowd cheering me because I could actually interact with audience feedback and play with feeling, despite not being nearly as technical as they were. there is a BIG difference between playing somebody else's work note by note and actually creating music, if all you want is the former? These are great for that, you want the latter? I would argue they actually hinder the player as they teach basic patterns but don't give you any context to use them except in that one specific piece, you end up with "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra", you know the words but have no meaning or context to use them correctly.
I'm sorry but I think you are wrong, and here is why....the "risk" came from the previous CEO which there is no danger of returning. It was Ballmer that was pushing the "branding" bullshit, Ballmer that was pushing GFWL, Ballmer that was sticking Winflags on everything, every single complaint Gabe had cane be traced back to Steve Ballmer.
Nadella's slogan should be "Not the Ballmer, not the Ballmer" as he has shown that gives not a single fuck about sticking Winflags, devs said they wanted.NET to be open sourced? There ya go, enjoy. All the Metrosexual Winbranded crap Ballmer kept trying to shovel whether the market wanted it or not? GONE. Nadella is ZERO threat to Steam because Nadella sees that Steam has a loyal userbase and that brings value to the Windows platform, no way in hell is he gonna risk losing tens of millions of loyal as hell gamers by treating Steam as a second class citizen. Ballmer thought it was still 1997 and he could just bully his way into a market like the old days and cost the company billions with his alienating attitude, there is no way in hell Nadella is gonna do that.
Finally you have to remember that SteamOS is already fucked because Gabe shot his load too damned early. he got all those OEMs to hop on board only to leave them high and dry without an OS on launch day, so no way in hell is he gonna get jack shit when it comes to OEM support. No Steamboxes on shelves? Nobody but a few Linux faithful using SteamOS, hell he'll only get a small subset of Linux gamers as many have already said they will not support Steam simply on DRM principles, so there really isn't even any growth in that teeny niche market!
Will he keep it on life support for a few years, just in case? Probably, if for no other reason that to save face and to keep them from looking like a failure, but the days of big SteamOS announcements and buzz? Stick a fork, the fat lady is down the street having a sammich.
Then riddle me this...why does NOBODY, and I do mean nobody, not in FOSS nor in proprietary, support Torvalds driver model? After all if it was good there is absolutely NOTHING stopping them from adopting it, right? And what about BSD, why does it not follow the great Torvalds driver model?
The reason why is obvious, its because its shit that just won't scale. Hell basic math will show you that "let the kernel devs handle it" utterly collapses when the number of drivers reaches 5 figures because there simply is not enough kernel devs to keep up with all the hardware that is already out, much less the hundreds of new devices released this and every other quarter. It really VERY simple, in 1993, when the entire OS could fit on a single floppy? Then sure letting the kernel devs handle it made sense, they had MAYBE 30 drivers all told to deal with, now how many is there? 100,000? 200,000? Even if you pumped up the devs on coke and locked them in a room with NOTHING to but but deal with drivers they would have MAYBE 5 minutes every 3 years for each driver!
There is a REASON why the Hairyfeet challenge has stood for nearly 8 years without a single consumer Linux OS passing and it all comes down to his driver model not scaling, simple as that. BSD? It passes the Hairyfeet challenge with flying colors, too bad there simply isn't enough consumer hardware support for it to be a viable desktop. Its been 24 years now, 24 years of the same excuses, 24 years of "update foo broke my drivers", 24 years of manufacturers being unable to put a fucking penguin on the box because they can't JUST support Linux, even JUST support a distro like Ubuntu, they have to support "Ubuntu version X, kernel version Y" because THAT is how fucking picky Linus has made the OS with his fucked up driver model!
Meanwhile a Windows user can buy a PC and have the drivers that come on the system run for the ENTIRE LIFE of the system, I can take a copy of XP RTM, install the drivers, and then run it through the entire life of the OS, 3 service packs and countless patches, know how many drivers will be non functional at the end? NONE, that is how many drivers will be broken at the end and THAT is what you are competing against, and failing miserably!
But if you truly believe what you are saying? Then put your money where your mouth is and take the Hairyfeet challenge which just FYI only requires Linux to run HALF, I repeat HALF as long as a Windows lifecycle. Surely your OS can do half of what Windows can, right? I look forward to seeing your video posted here and the complete vid on Dropbox. of course we'll never see it because if you actually attempt to take the challenge you'll see what I saw countless times and that is Torvalds.driver.model.doesn't.work. and it all comes down to his driver model being made of fail.
Sorry but I predict that SteamOS will be dead in 3, probably less, and in the meantime it will be given a trickle of updates while it slowly winds down. The reason? Windows 8 and the MSFT store.
The entire reason for the existence of SteamOS was that Gabe feared Windows 8, specifically the Windows Store. He gave interviews railing on Win 8 and talking about how shit the MSFT store was gonna be for lock in, bla bla bla....so what happened? Windows 8 went over with all the desirability of a trainwreck, the MSFT store turned out to be a spyware ridden clusterfuck, and the CEO that pushed that crap "decided to pursue other interests" rather than get canned. The new guy? Seems to actually have a brain and isn't trying to fuck his partners by sticking a Winflag on everything under the sun.
So every. single. reason. given for making SteamOS? Gone, finished, wasted. Why spend who knows how many millions to develop your own Operating System to defeat somebody who has already waved the white flag? Not to mention as long as Torvalds has a pulse the driver situation will NEVER get any better as Torvalds refuses to let go of the same crap driver model he has been pushing since 1993, so they get the "fun" of dealing with that mess, and for what? MSFT is giving away Windows 10 so you can't compete on cost, MSFT has all but given up on the Windows store, in fact the entire time I've been running Win 10 I don't think I've ever had so much as a "FYI did you know we got a store?" pop up, so that is not a threat, and Steam already has big picture mode in Windows so they can't even use a 10 foot UI as a selling point!
The Linux fanboys can scream and curse me all they want, but time will prove me right. Gabe royally fucked up the SteamOS launch by telling the OEMs it was ready when it wasn't (probably because he didn't know what an unstable POS the Linux driver model really is) so they ended up being left with their dicks in their hands and had to rush out their "Steamboxes" with Windows 8.1, which with the amount of hatred Windows 8/8.1 has? Might as well have just flushed the Steamboxes down the john. After taking a bath like that you can bet your last nickel that Gabe will NOT be getting any more custom hardware, Linux users simply do not buy enough games, hell most will refuse to support Steam simply because its DRM, so the growth in that market is practically flatline, and finally no reason in hell for Windows users to switch to a limited subset of their Steam library when Win 8 is dead and Win 10 looks to be another Windows 7 level hit, so what advantage is there for Valve continuing to sink millions into SteamOS?
There just isn't any which is why they went from trumpeting SteamOS every chance they got to a trickle of low priority press releases, Valve knows MSFT isn't gonna push them off of Windows, hell since Gabe screamed bloody murder GFWL was shut down, the push to combine Windows and Xbox gaming has all but died, MSFT is just no longer a threat to Steam and Gabe knows it. Expect SteamOS to slowly wane until its nothing but a trickle, followed by a little press release a year or two quietly announcing SteamOS is gone, there just isn't a good reason for it to exist any longer.
So MSFT going to Apple and saying "We'd like to buy a license to some of your IP" and Apple responding by saying "Sure! It'll cost you X amount" and MSFT paying it equals....thievery?
That word...I don't think it means what you think it means.
Drinkypoo has a serious grudge against AMD as Drinky made the mistake of buying a laptop with the ATI X1xxx chipset, a dead end that was abandoned when AMD bought the company. Blaming AMD for a bad chip ATI put out before the merger would be like blaming Seagate for Maxtor's crapfest Diamondmax line or Hasbro for the Atari 5200 sticks. It wasn't their company, they didn't put it out, that company no longer exists.
That said I've offered to help Drinky get a driver working on a newer than XP install, after all I've run Win2K drivers on Win 7, its not that difficult to do, but Drinky just says "don't work" without bothering to post logs, check the dependencies, or give us any error messages so either Drinky is just looking for something to complain about or the hardware is long gone and Drinky is pissed about long gone gear. In either case anybody whose run anything newer than the X1650 knows the AMD drivers are just fine and the FOSS drivers are good up to the HD7xxx.
Thanks, and for the stupid retard ACs that can't fucking Google? Here ya go, Intel admits to rigging benchmark results by wadda ya know, Tek Syndicate. I really shouldn't be surprised as unlike Anand and Tom's the guys at Tek Syndicate aren't making their money from intel's ads. But there it is, straight from Intel's own lips...what more do ya want? Their CEO to get his pic taken doing the Cash double bird with "yeah we rig so fuck you!" as the tag line?
Because, surprise surprise, Intel is rigging the benchmarks as badly as Quack.exe.
You follow the money and who pays for the majority of the ad budgets of the leading benchmark suites, we're talking tens of millions of dollars in free money? Intel. Now does anybody honestly think that when Intel hands the company a rigged all to fuck ICC and says "compile the benchmark software with this" they are gonna reply "No man, you keep your 40 million in free ad revenue, cross site promos, and handing reviewers copies of our software, we have integrity!"
This is rigging the market folks, no different than MSFT rigging the OEMs in the 90s with those uber nasty contracts. You look at actual games instead of the rigged benchmarks and shock! AMD and Intel trade blows despite the AMD being less than half the price of the Intel. And anybody who buys the shit that Tom's has been shoveling, that a fricking PENTIUM beats a hexacore? To steal a line from Mel Brooks "bullshit, bullshit, aaaaaannnnndddd bullshit!". Notice that those who say that shit ALWAYS use the same benches,even when a couple of those benches are out of date? Wouldn't be because Intel buys a shit ton of ads and making their products look less than stellar would hurt the bottom line, would it?
Just type "Cinebench rigs benchmarks" into the search engine of your choice friend, plenty of articles on the subject. You can also go to the channel of the first video I linked to, Tek Syndicate, as he has video up talking about it IIRC. You can trust the guys at Tek Syndicate as they buy their own gear and don't favor one manufacturer over the other.
You might also want to look up "Intel cripple compiler" as to this day their ICC still puts out code that will cripple any program compiled on it by using CPUID to detect AMD chips and turning off all SSE optimizations if AMD is detected. Considering that both chip makers have had SSE 1-3 for over a decade? Its a pretty big smoking gun. You can also look up "EU investigates Intel" for several articles with the charges laid out, it is shaping up to be as nasty as the OEM bribery scandal which netted AMD 1.2 billion in payoff from Intel.
I can't speak for the server market as I no longer do corporate but on the desktop? Its pretty dramatic, if you compare chips based on final unit cost then pretty much anything under $1K is gonna favor AMD by a fairly large amount as the money you save by going AMD can be used for more RAM, a bigger GPU, and often an SSD on top. I mean when you can pick up the FX8320 for $140 and if you shop around the FX8300 for less than $120? There really is no comparison, nothing Intel has at that price point even comes close.
BTW I put my money where my mouth is, as not only do I now sell AMD exclusively at the shop (nothing I hate more than bribery and dirty tricks) but my entire family is on AMD, with me and the oldest boy running Phenom II X6, the wife is happy with my hand me down Phenom II X4, the youngest rocking his games on the FX8300 and dad pulling up the rear with his Phenom I X4 he's had for nearly a decade because "Keep your mitts off my PC, it runs great so don't you dare touch it!" LOL. We couldn't be happier and despite the Phenom IIs being 6+ years old they play all the latest games without issue, hell the oldest is tearing into Shadows Of Mordor right now and its smooth as butter. This is why I have no trouble being an AMD only family, the bang for the buck is just nuts!
I'm afraid you have been SCAMMED, as Intel has been bribing the benchmark software companies to rig their tests. there is currently a major investigation in the EU over this and it looks like Intel may get even more in fines than they had to shell out to AMD over their OEM bribery scandal. The latest one caught was Cinebench, if their software detected an AMD APU/APU it would drop ALL SSE optimizations and run ALL the math in X87 mode, a mode that has been depreciated since the P3. yes they were rigging THAT badly.
If you take the rigged benchmarks out of the equation? Then surprise surprise AMD chips trade blows with chips costing more than twice as much with several tests the AMD outright smoking and in others within a couple percentage points of the i5s. Again we are talking about $120-$150 chips against $300+ chips and when you figure up how much more powerful your hardware could be if you put that extra $150 into the GPU or more RAM? Its really easy to choose AMD over Intel in the sub $700 mainstream price point. Oh and the AMD wrecks your power bill bullshit is just that, with 17 years required to make Intel come out ahead on power savings versus the increased cost.
So DO NOT BUY THE LIES, Intel has been caught over and over AND OVER committing bribery and outright market rigging to insure they can get the press and benches to say what they want it to. The fact that they have risked so many fines and sunk so many hundreds of millions on bribes should make you ask yourself one simple question.....if they were REALLY so far ahead, why risk it? Why not simply stand on their merits and let the chips fall where they may? Maybe because they are NOT as far ahead as the rigged benches they paid for indicate and they are afraid of losing their jacked up premium if they have to compete in a fair market?
I hate to break the news to ya Sparky but yesyoucan and ALL of which will do 1080P across the board, which NEITHER console can do! Note that this is just showing the DIY route, I could also wallpaper this page with quad core PCs from places like Tiger in the $250-$300 range already built and ready to go, just slap an HD260X for $100 and YOU WILL CURBSTOMP both the XBone and PS4 when it comes to graphics AND frame per second.
And games cost the same? Okay now I KNOW you are nothing but a fanboy or you've been living under a rock as you've apparently never heard of these little things known as Steam sales not to mention that anybody not sticking their head in the sand while waving their little console flag was fast as their little arms will go KNOWS that PC prices drop MUCH faster than on the consoles, whose prices are practically glacial. Care for an example? Theif 4 is currently $20 on consoles, not bad eh? Well yeah if you don't want the entire series which I paid $6 less for WITH all the DLC. Oh and there is this little thing you may have heard of called Humble Bundles? If you were to buy all the games currently on the bundle? Well first of all you are gonna need TWO consoles as not all the games are on XBone and PS4 and of course the OEMs give you a big fat greasy finger when it comes to backwards compatibility, which just FYI but thanks to DOSBox we PC gamers can play games going back to the early 80s, can even buy them preset for DOSBox so no muss, but just to buy the games currently on the list? Over $120, cost to PC gamers? $20 if you wanna be nice and throw them a couple bucks over minimum.
So wave your little flag all you want, won't make black into white, and it won't make the BS you are trying sooo hard to convince yourself is real into reality. Reality is you can grab a quad core PC made within the past 5 years for $300, slap a $100 GPU in, and be kicking with some serious gaming with better FPS and higher res than the netbook based consoles can deliver. Don't mind a little DIY? Then you can spend $80 less than a PS4 and still get an impressive gameplay experience with again higher framerate. Don't mind spending a little more? Then grab yourselfa fire breathing monster and pair it with a 250x or 260x and enjoy a PC that will run maybe $20 more than XBone with Kinect that will DEVASTATE both the PS4 and XBone on gaming! Those last 2? Yeah they both hit turbo speeds over 4GHz so it will be quite the long while before you see a game not be able to run on either system.
I should know as I play all the latest and greatest on a Phenom II X6, a chip that is now 6 years old, along with any game I want from the early 80s on up, every console from the Atari 2600- PS2,and I get to enjoy multiple vendors, insanely cheap prices and sales, free MP, streaming from any site in any format without needing a subscription, and oh yeah, literally thousands of 100% FTP games in every genre. Wanna play on a TV? Then DO IT as all the PCs come with HDMI now and you can choose from Steam or Kodi or Mediaportal for your 10 foot UI. Wanna play with a controller? Then DO IT as you can trivially hook up your choice of wireless controllers with nearly every game coming with X360 wireless support but if that don't float your boat and you don't mind wires? You can run anything from a 2600 or NES through PS3 and everything in between. Nothing like playing a classic fighter on
Uhhh just FYI but NONE of those games were developed by "Sega", Sega as a company has been dead since 2004. The company that owns the Sega name (and farms out the IP to third parties) is SAMMY who took over Sega by buying up the outstanding stock when they went broke in 04. Sammy then merely changed their name to Sega (just like Telegames bought the Atari name and IP and changed their name to Atari) and started pimping out the IP, again just like Telegames.
So I'm sorry but the company currently known as Sega has absolutely nothing in common with the people who made the SMS-Dreamcast, anymore than the current Atari has anything to do with the company who made the 2600. Its just a name now dude, the people are looooong gone.
What is retarded about his statement? You DO know that 2 out of the 3 current consoles are nothing but VERY low end PCs, right? That you can get a PC in the $400-$500 range that will do higher resolution AND better graphics AND will cost less for games, yes?
Anybody that has read my previous posts knows I'm a hardcore AMD supporter but I will never understand WTF they were thinking by going with the Jaguar APU for their consoles over something like the A-Series. I mean for fucks sake the Bobcat (which is all the Jag is, a Bobcat with more cores and 7%-10% more IPC) was designed to be an ultra low cost answer to the Intel ATOM chip, it was cut down all to hell to get it into Atom price territory and as somebody that owns a Bobcat netbook I can tell ya they run about as well as an Atom+ION but that's it,a first gen C2D or Athlon X2 just curbstomps the chip when it comes to number crunching.
This is the first console generation in ages where the PC didn't have to play catch up at release, in fact PC games already looked better and did higher resolution OOTB than either console and it all comes down to having a netbook APU. Its a fricking STB, no reason why they couldn't have went with something with more processing power, and what is worse is this is probably as good as its gonna get as the X86 arch is just so well known there really isn't any hidden power to squeeze, not with a chip that is already as weak as the Jag. I have built some Jag based systems (the AM1 socket systems are all Jag chips) and while they make great ULV office boxes or media tanks, would I want to game on the things? Not a chance.
So if this is gonna be the path they take? I honestly do not see the appeal. You have a system with all the downsides of a PC, long patch times, HDD loads, phone home DRM and DLC tied to a user, but none of the upsides like free MP, multiple vendors, or the much lower prices. Even the exclusives are drying up because the cost of triple A titles has gotten so high third parties can't afford to be exclusive. So yeah...really not seeing a selling point this gen, lots of downsides, not really seeing the ups.
I don't even think TFA understands there is a difference between "surviving" and being "a zombie company strictly used to whore out old IP by milking nostalgia value" which Atari is strictly the latter. I suppose one could argue that Sega has been the same since Sammi bought them out but I wouldn't call milking old IP for nostalgia value to be "surviving" by any stretch of the imagination.
I should have clarified I was talking about EARLY 90s, by 95 the quality had already started turning into deep fried dogshit. That was the case across the board BTW, even the first generation PlayStations were lucky if they made 90 days past warranty before the CD drives just fucking died! Going through 3 PlayStations in less than a year was ultimately turned me into a PC gamer as having to go months without my games and shell out the ass because Sony couldn't be bothered to put in a quality CD motor? REALLY pissed me off! Its amazing how many wear the rose colored goggles when it comes to the PS-1 but the gen 1 and 2 units? Absolute garbage.
That said from the mid 70s through around 92-93? You wanted a top notch piece of gear you bought Sony PERIOD. I had the same experience as you did with a Sony reel to reel unit, finally giving it away when I couldn't buy tape for it anymore and it still ran as good as the day I got it, the same was true across their entire line, you wanted something that would just last and last while having all the latest features? You bought Sony.
But we have seen the same story over and over again, once great companies get CEOs that care only about short term gains and cripple the company, from AMD firing their engineers and just using computer layouts to Seagate buying Maxtor and using their shitty ARM controllers on Seagate products, its a story as old as business and its the reason Sony is in such bad shape now. You burn your bridges for short term gains? You can't come crying when you need to work your way back.
And moreover partnering with Sony WOULD NOT HAVE SAVED THEM as they had burned their customers over and over AND OVER for the better part of 5 years. Nobody was gonna buy Sega hardware even if they came out with the baddest console in the history of the universe!
The reason Sega died was threefold, 1.- They royally fucked their retail partners on the Saturn by doing a "sneak launch" that left several 800 pound gorillas like Walmart out in the cold. this pissed off those retailers so badly that many of them swore to never carry another piece of Sega hardware, this crippled their retail channel overnight and it never recovered.
2.-The thing that put the first nails in the coffin though was the fact that SOA and SOJ weren't even on speaking terms, with things getting so bad that SOJ would even make announcements that would hamstring SOA! From what I read SOJ was a bunch of elitist pricks with a serious case of NIH so they treated SOA like a red headed stepchild and kept them out of the loop on what they had in the pipe.Depending on how you view 3 this can be seen as justified, though it still crippled the company.
3.- But what ultimately destroyed their sales was the fact that SOA simply refused to let go off the Genesis and launched one failed add-on after another, all of which left the consumer feeling like they got scammed as they spent hundreds of dollars (nearly $700 if they bought a Genesis, Sega-CD, and 32x at launch) and all they got was piss poor support, lousy titles, and in the case of the 32x a device that was dying less than 90 days after launch!
Many blame the fact that the Saturn was really designed to be a 2D gaming monster that had badly supported 3D just bolted on at the last minute but I would argue that by that time they were already dying. I was a HARDCORE Sega fan at the time but after getting burnt on the Sega-CD (I picked up a 32x when they hit $25 with 3 games but we all knew it was a dead system by then) I was just fucking done with the company,after seeing the incredible promise of Sega-CD just thrown away (anybody who says it couldn't be a great system really should play Lunar) I honestly didn't trust the company not to abandon their hardware before enough decent games came out to justify the expense. I avoided the Saturn altogether for the PlayStation, grabbed a Dreamcast when it hit $75 (and the pirates had already cracked it, makes a great NES/Genesis emulator box) and then went PC and never looked back.
At the time I was big into IRC and all I heard from the Sega channels was the same story, guys that got burnt on Sega-CD/32X that refused to give the company another shot, a few picked up Saturn only to see SOA refuse to import the best titles thanks to their pissing contest with SOJ, instead sticking with frankly shitty western games (most guys forget that before the big 3D shooter and RPG craze on PC that western game developers were REALLY piss poor compared to their eastern counterparts. Bad controls, lousy levels, and lame graphics were standard for western made games by and large) and leaving the best titles for the system overseas. By the time the Dreamcast came around? Even the most hardcore fanboys just had had enough, they had a shitload of hardware with little to no decent games and felt ripped off. You have to remember they hyped the shit out of Sega-CD/32X so a LOT of guys (myself included) got taken and when you sank nearly $500 and could count the good games on 2 hands with fingers left over? That is NOT a good sign!
So no Sony could not have saved them, they were already dying by that point. They should have never released the CD/32X or at least committed to giving them 3 years of game support, even if it meant dropping the royalties to nothing just to get devs on board,if they would have done that along with a promise of 3 years on Saturn? Then they might have made it, at least built enough good will to get their fanbase to get on board with Dreamcast which really was a kick ass piece of hardware, but shitty management, too many pieces of worthless hardware, and too much infighting had them dead by 2K and nothing would have saved them at that point.
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And if you believe a publicly traded corporation, one that many would argue has gotten nastier WRT to identity and free speech as they go along, won't manipulate this when the "facts" go against their corporate agenda? I have some magic beans you might be interested in.
Uhhh...unless I'm mistaken the USA hasn't used RTGs as power sources except in deep space for precisely this very reason, too risky if something goes BOOM!
OTOH the Soviets had a serious love affair with RTGs, they used 'em on LEO sats, used 'em in their arctic bases, even ran lighthouses with RTGs. They cranked out so many RTGs they honestly no longer know where they are all located, so many were used in the former USSR that there is no telling how many abandoned stations in Bumfuckistan have RTGs lying around waiting for some fool to kill himself trying to steal the metals in the casing.
Interesting? Really mods? Everybody forget Occam's razor? This thing was the OLDEST one the military had that was still "functioning" and by functioning they meant it was parked as a back up for the last NINE YEARS.
So you have a device in one of the most inhospitable places we know of, WELL past its prime, sitting in a holding pattern with minimal power strictly as a backup. So what would one say most likely using Occam's razor? That the thing has been deteriorating for over a decade and that when somebody fired up the engines they went BOOM! and took the bird with it. Considering how old it was? Not only is this most likely it really isn't even surprising, after all you ARE talking about trying to perform a controlled release of highly pressurized gas from a sat that has been beaten by micro meteors and exposed to insane temp variations since Clinton was POTUS.
Now which is more likely, the US military risked setting off a chain reaction and fucking up their satnav network just to test a laser, or they tried to move the thing and it ripped itself apart?
When most legit sites are accused of corruption? They show what steps they have taken to show they are not. Kotaku says we are just for entertainment so it doesn't matter which frankly says all anybody who ISN'T an SJW needs to know.
As for the rest of the "la la la, you are wrong, no proof you are wrong" all you have shown is you are a hardcore SJW and therefor there is no point even bothering to waste a few minutes to speak to you, you already believe your political narrative and if Jesus Christ came down and said "you are wrong" you would accuse him of being gender biased, good day.
Then you have only yourself to blame as Sony TRIED that, offering to sell its Viao line 100% bloatware free, you only had to pay $50 difference to make up what they were losing by not including the bloatware, what happened?
OMG get out of the way, here comes the waaaambulance as everyone ran to bitch and moan about actually having to pay full price for things, ZOMG the bastards! After 6 months where less than 3% actually paid the difference Sony quietly gave up, realizing that if given the choice between bloatware and cheaper or clean and more expensive? Well screw that $50, bring on the crapware...sigh.
Ya know, its that kind of stupid shit that keeps guys like me in business and ya know what? I really wish it didn't. I'd happily do something else if we could wipe that kind of dumbshit attitude from the world but as Sony found out "stupid is as stupid does"...ugh.
I'll just leave this here, but feel free to go back to Kotaku, which came out and actually BRAGGED about how corrupt they were, ignore the chat logs of GameJournoPro, where they literally got together to formulate a response when they got caught accepting both monetary and sexual favors (which is why no less than 13 different websites all printed the EXACT SAME ARTICLE about how "gamers are dead" within an 18 minute span of each other) and listen to AS who is literally a living breathing sockpuppet of the guy who runs feminist theory (she literally retweeted entire articles word for word he wrote nearly a decade ago as her own, when nobody would listen to a "CIS male" saying his crap he found her shilling real estate and hired her, funny shit) but that is the thing about people living a political narrative, they ignore any and all reality that doesn't fit their political agenda.
I find it funny how many of the radical feminists identify as social marxists, as they do seem to be stealing whole cloth from classical communist media manipulation, especially the old And you are lynching Negroes tactic of derailing a conversation from where they are weak (such as corruption and free speech) to some place where they believe they can control the narrative. I guess those that forget their history are doomed to use failed policies of the past over and over.
So you ADMIT that Linux can't even KEEP ITS OWN DRIVERS FUNCTIONING for a lousy 5 years, just HALF the life cycle of Windows?
I don't know what is more sad and pathetic, the fact that you consider basic functionality "stupid" or that you are so drunk on the koolaid that you actually consider such piss poor support to be an acceptable situation. And you wonder why Linux has been stuck at under 2% for 24 fricking years?
Why don't you just try finding some backing tracks on YouTube, like this one? They have dozens in all genres and its certainly easier to play with an on demand backup band in a box than it is to get time for everybody to meet.
That is not it, as I have been having the same issue and I'm on an all AMD rig. I don't know what it is, maybe they changed the buffer, but I've noticed that VLC is a LOT more choppy and stutters whereas MPC HC plays the files smooth as butter. The OS is on an SSD while the media files are on a 2TB HDD attached to the same system, maybe VLC doesn't like the speed difference?
The problem with those kinds of things is they just teach the kid to be a glorified MP3 player, that's it. There is a vid online of some kid being brought up on stage with Steel Panther I believe and as long as all the kid has to do is play Van Halen note for note? The kid plays perfectly. The second the kid is told to just shred? Deer in the headlights.
I've gotten on stage with those kinds of players and even though they could totally slaughter me when it came to playing a cover tune note perfect? I'd end up with the crowd cheering me because I could actually interact with audience feedback and play with feeling, despite not being nearly as technical as they were. there is a BIG difference between playing somebody else's work note by note and actually creating music, if all you want is the former? These are great for that, you want the latter? I would argue they actually hinder the player as they teach basic patterns but don't give you any context to use them except in that one specific piece, you end up with "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra", you know the words but have no meaning or context to use them correctly.
I'm sorry but I think you are wrong, and here is why....the "risk" came from the previous CEO which there is no danger of returning. It was Ballmer that was pushing the "branding" bullshit, Ballmer that was pushing GFWL, Ballmer that was sticking Winflags on everything, every single complaint Gabe had cane be traced back to Steve Ballmer.
Nadella's slogan should be "Not the Ballmer, not the Ballmer" as he has shown that gives not a single fuck about sticking Winflags, devs said they wanted .NET to be open sourced? There ya go, enjoy. All the Metrosexual Winbranded crap Ballmer kept trying to shovel whether the market wanted it or not? GONE. Nadella is ZERO threat to Steam because Nadella sees that Steam has a loyal userbase and that brings value to the Windows platform, no way in hell is he gonna risk losing tens of millions of loyal as hell gamers by treating Steam as a second class citizen. Ballmer thought it was still 1997 and he could just bully his way into a market like the old days and cost the company billions with his alienating attitude, there is no way in hell Nadella is gonna do that.
Finally you have to remember that SteamOS is already fucked because Gabe shot his load too damned early. he got all those OEMs to hop on board only to leave them high and dry without an OS on launch day, so no way in hell is he gonna get jack shit when it comes to OEM support. No Steamboxes on shelves? Nobody but a few Linux faithful using SteamOS, hell he'll only get a small subset of Linux gamers as many have already said they will not support Steam simply on DRM principles, so there really isn't even any growth in that teeny niche market!
Will he keep it on life support for a few years, just in case? Probably, if for no other reason that to save face and to keep them from looking like a failure, but the days of big SteamOS announcements and buzz? Stick a fork, the fat lady is down the street having a sammich.
Then riddle me this...why does NOBODY, and I do mean nobody, not in FOSS nor in proprietary, support Torvalds driver model? After all if it was good there is absolutely NOTHING stopping them from adopting it, right? And what about BSD, why does it not follow the great Torvalds driver model?
The reason why is obvious, its because its shit that just won't scale. Hell basic math will show you that "let the kernel devs handle it" utterly collapses when the number of drivers reaches 5 figures because there simply is not enough kernel devs to keep up with all the hardware that is already out, much less the hundreds of new devices released this and every other quarter. It really VERY simple, in 1993, when the entire OS could fit on a single floppy? Then sure letting the kernel devs handle it made sense, they had MAYBE 30 drivers all told to deal with, now how many is there? 100,000? 200,000? Even if you pumped up the devs on coke and locked them in a room with NOTHING to but but deal with drivers they would have MAYBE 5 minutes every 3 years for each driver!
There is a REASON why the Hairyfeet challenge has stood for nearly 8 years without a single consumer Linux OS passing and it all comes down to his driver model not scaling, simple as that. BSD? It passes the Hairyfeet challenge with flying colors, too bad there simply isn't enough consumer hardware support for it to be a viable desktop. Its been 24 years now, 24 years of the same excuses, 24 years of "update foo broke my drivers", 24 years of manufacturers being unable to put a fucking penguin on the box because they can't JUST support Linux, even JUST support a distro like Ubuntu, they have to support "Ubuntu version X, kernel version Y" because THAT is how fucking picky Linus has made the OS with his fucked up driver model!
Meanwhile a Windows user can buy a PC and have the drivers that come on the system run for the ENTIRE LIFE of the system, I can take a copy of XP RTM, install the drivers, and then run it through the entire life of the OS, 3 service packs and countless patches, know how many drivers will be non functional at the end? NONE, that is how many drivers will be broken at the end and THAT is what you are competing against, and failing miserably!
But if you truly believe what you are saying? Then put your money where your mouth is and take the Hairyfeet challenge which just FYI only requires Linux to run HALF, I repeat HALF as long as a Windows lifecycle. Surely your OS can do half of what Windows can, right? I look forward to seeing your video posted here and the complete vid on Dropbox. of course we'll never see it because if you actually attempt to take the challenge you'll see what I saw countless times and that is Torvalds.driver.model.doesn't.work. and it all comes down to his driver model being made of fail.
Sorry but I predict that SteamOS will be dead in 3, probably less, and in the meantime it will be given a trickle of updates while it slowly winds down. The reason? Windows 8 and the MSFT store.
The entire reason for the existence of SteamOS was that Gabe feared Windows 8, specifically the Windows Store. He gave interviews railing on Win 8 and talking about how shit the MSFT store was gonna be for lock in, bla bla bla....so what happened? Windows 8 went over with all the desirability of a trainwreck, the MSFT store turned out to be a spyware ridden clusterfuck, and the CEO that pushed that crap "decided to pursue other interests" rather than get canned. The new guy? Seems to actually have a brain and isn't trying to fuck his partners by sticking a Winflag on everything under the sun.
So every. single. reason. given for making SteamOS? Gone, finished, wasted. Why spend who knows how many millions to develop your own Operating System to defeat somebody who has already waved the white flag? Not to mention as long as Torvalds has a pulse the driver situation will NEVER get any better as Torvalds refuses to let go of the same crap driver model he has been pushing since 1993, so they get the "fun" of dealing with that mess, and for what? MSFT is giving away Windows 10 so you can't compete on cost, MSFT has all but given up on the Windows store, in fact the entire time I've been running Win 10 I don't think I've ever had so much as a "FYI did you know we got a store?" pop up, so that is not a threat, and Steam already has big picture mode in Windows so they can't even use a 10 foot UI as a selling point!
The Linux fanboys can scream and curse me all they want, but time will prove me right. Gabe royally fucked up the SteamOS launch by telling the OEMs it was ready when it wasn't (probably because he didn't know what an unstable POS the Linux driver model really is) so they ended up being left with their dicks in their hands and had to rush out their "Steamboxes" with Windows 8.1, which with the amount of hatred Windows 8/8.1 has? Might as well have just flushed the Steamboxes down the john. After taking a bath like that you can bet your last nickel that Gabe will NOT be getting any more custom hardware, Linux users simply do not buy enough games, hell most will refuse to support Steam simply because its DRM, so the growth in that market is practically flatline, and finally no reason in hell for Windows users to switch to a limited subset of their Steam library when Win 8 is dead and Win 10 looks to be another Windows 7 level hit, so what advantage is there for Valve continuing to sink millions into SteamOS?
There just isn't any which is why they went from trumpeting SteamOS every chance they got to a trickle of low priority press releases, Valve knows MSFT isn't gonna push them off of Windows, hell since Gabe screamed bloody murder GFWL was shut down, the push to combine Windows and Xbox gaming has all but died, MSFT is just no longer a threat to Steam and Gabe knows it. Expect SteamOS to slowly wane until its nothing but a trickle, followed by a little press release a year or two quietly announcing SteamOS is gone, there just isn't a good reason for it to exist any longer.
So MSFT going to Apple and saying "We'd like to buy a license to some of your IP" and Apple responding by saying "Sure! It'll cost you X amount" and MSFT paying it equals....thievery?
That word...I don't think it means what you think it means.
Drinkypoo has a serious grudge against AMD as Drinky made the mistake of buying a laptop with the ATI X1xxx chipset, a dead end that was abandoned when AMD bought the company. Blaming AMD for a bad chip ATI put out before the merger would be like blaming Seagate for Maxtor's crapfest Diamondmax line or Hasbro for the Atari 5200 sticks. It wasn't their company, they didn't put it out, that company no longer exists.
That said I've offered to help Drinky get a driver working on a newer than XP install, after all I've run Win2K drivers on Win 7, its not that difficult to do, but Drinky just says "don't work" without bothering to post logs, check the dependencies, or give us any error messages so either Drinky is just looking for something to complain about or the hardware is long gone and Drinky is pissed about long gone gear. In either case anybody whose run anything newer than the X1650 knows the AMD drivers are just fine and the FOSS drivers are good up to the HD7xxx.
Thanks, and for the stupid retard ACs that can't fucking Google? Here ya go, Intel admits to rigging benchmark results by wadda ya know, Tek Syndicate. I really shouldn't be surprised as unlike Anand and Tom's the guys at Tek Syndicate aren't making their money from intel's ads. But there it is, straight from Intel's own lips...what more do ya want? Their CEO to get his pic taken doing the Cash double bird with "yeah we rig so fuck you!" as the tag line?
Because, surprise surprise, Intel is rigging the benchmarks as badly as Quack.exe.
You follow the money and who pays for the majority of the ad budgets of the leading benchmark suites, we're talking tens of millions of dollars in free money? Intel. Now does anybody honestly think that when Intel hands the company a rigged all to fuck ICC and says "compile the benchmark software with this" they are gonna reply "No man, you keep your 40 million in free ad revenue, cross site promos, and handing reviewers copies of our software, we have integrity!"
This is rigging the market folks, no different than MSFT rigging the OEMs in the 90s with those uber nasty contracts. You look at actual games instead of the rigged benchmarks and shock! AMD and Intel trade blows despite the AMD being less than half the price of the Intel. And anybody who buys the shit that Tom's has been shoveling, that a fricking PENTIUM beats a hexacore? To steal a line from Mel Brooks "bullshit, bullshit, aaaaaannnnndddd bullshit!". Notice that those who say that shit ALWAYS use the same benches,even when a couple of those benches are out of date? Wouldn't be because Intel buys a shit ton of ads and making their products look less than stellar would hurt the bottom line, would it?
Just type "Cinebench rigs benchmarks" into the search engine of your choice friend, plenty of articles on the subject. You can also go to the channel of the first video I linked to, Tek Syndicate, as he has video up talking about it IIRC. You can trust the guys at Tek Syndicate as they buy their own gear and don't favor one manufacturer over the other.
You might also want to look up "Intel cripple compiler" as to this day their ICC still puts out code that will cripple any program compiled on it by using CPUID to detect AMD chips and turning off all SSE optimizations if AMD is detected. Considering that both chip makers have had SSE 1-3 for over a decade? Its a pretty big smoking gun. You can also look up "EU investigates Intel" for several articles with the charges laid out, it is shaping up to be as nasty as the OEM bribery scandal which netted AMD 1.2 billion in payoff from Intel.
I can't speak for the server market as I no longer do corporate but on the desktop? Its pretty dramatic, if you compare chips based on final unit cost then pretty much anything under $1K is gonna favor AMD by a fairly large amount as the money you save by going AMD can be used for more RAM, a bigger GPU, and often an SSD on top. I mean when you can pick up the FX8320 for $140 and if you shop around the FX8300 for less than $120? There really is no comparison, nothing Intel has at that price point even comes close.
BTW I put my money where my mouth is, as not only do I now sell AMD exclusively at the shop (nothing I hate more than bribery and dirty tricks) but my entire family is on AMD, with me and the oldest boy running Phenom II X6, the wife is happy with my hand me down Phenom II X4, the youngest rocking his games on the FX8300 and dad pulling up the rear with his Phenom I X4 he's had for nearly a decade because "Keep your mitts off my PC, it runs great so don't you dare touch it!" LOL. We couldn't be happier and despite the Phenom IIs being 6+ years old they play all the latest games without issue, hell the oldest is tearing into Shadows Of Mordor right now and its smooth as butter. This is why I have no trouble being an AMD only family, the bang for the buck is just nuts!
I'm afraid you have been SCAMMED, as Intel has been bribing the benchmark software companies to rig their tests. there is currently a major investigation in the EU over this and it looks like Intel may get even more in fines than they had to shell out to AMD over their OEM bribery scandal. The latest one caught was Cinebench, if their software detected an AMD APU/APU it would drop ALL SSE optimizations and run ALL the math in X87 mode, a mode that has been depreciated since the P3. yes they were rigging THAT badly.
If you take the rigged benchmarks out of the equation? Then surprise surprise AMD chips trade blows with chips costing more than twice as much with several tests the AMD outright smoking and in others within a couple percentage points of the i5s. Again we are talking about $120-$150 chips against $300+ chips and when you figure up how much more powerful your hardware could be if you put that extra $150 into the GPU or more RAM? Its really easy to choose AMD over Intel in the sub $700 mainstream price point. Oh and the AMD wrecks your power bill bullshit is just that, with 17 years required to make Intel come out ahead on power savings versus the increased cost.
So DO NOT BUY THE LIES, Intel has been caught over and over AND OVER committing bribery and outright market rigging to insure they can get the press and benches to say what they want it to. The fact that they have risked so many fines and sunk so many hundreds of millions on bribes should make you ask yourself one simple question.....if they were REALLY so far ahead, why risk it? Why not simply stand on their merits and let the chips fall where they may? Maybe because they are NOT as far ahead as the rigged benches they paid for indicate and they are afraid of losing their jacked up premium if they have to compete in a fair market?
I hate to break the news to ya Sparky but yes you can and ALL of which will do 1080P across the board, which NEITHER console can do! Note that this is just showing the DIY route, I could also wallpaper this page with quad core PCs from places like Tiger in the $250-$300 range already built and ready to go, just slap an HD260X for $100 and YOU WILL CURBSTOMP both the XBone and PS4 when it comes to graphics AND frame per second.
And games cost the same? Okay now I KNOW you are nothing but a fanboy or you've been living under a rock as you've apparently never heard of these little things known as Steam sales not to mention that anybody not sticking their head in the sand while waving their little console flag was fast as their little arms will go KNOWS that PC prices drop MUCH faster than on the consoles, whose prices are practically glacial. Care for an example? Theif 4 is currently $20 on consoles, not bad eh? Well yeah if you don't want the entire series which I paid $6 less for WITH all the DLC. Oh and there is this little thing you may have heard of called Humble Bundles? If you were to buy all the games currently on the bundle? Well first of all you are gonna need TWO consoles as not all the games are on XBone and PS4 and of course the OEMs give you a big fat greasy finger when it comes to backwards compatibility, which just FYI but thanks to DOSBox we PC gamers can play games going back to the early 80s, can even buy them preset for DOSBox so no muss, but just to buy the games currently on the list? Over $120, cost to PC gamers? $20 if you wanna be nice and throw them a couple bucks over minimum.
So wave your little flag all you want, won't make black into white, and it won't make the BS you are trying sooo hard to convince yourself is real into reality. Reality is you can grab a quad core PC made within the past 5 years for $300, slap a $100 GPU in, and be kicking with some serious gaming with better FPS and higher res than the netbook based consoles can deliver. Don't mind a little DIY? Then you can spend $80 less than a PS4 and still get an impressive gameplay experience with again higher framerate. Don't mind spending a little more? Then grab yourself a fire breathing monster and pair it with a 250x or 260x and enjoy a PC that will run maybe $20 more than XBone with Kinect that will DEVASTATE both the PS4 and XBone on gaming! Those last 2? Yeah they both hit turbo speeds over 4GHz so it will be quite the long while before you see a game not be able to run on either system.
I should know as I play all the latest and greatest on a Phenom II X6, a chip that is now 6 years old, along with any game I want from the early 80s on up, every console from the Atari 2600- PS2,and I get to enjoy multiple vendors, insanely cheap prices and sales, free MP, streaming from any site in any format without needing a subscription, and oh yeah, literally thousands of 100% FTP games in every genre. Wanna play on a TV? Then DO IT as all the PCs come with HDMI now and you can choose from Steam or Kodi or Mediaportal for your 10 foot UI. Wanna play with a controller? Then DO IT as you can trivially hook up your choice of wireless controllers with nearly every game coming with X360 wireless support but if that don't float your boat and you don't mind wires? You can run anything from a 2600 or NES through PS3 and everything in between. Nothing like playing a classic fighter on
Uhhh just FYI but NONE of those games were developed by "Sega", Sega as a company has been dead since 2004. The company that owns the Sega name (and farms out the IP to third parties) is SAMMY who took over Sega by buying up the outstanding stock when they went broke in 04. Sammy then merely changed their name to Sega (just like Telegames bought the Atari name and IP and changed their name to Atari) and started pimping out the IP, again just like Telegames.
So I'm sorry but the company currently known as Sega has absolutely nothing in common with the people who made the SMS-Dreamcast, anymore than the current Atari has anything to do with the company who made the 2600. Its just a name now dude, the people are looooong gone.
What is retarded about his statement? You DO know that 2 out of the 3 current consoles are nothing but VERY low end PCs, right? That you can get a PC in the $400-$500 range that will do higher resolution AND better graphics AND will cost less for games, yes?
Anybody that has read my previous posts knows I'm a hardcore AMD supporter but I will never understand WTF they were thinking by going with the Jaguar APU for their consoles over something like the A-Series. I mean for fucks sake the Bobcat (which is all the Jag is, a Bobcat with more cores and 7%-10% more IPC) was designed to be an ultra low cost answer to the Intel ATOM chip, it was cut down all to hell to get it into Atom price territory and as somebody that owns a Bobcat netbook I can tell ya they run about as well as an Atom+ION but that's it,a first gen C2D or Athlon X2 just curbstomps the chip when it comes to number crunching.
This is the first console generation in ages where the PC didn't have to play catch up at release, in fact PC games already looked better and did higher resolution OOTB than either console and it all comes down to having a netbook APU. Its a fricking STB, no reason why they couldn't have went with something with more processing power, and what is worse is this is probably as good as its gonna get as the X86 arch is just so well known there really isn't any hidden power to squeeze, not with a chip that is already as weak as the Jag. I have built some Jag based systems (the AM1 socket systems are all Jag chips) and while they make great ULV office boxes or media tanks, would I want to game on the things? Not a chance.
So if this is gonna be the path they take? I honestly do not see the appeal. You have a system with all the downsides of a PC, long patch times, HDD loads, phone home DRM and DLC tied to a user, but none of the upsides like free MP, multiple vendors, or the much lower prices. Even the exclusives are drying up because the cost of triple A titles has gotten so high third parties can't afford to be exclusive. So yeah...really not seeing a selling point this gen, lots of downsides, not really seeing the ups.
I don't even think TFA understands there is a difference between "surviving" and being "a zombie company strictly used to whore out old IP by milking nostalgia value" which Atari is strictly the latter. I suppose one could argue that Sega has been the same since Sammi bought them out but I wouldn't call milking old IP for nostalgia value to be "surviving" by any stretch of the imagination.
I should have clarified I was talking about EARLY 90s, by 95 the quality had already started turning into deep fried dogshit. That was the case across the board BTW, even the first generation PlayStations were lucky if they made 90 days past warranty before the CD drives just fucking died! Going through 3 PlayStations in less than a year was ultimately turned me into a PC gamer as having to go months without my games and shell out the ass because Sony couldn't be bothered to put in a quality CD motor? REALLY pissed me off! Its amazing how many wear the rose colored goggles when it comes to the PS-1 but the gen 1 and 2 units? Absolute garbage.
That said from the mid 70s through around 92-93? You wanted a top notch piece of gear you bought Sony PERIOD. I had the same experience as you did with a Sony reel to reel unit, finally giving it away when I couldn't buy tape for it anymore and it still ran as good as the day I got it, the same was true across their entire line, you wanted something that would just last and last while having all the latest features? You bought Sony.
But we have seen the same story over and over again, once great companies get CEOs that care only about short term gains and cripple the company, from AMD firing their engineers and just using computer layouts to Seagate buying Maxtor and using their shitty ARM controllers on Seagate products, its a story as old as business and its the reason Sony is in such bad shape now. You burn your bridges for short term gains? You can't come crying when you need to work your way back.
And moreover partnering with Sony WOULD NOT HAVE SAVED THEM as they had burned their customers over and over AND OVER for the better part of 5 years. Nobody was gonna buy Sega hardware even if they came out with the baddest console in the history of the universe!
The reason Sega died was threefold, 1.- They royally fucked their retail partners on the Saturn by doing a "sneak launch" that left several 800 pound gorillas like Walmart out in the cold. this pissed off those retailers so badly that many of them swore to never carry another piece of Sega hardware, this crippled their retail channel overnight and it never recovered.
2.-The thing that put the first nails in the coffin though was the fact that SOA and SOJ weren't even on speaking terms, with things getting so bad that SOJ would even make announcements that would hamstring SOA! From what I read SOJ was a bunch of elitist pricks with a serious case of NIH so they treated SOA like a red headed stepchild and kept them out of the loop on what they had in the pipe.Depending on how you view 3 this can be seen as justified, though it still crippled the company.
3.- But what ultimately destroyed their sales was the fact that SOA simply refused to let go off the Genesis and launched one failed add-on after another, all of which left the consumer feeling like they got scammed as they spent hundreds of dollars (nearly $700 if they bought a Genesis, Sega-CD, and 32x at launch) and all they got was piss poor support, lousy titles, and in the case of the 32x a device that was dying less than 90 days after launch!
Many blame the fact that the Saturn was really designed to be a 2D gaming monster that had badly supported 3D just bolted on at the last minute but I would argue that by that time they were already dying. I was a HARDCORE Sega fan at the time but after getting burnt on the Sega-CD (I picked up a 32x when they hit $25 with 3 games but we all knew it was a dead system by then) I was just fucking done with the company,after seeing the incredible promise of Sega-CD just thrown away (anybody who says it couldn't be a great system really should play Lunar) I honestly didn't trust the company not to abandon their hardware before enough decent games came out to justify the expense. I avoided the Saturn altogether for the PlayStation, grabbed a Dreamcast when it hit $75 (and the pirates had already cracked it, makes a great NES/Genesis emulator box) and then went PC and never looked back.
At the time I was big into IRC and all I heard from the Sega channels was the same story, guys that got burnt on Sega-CD/32X that refused to give the company another shot, a few picked up Saturn only to see SOA refuse to import the best titles thanks to their pissing contest with SOJ, instead sticking with frankly shitty western games (most guys forget that before the big 3D shooter and RPG craze on PC that western game developers were REALLY piss poor compared to their eastern counterparts. Bad controls, lousy levels, and lame graphics were standard for western made games by and large) and leaving the best titles for the system overseas. By the time the Dreamcast came around? Even the most hardcore fanboys just had had enough, they had a shitload of hardware with little to no decent games and felt ripped off. You have to remember they hyped the shit out of Sega-CD/32X so a LOT of guys (myself included) got taken and when you sank nearly $500 and could count the good games on 2 hands with fingers left over? That is NOT a good sign!
So no Sony could not have saved them, they were already dying by that point. They should have never released the CD/32X or at least committed to giving them 3 years of game support, even if it meant dropping the royalties to nothing just to get devs on board,if they would have done that along with a promise of 3 years on Saturn? Then they might have made it, at least built enough good will to get their fanbase to get on board with Dreamcast which really was a kick ass piece of hardware, but shitty management, too many pieces of worthless hardware, and too much infighting had them dead by 2K and nothing would have saved them at that point.