Um, have you ever been to "Hard Off"? (Yes mods, that's really the name. It's a sister store to "Book Off" and, also amusingly, "Kimono Off.") All they sell there are used electronics and used CDs/DVDs/VHSs. Yet they continue to be in business. Heck, just wander around the oh-so-trendy-now Akihabara section of Tokyo. That place is jam packed with shops selling used monitors, used game systems, used everything electronic. Used video games in Japan sell for pretty close to the original price, maybe minus only $5 or $10. My friend said he got good prices for reselling his games, but I haven't tried, so I can't give you a quote on that. Used games are also in really nice shape, generally, so it's almost worth the high cost.
Anyhow, it's not true that Japanese only buy new stuff.
In case people think you're kidding, let me spell it out about the cars. In Japan, every car needs to have an inspection. The older your car, the most frequent and more expensive the inspection. After a while, it costs more to have your car inspected than to buy a new car. Thus most of the cars that you see in Japan are under 10 years old. In America, you still see a fair amount of cars from the 70s and 80s, but in Japan, you just don't at all.
My understanding is that the old Japanese cars are sold to Australia, since they're also right hand drive and relatively close.
Of course, you're right. That's why I put the disclaimer "maybe, maybe not" in parentheses.:-D The 'Cube was much closer to the Xbox than one would expect from the numbers, however.
Nintendo has repeatedly said that they weren't going to release the specs to their next console, because it's irrelevant and misleading. IGN just proved their point. Everyone who knows anything about CPUs knows that PPC chips perform better on a per-megahertz basis than x86 chips, yet IGN acts like Xbox's higher clockrate means it was necessarily better than the Gamecube. (Maybe, maybe not, but the MHz tells you exactly nothing about the question.) Similarly, he's comparing the Xbox 360 to the Revolution without noting that they have completely different architectures. It's like saying, "this Japanese guy's phallus is 10cm and this American guy's is only 6", therefore, 10 being larger than 6, the Japanese are more fun in the sack for the ladies."
This article is completely misleading, and further illustrates why Nintendo didn't care to publish their specs. None of these specs have anything to do with whether the Revolution is fun or looks good. For that, we have to wait until E3 when Nintendo shows off the console to the public. Until then, it's all just meaningless dick measuring.
Wright freely admits to being influenced by "Powers of Ten." The trick is, that's a movie, but Wright is making a game. It's one thing to make a movie of powers of ten; it's another to make an entire sandbox universe that users can interact with based on it.
2. Open the screenshot on your iMac. Display it full screen.
3. Take a picture.
I mean, he hasn't posted a video of him using the computer and his mousing syncing up with the screen, right? Just a blurry photo. So, that proves basically nothing. I'm not saying he absolutely didn't do it, just that a photo doesn't count for much.
Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike
on
No EFI Support for Vista
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· Score: 5, Informative
Amit Singh and his friends at IBM got XP running under VMWare in Linux on an Intel iMac. As he says, "To anybody who has used Windows XP under Virtual PC on the PowerPC version of Mac OS X: you will simply be blown away by how fast Windows XP runs under VMware on the new hardware." So that's good news. Now someone just has to make it work under OS X directly.
Given that Nintendo is directly competing with Microsoft in the console arena, and in the handheld arena the PSP put up some strong competition, all I can assume is that you're trolling.
Meh. Seemed about par. I didn't notice the name, and just assumed it was one of the guys writing until I saw the PhotoBooth picture. Mighta been nice if they'd a run it over though.
My first thought was, "Oh, the screen's not that bright." Then I looked over at one of the old style DSes. It looked so muddy and washed out in comparison! It's definitely a step up. Next, I tried the demo of Animal Crossing... but I didn't learn much from that besides that AC is only interesting when it's your town not some demo character. Mario Kart was much more interesting, because it taught me that the buttons are way more comfortable. The current DS buttons are sort of shallow and hard, but the new buttons are a lot easier on the thumb when you're holding down the gas with all your might. It's also seemingly easier to hit A while holding X, or whatever. The stylus is also better. I almost never use the built-in stylus now, since it's too small to be comfortable, but the new one seems just big enough to be useable.
I'll see if I can manage to find one or not when they go on sale (when the shops open in a couple hours from). I'm actually holding out for the new color, but I told a friend, I'd send her one at low commission. Usually, there isn't much problem getting a hold of things on their release date, but this might be more problematic than usual, since it's supposedly in short supply. We'll see.
I sometimes wonder: doesn't Linux have an incentive to remain a poor choice for the desktop? I mean, if you're selling support, then it doesn't make sense to create an intuitive product that needs no support, right? I'm not saying this necessarily happens to Linux, I'm just wondering about the incentives for developers. Who's gonna get rich selling a no-brainer system like Unbutu, when you can get Unbutu for free? And how is Unbutu supposed to get big if it doesn't have the money to compete?...
Consider a contrasting case though, if you're Google or some other company dependent on big servers running OSes finely tuned to your particular performance and hardware needs, it makes sense to figure out how much you would have to pay MS for Windows 200x server licenses, cut the number in half, and pay developers that lower price to deliver an free OS with the feature you're looking for on your schedule instead of the ones that MS's other customers want on MS's schedule. Plus, if you can persuade other server dependent companies to do the same, your costs go down. This is famously IBM's strategy as well.
When you think about it from the perspective of business incentives, the poor inroads that Linux has on the desktop make a little more sense.
One more thought about incentives: these days, most consumers who upgrade their PCs are pushed over the edge when their computer gets so gunked up with spyware that it slows to a crawl. Dell ought to pay these guys a bounty if they didn't write it anyway. It's not in Dell's interest to move away from an OS that allows this sort of gunkifying. That want something that please you with its look and speed out of the box, but then turns into a fossil just as the warantee gives out.
You act as though there's some reason to not waste bits. There isn't. All of the Fairplay protected music on my computer comes to less than a gig in its current format. Let's say the lossless format I someday switch to is 5 times less efficient than this. Do you really think I'm going to upgrade from my 40-gig iPod to another player if wasting 4 gigs or not will be a relevant factor in my use of it? Most current manufactures only sell players in 10 gig increments, so I'm going to need to buy one with a least 10 gigs more space than my library currently has, just to avoid having to upgrade as soon as my library gets any larger. Why would I upgrade to a new player to begin with if it doesn't have enough space to spare for me to rerip all of existing CDs losslessly (9 gigs as currently compressed meaning 45 gigs lossless plus the space for the mp3s I got from my friends which I may or may not be able to get lossless from them as well)? So, if it's being a "sucker" to "waste" hard drive space that you weren't going to use anyway but still have to pay for, then I guess so, whatever.
The DRM is as lax as possible while still keeping the music industry from having a fit.
That's not 100% true. Emusic.com has a lot of indie artists available for download in unDRMed.mp3 format. Before you say, "So what? They're indies," bear in mind that a lot of these songs are also available on iTunes. For example, off the top of my head, I've seen albums by Tortoise, Dizzee Rascal, Cornelius in both music stores, yet Apple still puts standard issue FairPlay on to these same songs, even though another service wiggled their way out of it. So, while Apple is pretty fair given their contraints, it's not true that their as lax as they could be, given that other companies offer some of the same songs under a more lax policy.
The thing is since I backed up my iTunes purchase on CD (as Apple all but instructs you to do with their post-download warning dialog), I'm never going to end up listening to those songs at lower quality than I bought them. Why? Because if I ever move away from Apple iTunes/iPod it will be to some other system that is able to hold higher quality sound files than today's iPod. Which is to say, I'm not going to bother to sell my existing iPod unless I can buy a new player that supports lossless audio, and if my new player supports lossless audio, then I can just import my backup CDs losslessly. True, the quality won't be as good as buying CDs of the music in the first place, but it won't be worse than what I've always had before that. On top of that, the iTunes store is cheaper and more convenient than buying a real CD, so for purchases where I don't need absolutely every possible bit of sound quality, it's the best value and reasonably future proof given the CD loophole. And all this goes without even using illegal means of removing DRM like jhymn.
I was given an original Japanese Xbox and kept it for a little while without really playing it that much. One day, I wanted to watch a DVD, so I put it into the Xbox. Everything worked out once I found the batteries for the remote (that you need them to get the DVD working at all is another rant). However, suddenly I noticed something odd: When you press play, on the top of the screen it says "Play." It doesn't say saisei or katakanaized purei, but straight up, using roman letters "Play." The same for fast forward and rewind. To me, this seemed emblematic of MS's failure to properly localize its product. It's true that Japanese people know a lot of the English words for consumer product related thing, but this just struck me as laziness on MS's part.
Another story: this weekend, I was at Japanese Toys'R'Us, and I decided to play with their 360. I tried out Kong, and it looked pretty good to start with, but before long I was kind of stuck. The screen was really dark, and I couldn't tell where I was or what was going on. Then I remembered a story I saw on Slashdot: Kong is too dark on conventional, non-HD TVs because the devs didn't think to test it properly. Now, I'm not sure of all the details, but I'm pretty sure that Japan's version of HD is significantly different from the American version. (It came out before the US version, but never really caught on, I think.) Anyhow, that is probably related to why even though the screen for the demo machine looked pretty sharp, Kong was unplayably dark.
That was and is my mom's philosophy with cars. She never locks her doors (although lately more and more cars lock themselves automatically). She says it's OK though, since no one will steal her car if it looks all junky on the inside.
Example of the above: The "happiness book" in Majora's Mask (I forget the actual name for it). It let you know that you were supposed to help Anju and Kaffe, but you already knew that beating the game was actually just a matter of solving the canyon dungeon. So, sometimes you did the dungeons, and sometimes you helped people. It was the best Zelda.
They just announced a new cart that will support user input -> kanji, but it only comes with English to Japanese and Japanese-Japanese dictionaries. See http://ds.ign.com/articles/688/688906p1.html.
I already have their old dictionary, but I'm considering selling it when this one comes out and getting it.
Unlikely. There's no real precedent of Action News channels admitting how full of crap they are. And why would they? They have no incentive to do so as it stands. They must have known the story was garbage when they made it. Any idiot can tell that the DS only chats locally. So they willfully overlooked the truth to get ratings through sensastionalism. Pointing out their error won't cause them to correct their mistake, because it wasn't an honest one, it was a willful deception. What are they going to do, go on TV and say, "Oh our bad, we lied right through our teeth the other day, but we got some polite calls, so we'll retract what we said now." Not going to happen.
Basically our only realistic hope is to annoy them so much that they (and other TV news shows) realize that if they libel video gamers again it's just going to clog their phones and email boxes and make their lives miserable. The other options are to complain to the FCC about the blatantly misleading nature of the program and hope that they threaten to pull their license and to encourage Nintendo to sue, but neither is that likely to happen given the spinelessness of the FCC and the difficulty of proving libel in America. There's not really much hope for justice. All we can do is annoy them and hope they learn their lesson.
Haven't you seen "I, Robot" starring Will Smith!? Once the master computer turns alive and evil, it will use auto-update to infect every computer/robot in the world! Turn off auto-update now, while you still have a chance to enjoy Converse tennis shoes and [insert product placement]!! If you don't, the consequences could be dire.
This message brought to you by Sony Home Entertainment.
You're right. I think what Nintendo is doing is really dangerous. They're putting their chips on the line. But, I think it might pay off in the end. Just looking at the Japanese market, they've apparently done a good job of selling Brain Training to old people and Nintendogs to girls. Nintendo knows how to make a fun and interesting game, and if they can get non-gamers to give up their anti-game prejudice, they can make a lot of sales... But yeah, this may end or may not end up leaving fanbois in the dust. It all depends on whether or not they're able to do this new strategy while continuing to make the kind of games that fanbois like. It will require a lot of good resource allocation and fine balancing of how much to invest in each game. If it works out, Nintendo could herald in a new age of mass involvement in games not seen since the NES. If it doesn't work out... Well, the Dreamcast still has some fans, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Um, have you ever been to "Hard Off"? (Yes mods, that's really the name. It's a sister store to "Book Off" and, also amusingly, "Kimono Off.") All they sell there are used electronics and used CDs/DVDs/VHSs. Yet they continue to be in business. Heck, just wander around the oh-so-trendy-now Akihabara section of Tokyo. That place is jam packed with shops selling used monitors, used game systems, used everything electronic. Used video games in Japan sell for pretty close to the original price, maybe minus only $5 or $10. My friend said he got good prices for reselling his games, but I haven't tried, so I can't give you a quote on that. Used games are also in really nice shape, generally, so it's almost worth the high cost.
Anyhow, it's not true that Japanese only buy new stuff.
In case people think you're kidding, let me spell it out about the cars. In Japan, every car needs to have an inspection. The older your car, the most frequent and more expensive the inspection. After a while, it costs more to have your car inspected than to buy a new car. Thus most of the cars that you see in Japan are under 10 years old. In America, you still see a fair amount of cars from the 70s and 80s, but in Japan, you just don't at all.
My understanding is that the old Japanese cars are sold to Australia, since they're also right hand drive and relatively close.
Of course, you're right. That's why I put the disclaimer "maybe, maybe not" in parentheses. :-D The 'Cube was much closer to the Xbox than one would expect from the numbers, however.
Nintendo has repeatedly said that they weren't going to release the specs to their next console, because it's irrelevant and misleading. IGN just proved their point. Everyone who knows anything about CPUs knows that PPC chips perform better on a per-megahertz basis than x86 chips, yet IGN acts like Xbox's higher clockrate means it was necessarily better than the Gamecube. (Maybe, maybe not, but the MHz tells you exactly nothing about the question.) Similarly, he's comparing the Xbox 360 to the Revolution without noting that they have completely different architectures. It's like saying, "this Japanese guy's phallus is 10cm and this American guy's is only 6", therefore, 10 being larger than 6, the Japanese are more fun in the sack for the ladies."
This article is completely misleading, and further illustrates why Nintendo didn't care to publish their specs. None of these specs have anything to do with whether the Revolution is fun or looks good. For that, we have to wait until E3 when Nintendo shows off the console to the public. Until then, it's all just meaningless dick measuring.
Just wait until your dentist get the toothbrushing game for Revolution! :-D
Wright freely admits to being influenced by "Powers of Ten." The trick is, that's a movie, but Wright is making a game. It's one thing to make a movie of powers of ten; it's another to make an entire sandbox universe that users can interact with based on it.
It's not as though it's a hard hoax to do.
1. Go to a Windows box. Take a screen shot.
2. Open the screenshot on your iMac. Display it full screen.
3. Take a picture.
I mean, he hasn't posted a video of him using the computer and his mousing syncing up with the screen, right? Just a blurry photo. So, that proves basically nothing. I'm not saying he absolutely didn't do it, just that a photo doesn't count for much.
Amit Singh and his friends at IBM got XP running under VMWare in Linux on an Intel iMac. As he says, "To anybody who has used Windows XP under Virtual PC on the PowerPC version of Mac OS X: you will simply be blown away by how fast Windows XP runs under VMware on the new hardware." So that's good news. Now someone just has to make it work under OS X directly.
Nintendo has less competition... than Microsoft
Given that Nintendo is directly competing with Microsoft in the console arena, and in the handheld arena the PSP put up some strong competition, all I can assume is that you're trolling.
Meh. Seemed about par. I didn't notice the name, and just assumed it was one of the guys writing until I saw the PhotoBooth picture. Mighta been nice if they'd a run it over though.
It was playing demo software, so I wasn't able to adjust it.
I was at J. Toys R Us and tried it out:
My first thought was, "Oh, the screen's not that bright." Then I looked over at one of the old style DSes. It looked so muddy and washed out in comparison! It's definitely a step up. Next, I tried the demo of Animal Crossing... but I didn't learn much from that besides that AC is only interesting when it's your town not some demo character. Mario Kart was much more interesting, because it taught me that the buttons are way more comfortable. The current DS buttons are sort of shallow and hard, but the new buttons are a lot easier on the thumb when you're holding down the gas with all your might. It's also seemingly easier to hit A while holding X, or whatever. The stylus is also better. I almost never use the built-in stylus now, since it's too small to be comfortable, but the new one seems just big enough to be useable.
I'll see if I can manage to find one or not when they go on sale (when the shops open in a couple hours from). I'm actually holding out for the new color, but I told a friend, I'd send her one at low commission. Usually, there isn't much problem getting a hold of things on their release date, but this might be more problematic than usual, since it's supposedly in short supply. We'll see.
I sometimes wonder: doesn't Linux have an incentive to remain a poor choice for the desktop? I mean, if you're selling support, then it doesn't make sense to create an intuitive product that needs no support, right? I'm not saying this necessarily happens to Linux, I'm just wondering about the incentives for developers. Who's gonna get rich selling a no-brainer system like Unbutu, when you can get Unbutu for free? And how is Unbutu supposed to get big if it doesn't have the money to compete?...
Consider a contrasting case though, if you're Google or some other company dependent on big servers running OSes finely tuned to your particular performance and hardware needs, it makes sense to figure out how much you would have to pay MS for Windows 200x server licenses, cut the number in half, and pay developers that lower price to deliver an free OS with the feature you're looking for on your schedule instead of the ones that MS's other customers want on MS's schedule. Plus, if you can persuade other server dependent companies to do the same, your costs go down. This is famously IBM's strategy as well.
When you think about it from the perspective of business incentives, the poor inroads that Linux has on the desktop make a little more sense.
One more thought about incentives: these days, most consumers who upgrade their PCs are pushed over the edge when their computer gets so gunked up with spyware that it slows to a crawl. Dell ought to pay these guys a bounty if they didn't write it anyway. It's not in Dell's interest to move away from an OS that allows this sort of gunkifying. That want something that please you with its look and speed out of the box, but then turns into a fossil just as the warantee gives out.
You act as though there's some reason to not waste bits. There isn't. All of the Fairplay protected music on my computer comes to less than a gig in its current format. Let's say the lossless format I someday switch to is 5 times less efficient than this. Do you really think I'm going to upgrade from my 40-gig iPod to another player if wasting 4 gigs or not will be a relevant factor in my use of it? Most current manufactures only sell players in 10 gig increments, so I'm going to need to buy one with a least 10 gigs more space than my library currently has, just to avoid having to upgrade as soon as my library gets any larger. Why would I upgrade to a new player to begin with if it doesn't have enough space to spare for me to rerip all of existing CDs losslessly (9 gigs as currently compressed meaning 45 gigs lossless plus the space for the mp3s I got from my friends which I may or may not be able to get lossless from them as well)? So, if it's being a "sucker" to "waste" hard drive space that you weren't going to use anyway but still have to pay for, then I guess so, whatever.
The DRM is as lax as possible while still keeping the music industry from having a fit.
.mp3 format. Before you say, "So what? They're indies," bear in mind that a lot of these songs are also available on iTunes. For example, off the top of my head, I've seen albums by Tortoise, Dizzee Rascal, Cornelius in both music stores, yet Apple still puts standard issue FairPlay on to these same songs, even though another service wiggled their way out of it. So, while Apple is pretty fair given their contraints, it's not true that their as lax as they could be, given that other companies offer some of the same songs under a more lax policy.
That's not 100% true. Emusic.com has a lot of indie artists available for download in unDRMed
The thing is since I backed up my iTunes purchase on CD (as Apple all but instructs you to do with their post-download warning dialog), I'm never going to end up listening to those songs at lower quality than I bought them. Why? Because if I ever move away from Apple iTunes/iPod it will be to some other system that is able to hold higher quality sound files than today's iPod. Which is to say, I'm not going to bother to sell my existing iPod unless I can buy a new player that supports lossless audio, and if my new player supports lossless audio, then I can just import my backup CDs losslessly. True, the quality won't be as good as buying CDs of the music in the first place, but it won't be worse than what I've always had before that. On top of that, the iTunes store is cheaper and more convenient than buying a real CD, so for purchases where I don't need absolutely every possible bit of sound quality, it's the best value and reasonably future proof given the CD loophole. And all this goes without even using illegal means of removing DRM like jhymn.
I was given an original Japanese Xbox and kept it for a little while without really playing it that much. One day, I wanted to watch a DVD, so I put it into the Xbox. Everything worked out once I found the batteries for the remote (that you need them to get the DVD working at all is another rant). However, suddenly I noticed something odd: When you press play, on the top of the screen it says "Play." It doesn't say saisei or katakanaized purei, but straight up, using roman letters "Play." The same for fast forward and rewind. To me, this seemed emblematic of MS's failure to properly localize its product. It's true that Japanese people know a lot of the English words for consumer product related thing, but this just struck me as laziness on MS's part.
Another story: this weekend, I was at Japanese Toys'R'Us, and I decided to play with their 360. I tried out Kong, and it looked pretty good to start with, but before long I was kind of stuck. The screen was really dark, and I couldn't tell where I was or what was going on. Then I remembered a story I saw on Slashdot: Kong is too dark on conventional, non-HD TVs because the devs didn't think to test it properly. Now, I'm not sure of all the details, but I'm pretty sure that Japan's version of HD is significantly different from the American version. (It came out before the US version, but never really caught on, I think.) Anyhow, that is probably related to why even though the screen for the demo machine looked pretty sharp, Kong was unplayably dark.
That was and is my mom's philosophy with cars. She never locks her doors (although lately more and more cars lock themselves automatically). She says it's OK though, since no one will steal her car if it looks all junky on the inside.
She hasn't been wrong so far.
I still lock my car though.
The new models might be good phones, I don't know. But the first model was the only phone with the only feature that matters:
Sidetalkin'.
Example of the above: The "happiness book" in Majora's Mask (I forget the actual name for it). It let you know that you were supposed to help Anju and Kaffe, but you already knew that beating the game was actually just a matter of solving the canyon dungeon. So, sometimes you did the dungeons, and sometimes you helped people. It was the best Zelda.
I'd be happy if they'd just solve the damn clipping problem.
"Hey, check it out, King Kong's arm is sort of going into the wall. He must be a g-g-g-ghoooooost!"
They just announced a new cart that will support user input -> kanji, but it only comes with English to Japanese and Japanese-Japanese dictionaries. See http://ds.ign.com/articles/688/688906p1.html.
I already have their old dictionary, but I'm considering selling it when this one comes out and getting it.
Unlikely. There's no real precedent of Action News channels admitting how full of crap they are. And why would they? They have no incentive to do so as it stands. They must have known the story was garbage when they made it. Any idiot can tell that the DS only chats locally. So they willfully overlooked the truth to get ratings through sensastionalism. Pointing out their error won't cause them to correct their mistake, because it wasn't an honest one, it was a willful deception. What are they going to do, go on TV and say, "Oh our bad, we lied right through our teeth the other day, but we got some polite calls, so we'll retract what we said now." Not going to happen.
Basically our only realistic hope is to annoy them so much that they (and other TV news shows) realize that if they libel video gamers again it's just going to clog their phones and email boxes and make their lives miserable. The other options are to complain to the FCC about the blatantly misleading nature of the program and hope that they threaten to pull their license and to encourage Nintendo to sue, but neither is that likely to happen given the spinelessness of the FCC and the difficulty of proving libel in America. There's not really much hope for justice. All we can do is annoy them and hope they learn their lesson.
Haven't you seen "I, Robot" starring Will Smith!? Once the master computer turns alive and evil, it will use auto-update to infect every computer/robot in the world! Turn off auto-update now, while you still have a chance to enjoy Converse tennis shoes and [insert product placement]!! If you don't, the consequences could be dire.
This message brought to you by Sony Home Entertainment.
You're right. I think what Nintendo is doing is really dangerous. They're putting their chips on the line. But, I think it might pay off in the end. Just looking at the Japanese market, they've apparently done a good job of selling Brain Training to old people and Nintendogs to girls. Nintendo knows how to make a fun and interesting game, and if they can get non-gamers to give up their anti-game prejudice, they can make a lot of sales... But yeah, this may end or may not end up leaving fanbois in the dust. It all depends on whether or not they're able to do this new strategy while continuing to make the kind of games that fanbois like. It will require a lot of good resource allocation and fine balancing of how much to invest in each game. If it works out, Nintendo could herald in a new age of mass involvement in games not seen since the NES. If it doesn't work out... Well, the Dreamcast still has some fans, right?