I'm all for copyrights, though I think that the current duration is a little long. However, I am against the concept of DRM on anything except for things which are explicitly rentals.
DRM is what keeps me from having a nice application that I can just put in a DVD player and have it ripped and stored in a library for later viewing on my computer, just like music I rip from a CD. DRM keeps me from listening to iTunes songs on my Linux box without having to burn it to a CD. DRM keeps me from reading my ebooks on any platform I choose on any hardware I choose. On the flipside, it does not stop copyright infringers from distributing illegal copies of those copyrighted works. It only has to be broken once. So while it has done nothing to stop the copyright infringers, it has stopped the paying customers.
So there is what is wrong with DRM. I didn't mention abuses like Sony's rootkit even.
I also realize that there are ways to circumvent most DRM to do the things I described above, but for most people those aren't even an option due to lack of technical skills, and for a lot of people in the world the circumvention itself is illegal.
Little do you know that human history has been rife with DRM. We just think they were all uneducated but in reality archaelogists just can't get past the DRM of the Dark Ages. And if you think that is bad, wait until you hear about Neanderthal man's DRM capabilities. We all think they were pretty dumb, but they DRM'd everything. All in all, mankind is making progress as there aren't nearly as many things that are DRM'd nowadays.
Yes, AFAIK, all the Doom 3 based games do run on more than Windows. So that is a sign of hope. But we'll see if Unreal Engine licensees can ever figure out that the Unreal Engine gives them an easy in for a few more sales.
The problem is that people aren't using the full capabilities of those engines. For example, the Unreal engine works on Windows, Mac and Linux. I've played UT 2003 and 2004 on all three without any emulators so I know it works. But then you have alls sorts of companies that make games using it and they do something to make it only work on Windows. Epic goes through all this work to give them easy access to Mac and Linux users and they go and blow it. A lot of developers might say it's not worth the effort to increase market share by a few points, but that's not what this is. They are effectively saying that they don't want that market share since all the effort has already been done for them. The whole thing is ridiculous. You might be singing happy diddly day for more development houses using premade engines, but that's been going on for a while now and they still don't bother taking advantage of the efforts already put forth. Stupid Developers!
Games (most of them anyway) are not much more than a scripted sequence of events that occurs based upon certain inputs. That is, if I push w in most FPSs my character plays a little animation that usually looks like he is walking forward. If I shoot and I hit a biological target, in many games a sequence is played of causing that target to play its death animation and maybe some particles will come out that look like blood. In Unreal Tournament that character sometimes becomes a floating skeleton, sometimes becomes a rag doll, and almost every time will turn ethereal and start floating into the air. In Half-Life some of those particles stick to the wall or floor for a given time.
In other words, a ratings board, such as the ESRB, does not need to play the entire game, because much of it is going to be repetitive in terms of its rating. All the developer/publisher would need to do is present all the models, animations, textures and sound files that are in the game. Now that would work for some things (such as foul language in sound files or textures with pornographic images) but many things depend on context. Thus, the developer/publisher could also present a short showcase of the game. For example, a movie from several different parts of the game highlighting how miserably deprave or sanctimoniously righteous the game truly is. Of course, the ratings board would have to trust the developer/publisher to be honest. But they could get around that by implementing fines for dishonesty, mostly because it hurts the trust that consumers can have for the ratings board.
Wait, I think I just described how it already works. Oh nevermind, I guess it's not broken after all. Move along, nothing to see here but a bunch of hot headed congress critters drumming up some attention and votes.
For the price of a new DVD and gas, I can rent 7 movies.
I am confused. Do you live next door to a rental place? Do you use Netflix? Why would gas not come into play when you are renting a movie? Either you are not using your brain to its fullest capacity or you are withholding information from us.
Can huge corporations succeed in gaming culture/counterculture?
The better question is "Can gaming culture maintain its somewhat counter culture edge?" Gaming is moving mainstream and as it does more "mainstream" people get into it. That is people who are only concerned about being mainstream are going to be the more predominant group. The same can be said of almost any group of people. As it becomes mainstream then you get more people who only care about the appearance rather than the core ideologies of that group.
No kidding. I had a friend come to me a few weeks ago after he priced out a computer on Dell for gaming. He didn't tell me what it had. Just wanted me to price one out for him. All the parts came from Newegg (so we weren't even shopping around for the best price) and when we were done he had nearly the exact same machine (with the exception that the one on Newegg included two monitors in the price) and it was $1000 less than Dell. His wife asked if he could get it lower so we went back and started trimming here and there and eventually dropped another $600. So his $3000 Dell dropped to a slightly (very slightly) underpowered $1400 computer. I bought a computer at the same time for only $580 and can turn all the settings up on Half-Life 2 and Doom 3.
Spending insane amounts of cash on computers for gaming purposes is ridiculous if you know what and where to buy. So listen up all you console fans: For less than the price of a PS3, I have a fully backward compatible gaming rig that can output at a resolution higher than HD. It just so happens that I can also do other useful things with my gaming rig. The only thing consoles have over PCs is being able to sit on a couch (which can be done with a PC) and play multiplayer with one machine (if you're all in the same room).
Sorry about turning that into a PC/console rant. The point is that these "gaming computers" are a big ripoff.
In that case they could use stationary solar panels. That is, they could set up little gas stations...er...solar stations where the rovers could go and charge and then they could go into the shadowy areas for a while and come back when they need a new charge.
the board will not give specific reasons behind their ratings, only generalities.
That's crazy talk. Movies are always rated with little blurbs like "Strong Thematic Elements." I'm sorry, but it's just not possible to get anymore specific than that without giving out the actual script. Generalities!?! Whatever man.
That doesn't really work statistically speaking because after you got older and wiser and decided that music wasn't where you wanted to spend your money, another group of younger kids came along buying CDs. However, culturally, you're generation bought music in stores in the CD (cassette, record) format. Nowadays, people are buying them from iTunes or renting them from Napster. That is what accounts for the change. It's not you growing up, or music starting to suck, it's where people are buying the music. Even if they really meant albums and not CDs, I rarely (read haven't yet) buy an entire album anymore because I'd rather get the one or two songs I like and leave the filler out, and I'm not alone in this. What the online music stores are allowing is people to tell artists what songs they like. No more need to create filler songs.
So since you've gone to all no name music, my question is, "Is there a website I can go to find no name indie bands whose style is what I like?" For example, I want to tell it that I listen to Foo Fighters, Green Day, Nirvana, Three Days Grace and Beethoven and it will give me a list of indie bands that are similar. I think I remember hearing about something like that recently but I have no clue what it is.
I realize that the original poster did say "enter already established markets" I don't think that is what he meant. I say that because entering a market is easy for the most part. Succeeding in a market is a very different thing. You might say MS barely beating out Nintendo in worldwide consoles sales is success, but most business people will tell you that success is making a profit. MS has made a profit on their entire xbox division in only one quarter. That quarter happened to contain Halo 2 and Christmas. Other than that, they have lost money on the xbox division. In fact, forbes says they've lost $7 billion from their newer products, including the xbox ($4 billion alone) and MSN. So while they might be entering already established markets with ease, I'd say they are hardly successful at it. Sega left the console market when they couldn't afford to be in the console market anymore. If the past is an indication of the future, Microsofts investors will want them to leave the console market as well.
No, Moore's law states that the number of integrated circuits will double in density every two years with respect to minimum component cost. Moore claims he never said 18 months even though it is often quoted as such. It is also not an exact law, but was an empirical observation of his time, which was why he orignially said every year, but changed that early on. And not only that, but speed != number of circuits != number of cores. In fact, clock speed != CPU calculation speed.
MS achieved second place in a established market their first try. That is far from a 'failure'.
MS achieved last place in profits and they did so with entirely borrowed funds. They are a business so in the end, profits is all that determines success. Which was my point. They made a splash, but even with such hits as Halo and Halo 2 they couldn't gain a profit overall.
Second point, that 5 billion lost, does that include revenue from games and Live? Care to give a cite somewhere?
For a citation, how about the same article you linked to. There they claim only 4 billion in losses, but I've heard 5 somewhere else which may or may not be true. In either case, that isn't chump change.
I am sure they would like to sell more but a lot of people are waiting to see what the other players bring to the market.
I'm sure people are. And from everything I've heard both on the internet and from people I know, there are essentially three camps: those who want a Wii, those who want a PS3, and those who already have a 360. That's not exactly a scientific study or good statisticaly analysis, but that's what I've seen.
Comparing two companies' total financials when you really mean to compare divisions is inaccurate to say the least. Microsoft is losing a lot of money on almost everything they do except for Windows and Office. They need to start turning a profit on those things or investors are going to be upset. Sony on the other hand does not have its entire financial future based on two things. They have a music, TV and movie division, they have the Playstation brand and video games, they have a broad range of electronics, and they have computers. They branched out and were profitable in the process, maybe not wildly profitable, but profitable nonetheless. MS is branching out and losing money everywhere they do. Investors may be a finicky bunch but eventually they would rather a small profit than a big splash that goes no where. And that is where my predictions are based. Unless MS really starts making profits investors are going to want them to get lean and that means cutting all sorts of unprofitable ventures.
Based on the above, I will restate, unless something really changes this generation, MS will leave the console business.
Let's see Microsoft and Sony make billions in profit from their home console business...
That's hilarious. I was just thinking about this and have come to the conclusion that MS will be out of the console business within 5 years unless something extraordinary occurs this generation. They lost over 5 billion dollars on the Xbox. That is >$5,000,000,000! This all while they had Halo and Halo 2. You may recall Halo 2 sold over 2.4 million copies on its first day and over 7 million in its lifetime. MS even owns the freaking company that made it. They still couldn't turn a profit on that kind of success. The Xbox 360 looks to be heading the same direction. They've had nearly a whole year to without competition and they've only sold 5 million consoles. Considering the Xbox sold ~24 million in 4 years, that's 6 million/year, so they're behind, and this without any competition.
I predict, MS will flounder this generation, and if their investors allow a third generation, that will be their last. Right now, the Playstation name means more than Xbox, and Nintendo is actually profitable so Sony and Nintendo aren't going anywhere after this generation. MS absolutely needs to drop the price of the 360 to below that of the Wii this season if they want to survive.
1. It's cheaper for games, yes. But what about everything else you want to do? You know that whole "surf the web" thing, write some kind of document, check your email, etc. Let's say you get a new Wii at $250 and a cheap Dell at ~$300. So you are already at $550. The other day I priced out a computer from newegg for $700 that would be sufficient to play video games now and for the next 3-4 years. Plus it'll be able to do all those things most people do on their computers as well as all the things I do on computers. So a difference of only $150 dollars if you go with the cheapest console and the cheapest computer.
2. I think this is a myth. I have never once had a problem with any game playing on my computer. Maybe it requires a special kind of stupid or something.
3. Tweaking this or that is similar to #2 but also to #1. Again, my $700 computer can handle it all. But let's compare apples to apples. I had a roommate at one time that thought Halo looked much better on the xbox than Jedi Outcast on the PC. So I reduced my resolution from 1280x1024 to 640x480 and suddenly he thought Outcast looked better. Turns out having a crappy blurry res on TV actually eliminates detail and thus makes it easier for the machine to run things. But it doesn't look nicer. Now with HD many games are still at lower resolutions than PCs have been for a while. Turn your PC down to those same resolutions and amazingly it can handle it.
4. This is rather a moot point. Exclusives on consoles mean if you want that game you get that console. But the PC has exclusives that just aren't coming over. I couldn't imagine trying to play Warcraft III on a console. FPSs and RTSs are not for consoles. Some FPSs have been ported over, but they still don't play as nicely as on a PC. Plus, consoles don't have all the simple/web/java/flash based games that are really the big market. Those are played more often than even WoW. Remember, MS Solitaire is a video game too.
5. I'm not much into online play and don't know much about it. So I will concede this one. However, there is nothing inherent about consoles that allow this. Just because it hasn't been done on PCs doesn't mean it can't be soon.
6. There hasn't been much in the way of backwards compatibility until Sony's PS2. Xbox BC is a mess, Nintendo is doing something for once with the Wii, and the PS3 is supposed to have some BC. PC BC is much better. You may have had some issues with an upgrade, but for some games, so I've heard, give issues going from PSX to PS2. There will be more issues going to PS3 and xbox BC is a load of crap.
7. So here you are saying that you are giving up on computers. I guess that is why #1 is such an issue. Yeah, if all you want to do is play games with no need for anything a computer can do then sure, #1 is big. But if you need a computer for any reason, #1 becomes less of an issue, and you'll still have to deal with the bad stuff on computers.
8. Sounds fairly subjective. I enjoy being at my computer. But if you want to sit at a couch you can hook up to your TV and still play games. Cables can be long or you can go wireless or if you prefer controllers those can be purchased as well. Plus, I believe I saw a USB cooler on thinkgeek once.
9. Logitech is your friend. They make controllers for PCs. Typically though if there are that many options then you are playing a game that you cannot use with a controller. And for any recent FPS I have been successful at knowing the key bindings without having to look them up. Still, if you find controllers more your thing, they can be had on PCs.
10. There are some pretty wild and cool input gadgets on PCs too. Some are really neat while others are pure crap. Not much different than consoles here. So Nintendo came out with something neat, which I am looking forward to, but the reason it's not viewed as some gimmick (by most) is because it is shipping with all Wiis. If every PC purchased from Dell came w
I know I have said that at the current price point no one will buy it. Of course, by "no one" I have always meant "relatively very few compared to the other consoles." So perhaps that is what others are saying, even if they are the same people. I think this is the case. Very few people were going to buy one because of the price, and now that supply will be limited, those who did want one, will not be able to, unless they want to pay even more as some enterprising individuals will buy one solely to sell it on ebay.
Allstate is terrible at that too. I've timed my calls. One where I listened to all their nonsense before even getting to menus, and one where I memorized the numbers I needed to push and did so as soon as I could. For a simple call of paying my bill only the difference was about 4-5 minutes. It's ridiculous. These calls could still be reduced in time by another minute or so, so it's still not very good, even when I do memorize key presses.
Are you listening Allstate? Shut that lady on the phone up!
An infinite number of monkeys, on an infinite number of typewriters, will eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare. John Romero's Daikatana was a ten-minute, five-monkey job. Found here.
Slashdot Mirror
There's klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow.
Everyone join in!
Only going forward 'cause we can't find reverse!
Troll? Methinks I may have made one of the Neanderthals mad.
I'm all for copyrights, though I think that the current duration is a little long. However, I am against the concept of DRM on anything except for things which are explicitly rentals.
DRM is what keeps me from having a nice application that I can just put in a DVD player and have it ripped and stored in a library for later viewing on my computer, just like music I rip from a CD. DRM keeps me from listening to iTunes songs on my Linux box without having to burn it to a CD. DRM keeps me from reading my ebooks on any platform I choose on any hardware I choose. On the flipside, it does not stop copyright infringers from distributing illegal copies of those copyrighted works. It only has to be broken once. So while it has done nothing to stop the copyright infringers, it has stopped the paying customers.
So there is what is wrong with DRM. I didn't mention abuses like Sony's rootkit even.
I also realize that there are ways to circumvent most DRM to do the things I described above, but for most people those aren't even an option due to lack of technical skills, and for a lot of people in the world the circumvention itself is illegal.
Little do you know that human history has been rife with DRM. We just think they were all uneducated but in reality archaelogists just can't get past the DRM of the Dark Ages. And if you think that is bad, wait until you hear about Neanderthal man's DRM capabilities. We all think they were pretty dumb, but they DRM'd everything. All in all, mankind is making progress as there aren't nearly as many things that are DRM'd nowadays.
Yes, AFAIK, all the Doom 3 based games do run on more than Windows. So that is a sign of hope. But we'll see if Unreal Engine licensees can ever figure out that the Unreal Engine gives them an easy in for a few more sales.
The problem is that people aren't using the full capabilities of those engines. For example, the Unreal engine works on Windows, Mac and Linux. I've played UT 2003 and 2004 on all three without any emulators so I know it works. But then you have alls sorts of companies that make games using it and they do something to make it only work on Windows. Epic goes through all this work to give them easy access to Mac and Linux users and they go and blow it. A lot of developers might say it's not worth the effort to increase market share by a few points, but that's not what this is. They are effectively saying that they don't want that market share since all the effort has already been done for them. The whole thing is ridiculous. You might be singing happy diddly day for more development houses using premade engines, but that's been going on for a while now and they still don't bother taking advantage of the efforts already put forth. Stupid Developers!
Games (most of them anyway) are not much more than a scripted sequence of events that occurs based upon certain inputs. That is, if I push w in most FPSs my character plays a little animation that usually looks like he is walking forward. If I shoot and I hit a biological target, in many games a sequence is played of causing that target to play its death animation and maybe some particles will come out that look like blood. In Unreal Tournament that character sometimes becomes a floating skeleton, sometimes becomes a rag doll, and almost every time will turn ethereal and start floating into the air. In Half-Life some of those particles stick to the wall or floor for a given time.
In other words, a ratings board, such as the ESRB, does not need to play the entire game, because much of it is going to be repetitive in terms of its rating. All the developer/publisher would need to do is present all the models, animations, textures and sound files that are in the game. Now that would work for some things (such as foul language in sound files or textures with pornographic images) but many things depend on context. Thus, the developer/publisher could also present a short showcase of the game. For example, a movie from several different parts of the game highlighting how miserably deprave or sanctimoniously righteous the game truly is. Of course, the ratings board would have to trust the developer/publisher to be honest. But they could get around that by implementing fines for dishonesty, mostly because it hurts the trust that consumers can have for the ratings board.
Wait, I think I just described how it already works. Oh nevermind, I guess it's not broken after all. Move along, nothing to see here but a bunch of hot headed congress critters drumming up some attention and votes.
For the price of a new DVD and gas, I can rent 7 movies.
I am confused. Do you live next door to a rental place? Do you use Netflix? Why would gas not come into play when you are renting a movie? Either you are not using your brain to its fullest capacity or you are withholding information from us.
Can huge corporations succeed in gaming culture/counterculture?
The better question is "Can gaming culture maintain its somewhat counter culture edge?" Gaming is moving mainstream and as it does more "mainstream" people get into it. That is people who are only concerned about being mainstream are going to be the more predominant group. The same can be said of almost any group of people. As it becomes mainstream then you get more people who only care about the appearance rather than the core ideologies of that group.
No kidding. I had a friend come to me a few weeks ago after he priced out a computer on Dell for gaming. He didn't tell me what it had. Just wanted me to price one out for him. All the parts came from Newegg (so we weren't even shopping around for the best price) and when we were done he had nearly the exact same machine (with the exception that the one on Newegg included two monitors in the price) and it was $1000 less than Dell. His wife asked if he could get it lower so we went back and started trimming here and there and eventually dropped another $600. So his $3000 Dell dropped to a slightly (very slightly) underpowered $1400 computer. I bought a computer at the same time for only $580 and can turn all the settings up on Half-Life 2 and Doom 3.
Spending insane amounts of cash on computers for gaming purposes is ridiculous if you know what and where to buy. So listen up all you console fans: For less than the price of a PS3, I have a fully backward compatible gaming rig that can output at a resolution higher than HD. It just so happens that I can also do other useful things with my gaming rig. The only thing consoles have over PCs is being able to sit on a couch (which can be done with a PC) and play multiplayer with one machine (if you're all in the same room).
Sorry about turning that into a PC/console rant. The point is that these "gaming computers" are a big ripoff.
In that case they could use stationary solar panels. That is, they could set up little gas stations...er...solar stations where the rovers could go and charge and then they could go into the shadowy areas for a while and come back when they need a new charge.
Or I suppose they could use RTGs.
the board will not give specific reasons behind their ratings, only generalities.
That's crazy talk. Movies are always rated with little blurbs like "Strong Thematic Elements." I'm sorry, but it's just not possible to get anymore specific than that without giving out the actual script. Generalities!?! Whatever man.
That doesn't really work statistically speaking because after you got older and wiser and decided that music wasn't where you wanted to spend your money, another group of younger kids came along buying CDs. However, culturally, you're generation bought music in stores in the CD (cassette, record) format. Nowadays, people are buying them from iTunes or renting them from Napster. That is what accounts for the change. It's not you growing up, or music starting to suck, it's where people are buying the music. Even if they really meant albums and not CDs, I rarely (read haven't yet) buy an entire album anymore because I'd rather get the one or two songs I like and leave the filler out, and I'm not alone in this. What the online music stores are allowing is people to tell artists what songs they like. No more need to create filler songs.
So since you've gone to all no name music, my question is, "Is there a website I can go to find no name indie bands whose style is what I like?" For example, I want to tell it that I listen to Foo Fighters, Green Day, Nirvana, Three Days Grace and Beethoven and it will give me a list of indie bands that are similar. I think I remember hearing about something like that recently but I have no clue what it is.
I realize that the original poster did say "enter already established markets" I don't think that is what he meant. I say that because entering a market is easy for the most part. Succeeding in a market is a very different thing. You might say MS barely beating out Nintendo in worldwide consoles sales is success, but most business people will tell you that success is making a profit. MS has made a profit on their entire xbox division in only one quarter. That quarter happened to contain Halo 2 and Christmas. Other than that, they have lost money on the xbox division. In fact, forbes says they've lost $7 billion from their newer products, including the xbox ($4 billion alone) and MSN. So while they might be entering already established markets with ease, I'd say they are hardly successful at it. Sega left the console market when they couldn't afford to be in the console market anymore. If the past is an indication of the future, Microsofts investors will want them to leave the console market as well.
No, Moore's law states that the number of integrated circuits will double in density every two years with respect to minimum component cost. Moore claims he never said 18 months even though it is often quoted as such. It is also not an exact law, but was an empirical observation of his time, which was why he orignially said every year, but changed that early on. And not only that, but speed != number of circuits != number of cores. In fact, clock speed != CPU calculation speed.
Save the Universe! Just say NO to irreversible processes!
MS achieved last place in profits and they did so with entirely borrowed funds. They are a business so in the end, profits is all that determines success. Which was my point. They made a splash, but even with such hits as Halo and Halo 2 they couldn't gain a profit overall.
For a citation, how about the same article you linked to. There they claim only 4 billion in losses, but I've heard 5 somewhere else which may or may not be true. In either case, that isn't chump change.
I'm sure people are. And from everything I've heard both on the internet and from people I know, there are essentially three camps: those who want a Wii, those who want a PS3, and those who already have a 360. That's not exactly a scientific study or good statisticaly analysis, but that's what I've seen.
Comparing two companies' total financials when you really mean to compare divisions is inaccurate to say the least. Microsoft is losing a lot of money on almost everything they do except for Windows and Office. They need to start turning a profit on those things or investors are going to be upset. Sony on the other hand does not have its entire financial future based on two things. They have a music, TV and movie division, they have the Playstation brand and video games, they have a broad range of electronics, and they have computers. They branched out and were profitable in the process, maybe not wildly profitable, but profitable nonetheless. MS is branching out and losing money everywhere they do. Investors may be a finicky bunch but eventually they would rather a small profit than a big splash that goes no where. And that is where my predictions are based. Unless MS really starts making profits investors are going to want them to get lean and that means cutting all sorts of unprofitable ventures.
Based on the above, I will restate, unless something really changes this generation, MS will leave the console business.
Let's see Microsoft and Sony make billions in profit from their home console business...
That's hilarious. I was just thinking about this and have come to the conclusion that MS will be out of the console business within 5 years unless something extraordinary occurs this generation. They lost over 5 billion dollars on the Xbox. That is >$5,000,000,000! This all while they had Halo and Halo 2. You may recall Halo 2 sold over 2.4 million copies on its first day and over 7 million in its lifetime. MS even owns the freaking company that made it. They still couldn't turn a profit on that kind of success. The Xbox 360 looks to be heading the same direction. They've had nearly a whole year to without competition and they've only sold 5 million consoles. Considering the Xbox sold ~24 million in 4 years, that's 6 million/year, so they're behind, and this without any competition.
I predict, MS will flounder this generation, and if their investors allow a third generation, that will be their last. Right now, the Playstation name means more than Xbox, and Nintendo is actually profitable so Sony and Nintendo aren't going anywhere after this generation. MS absolutely needs to drop the price of the 360 to below that of the Wii this season if they want to survive.
1. It's cheaper for games, yes. But what about everything else you want to do? You know that whole "surf the web" thing, write some kind of document, check your email, etc. Let's say you get a new Wii at $250 and a cheap Dell at ~$300. So you are already at $550. The other day I priced out a computer from newegg for $700 that would be sufficient to play video games now and for the next 3-4 years. Plus it'll be able to do all those things most people do on their computers as well as all the things I do on computers. So a difference of only $150 dollars if you go with the cheapest console and the cheapest computer.
2. I think this is a myth. I have never once had a problem with any game playing on my computer. Maybe it requires a special kind of stupid or something.
3. Tweaking this or that is similar to #2 but also to #1. Again, my $700 computer can handle it all. But let's compare apples to apples. I had a roommate at one time that thought Halo looked much better on the xbox than Jedi Outcast on the PC. So I reduced my resolution from 1280x1024 to 640x480 and suddenly he thought Outcast looked better. Turns out having a crappy blurry res on TV actually eliminates detail and thus makes it easier for the machine to run things. But it doesn't look nicer. Now with HD many games are still at lower resolutions than PCs have been for a while. Turn your PC down to those same resolutions and amazingly it can handle it.
4. This is rather a moot point. Exclusives on consoles mean if you want that game you get that console. But the PC has exclusives that just aren't coming over. I couldn't imagine trying to play Warcraft III on a console. FPSs and RTSs are not for consoles. Some FPSs have been ported over, but they still don't play as nicely as on a PC. Plus, consoles don't have all the simple/web/java/flash based games that are really the big market. Those are played more often than even WoW. Remember, MS Solitaire is a video game too.
5. I'm not much into online play and don't know much about it. So I will concede this one. However, there is nothing inherent about consoles that allow this. Just because it hasn't been done on PCs doesn't mean it can't be soon.
6. There hasn't been much in the way of backwards compatibility until Sony's PS2. Xbox BC is a mess, Nintendo is doing something for once with the Wii, and the PS3 is supposed to have some BC. PC BC is much better. You may have had some issues with an upgrade, but for some games, so I've heard, give issues going from PSX to PS2. There will be more issues going to PS3 and xbox BC is a load of crap.
7. So here you are saying that you are giving up on computers. I guess that is why #1 is such an issue. Yeah, if all you want to do is play games with no need for anything a computer can do then sure, #1 is big. But if you need a computer for any reason, #1 becomes less of an issue, and you'll still have to deal with the bad stuff on computers.
8. Sounds fairly subjective. I enjoy being at my computer. But if you want to sit at a couch you can hook up to your TV and still play games. Cables can be long or you can go wireless or if you prefer controllers those can be purchased as well. Plus, I believe I saw a USB cooler on thinkgeek once.
9. Logitech is your friend. They make controllers for PCs. Typically though if there are that many options then you are playing a game that you cannot use with a controller. And for any recent FPS I have been successful at knowing the key bindings without having to look them up. Still, if you find controllers more your thing, they can be had on PCs.
10. There are some pretty wild and cool input gadgets on PCs too. Some are really neat while others are pure crap. Not much different than consoles here. So Nintendo came out with something neat, which I am looking forward to, but the reason it's not viewed as some gimmick (by most) is because it is shipping with all Wiis. If every PC purchased from Dell came w
I know I have said that at the current price point no one will buy it. Of course, by "no one" I have always meant "relatively very few compared to the other consoles." So perhaps that is what others are saying, even if they are the same people. I think this is the case. Very few people were going to buy one because of the price, and now that supply will be limited, those who did want one, will not be able to, unless they want to pay even more as some enterprising individuals will buy one solely to sell it on ebay.
Maybe the universe would care if we gave a little something back.
Save the Universe: Just say no to non-reverisible processes!
Allstate is terrible at that too. I've timed my calls. One where I listened to all their nonsense before even getting to menus, and one where I memorized the numbers I needed to push and did so as soon as I could. For a simple call of paying my bill only the difference was about 4-5 minutes. It's ridiculous. These calls could still be reduced in time by another minute or so, so it's still not very good, even when I do memorize key presses.
Are you listening Allstate? Shut that lady on the phone up!
I just hope that while they are at it they can go ahead and renew my FAFSA for this year.
An infinite number of monkeys, on an infinite number of typewriters, will eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare. John Romero's Daikatana was a ten-minute, five-monkey job. Found here.