The Media industry is the enforcer keeping the retailers from selling to kids. I don't know a single US retailer who would seriously risk the negative public feedback if they did. The media makes a point every so often of sending kids in with the idea of testing retailers over this. If you work for a corporate retailer you should expect to hear tons of crap every year about how anyone found selling a game to minors will be fired on the spot.
On the other hand when GTA3 came out I had plenty of parents coming into the store I worked for buying it for their 7 year olds knowing full well what content is in it (I maid sure they did)... I doubt many kids actually had to go out of their way to get copies, they asked their parents who make no attempts to raise them to buy it and that was it.
Well overlooking the fact that both PS2 and Xbox versions have the same code and all it takes is a small modified save game file I doubt they plan on running and buying the PC version anytime soon...
This can't help Rockstar as 90% of retail outlets here in the US have a policy against carrying 'AO' rated content. Mine does and I already got a decree from corporate tonight before I left work that theyed already adjusted the system to dissallow copies of the game to be sold and required all stores to pull units of the game from the floor in preperation for sending them back.
It sounds awfully hard to make money when no one can find your game to buy it...
CN still says Naruto this fall, but who knows for sure...
Anyways... Yeah they are bad... I am the Video Director for an anime convention and we play fansubs in our video line-up and one of the ADV guys after lookign at our schedule had a fit... To which I pointed out if that none of the shows we were showing in fansub form where licensed by anyone outside the original creator and we'd be happy to show the series in a none fansub form if they would provide it to us... He still sputtered for awhile, but he couldn't really argue the point...
Um besides the offensive nature of that comment (you have no idea after all how long I've been collecting anime after all, but you make it sound as if I can't possiblly have collected it as long as you), That's based on one piece of information...
From my POV (that of being the video director of a anime convention) crowds only seem to get bigger and this is the case across the board. Though 2 things have most likely significantly effected growth on TV (especially with the adult crowd)... The first is the horrible job done on alot of dubs of late (I know from our work fansubs are gaining popularity among atendees and it forces us to air fansubbed anime to keep their interest in our video rooms). The second is a lack of good anime being bought for airing even on adult swim. Time block also has a big effect on why I don't watch adult swim, I've never bothered with a Tivo style device and midnight showings of things I might want to watch haven't suited my viewing (or sleeping) habits for several years now...
TV in general has never fared well with anime (except in the kids category where it continues to dominate a sizable chunk of TV viewing) here in the US. ADV's attempts at creating a pure anime cable TV channel should highlight this. The quality and volume of anime it would take to sustain a pure anime channel is larger than the distribution here in the US is outside of fansubs...
Um I was replying to his statement where he says "ADV had a brief lucky streak where the niche market they serve suddenly became a booming industry fad here in the U.S. As a result, they grew way too fast for their primary market to sustain them. Now with the industry receding back toward being a niche market again, they're struggling to stay afloat."
I argued back that the signs seem to indicate that the market isn't shrinking and if anything is still growing (just maybe not as fast as it did a couple years ago). He also argued over and over that anime was a 'fad', if so it's gotta be the longest 'fad' in history since this is the 3rd decade for growth of it...
I didn't say anything about ADV at all. ADV has been stupid for almost a decade now with progressively worse work in their market. With alternatives that are much better it's no suprise at all they aren't doing well... But again that wasn't the point of my comment...
Now I find this a strange statement... Probably because I'm staff for an Anime Convention. Year over year Anime conventions have kept growing in attendance. Heck some of the most popular have had to set caps on attendance or they couldn't fit them all in a reasonable way... That would seem counter to any kind of 'recession back to a niche market'. At the same time Anime Conventions are sprouting up everywhere, five years ago I'd have had to drive 500 miles to visit a convention, now I have 3 within 100 miles...
I should also mention companies like Viz found effective solutions to limited growth like doing away with the middleman by merger. But even so some of the biggest US distributors these days are Bandai and Geneon... Both of which are US branches of Japanese companies involved in the production of Anime in the first place...
ADV is known as the 'Terminator' of licensing companies by fansubbers, because as soon as they license a project *normally before it's finished airing in Japan) they sick their lawyers on any and all fansub groups. They also hound bittorrent sites used to distribute fansubs of their licenses at the same time. They are absolutely horrible on fansubbers these days, which is funny (at least to me) since ADV grew out of the fansubbing community in it's early days...
This is simply an attempt by them to give the impression that they might eventually offer online content beyond trailers, while cutting bandwidth expenses on distributing things like trailers. I really doubt they will ever want to release any of their actual products via BT.
Um dude team ninja makes DOA games and Ninja Gaiden, they don't make anything else for Namco and frankly Team Ninja itself wasn't paid anything to use the Xbox... ANotehr team in Namco made Rygar (which frankly I'm not willing to call better than DOA or Ninja Gaiden).
Also in the US MS had alot of 3rd party xbox support with only a few notable exceptions that eventually came over anyways. Japan could have seen better games from Japanese developers if other developers would have just taken a chance, but none did. Well at least not til now with several offshot development companies and Square Enix wanting a piece of the pie...
I will mention some really nice Japanese oriented games that MS had made for xbox and did (to a limited extent) come out in the US as well like Phantom Crash and Phantom Dust (don't ask why they both ahve 'Phantom' in the name). I have owned both (& I kick myself every day for the last year because I traded Phantom Crash in which was a great game I'd still like to play now) and each had interesting gameplay and a very japanese presentation, but got no response from either Japan or the US...
duh. But you know why they are like that? It starts with most Japanese developers shunning the xbox when it came out. Team Ninja (part of Namco) was about the only development team to insist on Xbox. Most developers just ignored it from the start, with no one who developes Japanese games (with the one noted exception) developing for the xbox who was supposed to make Japanese style games for it? US game companies? Eroupian game companies? I don't think they would understand what makes a game a japanese style game...
While certain 'western' things may be 'in' for the Japanese people, in certain cases they are indeed very protectionist of their 'local' brands. Heck even the survey says a huge chunk of those people surveyed would buy a Revolution or PS3 because of the brand. I'll agree that either absolute is true, just like you say, but you do need to admit that their is alot of protectionism in Japan.
Vehicles and Electronics are the biggest things that the Japanese feel protective about when it comes to brands. That said their are exceptions, like 'performance cars' which they are more likely to look at Europe for. For electronics though (which is what consoles are), you don't see very much popularity in the Japanese market for western brands at all. Sony does huge bussiness in the electronics field in Japan and US centric brands like RCA or GE are almost non-existant (also the same with europian brands like Uniden). I'd look up the figures to show you in fancy charts and such, but I think you can handle that on your own....
Well since you mentioned Voom I'll mention last I heard Dish network bought Voom for bargin pricing to get their collective HD channels for use on their own system...
I heard this from Dish directly since I use Dish now (though currently not their 'Dish HD' since they want me to spend more cash than I'm willing to pay for a new box and dish and then charge em more per month).
it must be nice to have all your statiosn in HD... Whiel the parent companies of my local statiosn all air HD signals not even one local station offers HD where I live (right next to a city of 500,000). PBS used to offer HD (though not every day which I always thought was funny), but they just dropped their HD transmissions because of expense. No one else has ever offered it and of the other 5 stations only one even offers a digital signal (which from a conversation with the stations technology director reachers at best 10 miles, compared to 60-80 miles with their analog signal). I am 17 miles from their tower and can't recieve their digital signal at all.
It's depressing and sad such I know what HD looks like, but it looks like my only option for HD signals will be via satellite for quite some time...
Well from my personnal experience I will tell you that reading means many things to many different people. Actual comprehension was always a strong point for me because my mom (before she quit college to have me) was on her way to a elementary education degree I learned the basics school wouldn't get aroudn to teaching me til 2nd grade... On the other hand while I could say... read anything given to me I hated reading. For years school had me read garbage that didn't hold my interest for long and heck I even got bitched at by teachers during school because they couldn't understand I had no problems reading literally anything. Heck as an example at the begining of middle school we had a test to evaluate or current ability in different subjects. My Math ability tested a couple grades higher than I was in (7th or 8th when I was in 6th), but my reading levels were college level or above... But still I hadn't found anything I wanted to read it took a chance encounter at my uncles house with the original dragonlance books for me to find something that actually sparked my interest in reading. But teachers couldn't understand these 'vile' books I was reading and things like book reports where I used a fantasy or sci-fi novel (rather than some scholastic 50 page piece of trash like my classmates) always got me negative scores because of the bias of the teachers. Luckily I'm a stubburn guy and never gave up reading what I liked, though If anything they should have been happy, those books paved my way into alot of other works they probably would have appreciated more (like histories and scientific articles)... Forcing a particular view on what's a good choice of reading materials won't help people read
Also before I stop I'll mention 80% of my time in school I was treated like shit... School wasn't very 'feel good' for me and heck as we should know from slashdot that's still the case for alot of kids now. I think the problem is more that the kids who need that 'feel good' vibe don't get it and the ones who do don't really need it... So it's all wasted.
Btw you also seem to like the shoehorn approach (aka shove them into learning like so and damn them if it doesn't fit them). That's a very narrow minded approach, though one that has as many supporters as opposers. Personally as a kid I was incredibly shy and oral arguments or analysis are things I couldn't do. To this day I'm still a bit shy, but that's taken nearly 30 years now (aka my entire life) to change. It would have never happened in a day or a week just because some teacher insisted I be good at something...
What's really funny si the company behind WeatherBug sells it in stores and people pay $20-30 for it... I mean if people had comon sense when it comes to computers they wouldn't actually pay money to infect themselves...
Uh really I don't see the point in arguing with you since you don't understand your wrong, but I had to differ from what I know to be true...
Oh though I was off on the number of chips AMD wanted to give HP for free... It was 1,000,000 chips of which HP took 150,000 of.
Oh and just a note on laptops... Laptop manufacturers definately undercut the AMD systems with lesser hardware in most cases... I'd also comment on power consumption/battery life and provide a link to a good comparison I read a couple days ago, but I can't find the link right now. But suffice it to say in that comparison the AMD laptops did at least as good (& in at least one case lasted 30 minutes longer) than the Centrino laptops.
Ok I have to call BS on some of the stuff your talking about:
1. "AMD cannot deliver in volume, particularly their high-end stuff." They can to OEM's outside of OEM's things are dependant first and foremost on OEM demand. That means if HP decides suddenly they need 10k more chips AMD will give them 10k from the next batch before serving the rest of the market. They have served OEM's fairly high volume for all high-end chips for quite awhile. They may not have the sheer capacity of Intel (1 and soon 2 fabs versus 30), but they have always been able to meet demand if not exceed it for the past 6 years...
2. "AMD is too unpredictable with their schedules." I've never heard this claim before. I'm also not sure if you mean 'product batch shipment' schedules or 'new product' schedules. Though #1 answered the first and #2 they do as well if not better than Intel.
3. "AMD has too high field failure rates." This should be tossed with the manure it belongs with. I know alot of small bussinesses that provide computers (not true OEM's) and they regularly say AMD cpu's have lower failure rates than Intel for the last several years...
4. "Good AMD motherboards are too pricey." Hmm... Gotta say boards within teh same class cost as much on either side of the line (whether AMD or Intel) and most OEM's use fairly cheap designs for AMD systems which use chips such as the ATI Express 200 which are as complete as anything Intel offers in the same market and for a nearly identical price.
5. "AMD mobile CPUs suck power and are inferior overall." Turion's when tested evenly beat the best Intel 'Centrino' cpu's for battery life. Same goes for Mobile Athlon 64 vs Intel P4. But Intel has had a strangle hold on laptop manufacturers for so long they don't often make systems that are easy to compare fairly between the two.
6. "And they can't provide the same volume discounts because their margins are too small because they are 1-2 years behind Intel in process technology/geometry." Um What? Have you been smoking something? Well no I know you've been smoking soemthing, so let me take that back... They can't provide volume discounts as deep as Intel for a simple reason: They don't have the revenue to give any bigger discounts. Though they have still offered some huge dicounts before. HP for instance was offered 10,000 cpu's from AMD for free! They only ever ended up requesting about 1500 of their free cpu's. As for 'process technology/geometry' this is an area AMD has stayed even with Intle on or beat them for the last 5 years.
How about getting more up to date then commenting, 'k? Oh and stop smoking that stuff Intel sends you, that might help to...
1) AMD ahs a new fab that will be ready before any Intel chip goes into a Mac...
2) AMD had to much space just two years ago (and was renting out part of the Dresden fab). Only recently has demand caused any problems with supply and only because they are supplying 4 segments (server, workstation, desktop, laptop) of the market with the newest using up more wafer space because they are dual core.
No, but then again no bank would ever let them hand them out like candy that way... It's still a high intrest (something like 27% I believe) card with a fairly low point of entry (don't have to make huge amounts of money or have the best credit to get one) though.
Ya know that's exactly what Intel has been doing for years though... I can't even count how many times Intel has gone after AMD over the last decade at least...
I think AMD finally decided enough was enough and have thrown down the gauntlet... Let all the dirty laundry air... etc...
They will also come out a year after Xbox 360 and since we have no idea about actually hardware for this machine that we have only seen the casing for and nothing else... My point is (and was before) that it's to early to guess what the prices will be or who may or may not be making money off of the systems next generation...
They already do offer Sony credit cards... take a careful look at their website some time... It's not Playstation specific, but then again theyed rather you buy one of their $5000 TV's than a PS3 on that card...
Sicne I work for a retail chain (I'm the head of the Software/games department for my store FYI), I cna say that each generation we have bougth the systems for more than we sell them for and that this lasts for up to two years per system...
It's one of the reasons upper management is so uptight about demanding we sell games, accessories, and service contracts on each and every new system we sell... For both the first year of the Xbox and the PS2 both systems cost us $40 more than we sold them for... Most people will also refuse to get any of the three things I just mentioned we use to make up this loss because they already feel the system itself is expensive and don't believe they should have to pay more to make it usable. I've seen someone who owned no games for a brand new system demand that it was extortion because we said he wouldn't eb able to do much of anything with it without something to play on it. That means we took a hit every system we sold... and corporate smiles happily at these losses because in reality the manufacturer gives them truck loads of cash for helping to 'market' these new systems so in the end at the corporate level we break even, but the stores themselves loose money...
I think you may be a bit pre-mature on the cost of the Nintendo Revolution... So far we know next to nothign about it or what it may (or may not) cost... We also have no real idea how much the Xbox 360 may cost at launch either... Or heck even PS3 costs...
After all this was just a bunch of analysts getting together and deciding what they feel will be Sony's asking price for their next system that is still more than a year away in the US or Europe (though Japan will get it next spring)...
It's way way to early to say who will truly be more expensive...
"Personally, I question whether anyone should be taught or conditioned to equate bloody violence with "fun"."
Humans have always to some degree found 'bloody violence' fun. Otherwise how do you explain Gladiatorial games, public executions, battlefield watchers, etc, etc... Over the last 10,000 years of recorded history? I frankly don't think most people need to 'learn' that it is in any way shape or form 'fun', I think to some degree it's instictive.
Also in response to: "blame parents for not "parenting" ("It's not the game's fault, its the parent's fault for not being involved in the active parenting of their children!") when their children go psycho, a la Columbine, and the video game industry takes a (perhaps) unjustified hit? What do you say when part of active parenting involves limiting exposure to sex and violence?" While I may not want to give say a 7 year old GTA, I know (from persional experience) enough parents won't care what it's rated as or what it's like and so most likely even if I didn't let my child play those games they will probably still see them. It's also pretty wrong to blame the games or the makers of those games because they aren't trying to make a game for kids, it is clearly marked that it's intended for oldwer teens and adults... Heck have you seen the box for Conker: Live and Reloaded? It's got a glowing neon sticker that proclaims it as a game for those 17 years of age and older only...
Personally I have less of a problem with nudity/sex than violence, but the US in general seems to have that ass-backwards dur to religous eliments. It's funny that a religion that teaches peace has always had something of a love affair with violence, but nudity and sexuality is nie forbidden. I don't have a choice with games though, nudity has been forbidden in almost all cases (and what cases I could show are more corny than sexual) and violence becomes the rule because it's an easy way to create 'gameplay'. Sometimes though depending on the story and content violence is required... Other times it's just their to give you something to do before the next level of the same...
Sadly most US companies are really really bad at lettting users do stuff like that... Verizon for instance cripples Bluetooth support so you can't transfer files to the phone like that, not that they have many phones with bluetooth anyways...
I can't think of any non-PDA/cellphones that include a IrDA port, so that's out as well... USB data cables are an option and fairly popular, but even that gets crippled on alot fo models...
I shoudl also mention GSM is less than 40% of the cellular network in the US and it's shrinking, because companies didn't invest enough in it's infrastructure before transitioning over to GSM. In the US you are more likely to get dropped calls on GSM, have les service area, and often more problematic service in general.
I have a Verizon booth near where I work (they aren't GSM) and I watch customers switch all the time from GSM service to Verizon's non-GSM service because fo service issues... So using GSM phones as a comparison is probably a bad idea...
Slashdot Mirror
The Media industry is the enforcer keeping the retailers from selling to kids. I don't know a single US retailer who would seriously risk the negative public feedback if they did. The media makes a point every so often of sending kids in with the idea of testing retailers over this. If you work for a corporate retailer you should expect to hear tons of crap every year about how anyone found selling a game to minors will be fired on the spot.
On the other hand when GTA3 came out I had plenty of parents coming into the store I worked for buying it for their 7 year olds knowing full well what content is in it (I maid sure they did)... I doubt many kids actually had to go out of their way to get copies, they asked their parents who make no attempts to raise them to buy it and that was it.
Well overlooking the fact that both PS2 and Xbox versions have the same code and all it takes is a small modified save game file I doubt they plan on running and buying the PC version anytime soon...
This can't help Rockstar as 90% of retail outlets here in the US have a policy against carrying 'AO' rated content. Mine does and I already got a decree from corporate tonight before I left work that theyed already adjusted the system to dissallow copies of the game to be sold and required all stores to pull units of the game from the floor in preperation for sending them back.
It sounds awfully hard to make money when no one can find your game to buy it...
CN still says Naruto this fall, but who knows for sure...
Anyways... Yeah they are bad... I am the Video Director for an anime convention and we play fansubs in our video line-up and one of the ADV guys after lookign at our schedule had a fit... To which I pointed out if that none of the shows we were showing in fansub form where licensed by anyone outside the original creator and we'd be happy to show the series in a none fansub form if they would provide it to us... He still sputtered for awhile, but he couldn't really argue the point...
Um besides the offensive nature of that comment (you have no idea after all how long I've been collecting anime after all, but you make it sound as if I can't possiblly have collected it as long as you), That's based on one piece of information...
From my POV (that of being the video director of a anime convention) crowds only seem to get bigger and this is the case across the board. Though 2 things have most likely significantly effected growth on TV (especially with the adult crowd)... The first is the horrible job done on alot of dubs of late (I know from our work fansubs are gaining popularity among atendees and it forces us to air fansubbed anime to keep their interest in our video rooms). The second is a lack of good anime being bought for airing even on adult swim. Time block also has a big effect on why I don't watch adult swim, I've never bothered with a Tivo style device and midnight showings of things I might want to watch haven't suited my viewing (or sleeping) habits for several years now...
TV in general has never fared well with anime (except in the kids category where it continues to dominate a sizable chunk of TV viewing) here in the US. ADV's attempts at creating a pure anime cable TV channel should highlight this. The quality and volume of anime it would take to sustain a pure anime channel is larger than the distribution here in the US is outside of fansubs...
Um I was replying to his statement where he says "ADV had a brief lucky streak where the niche market they serve suddenly became a booming industry fad here in the U.S. As a result, they grew way too fast for their primary market to sustain them. Now with the industry receding back toward being a niche market again, they're struggling to stay afloat."
I argued back that the signs seem to indicate that the market isn't shrinking and if anything is still growing (just maybe not as fast as it did a couple years ago). He also argued over and over that anime was a 'fad', if so it's gotta be the longest 'fad' in history since this is the 3rd decade for growth of it...
I didn't say anything about ADV at all. ADV has been stupid for almost a decade now with progressively worse work in their market. With alternatives that are much better it's no suprise at all they aren't doing well... But again that wasn't the point of my comment...
Now I find this a strange statement... Probably because I'm staff for an Anime Convention. Year over year Anime conventions have kept growing in attendance. Heck some of the most popular have had to set caps on attendance or they couldn't fit them all in a reasonable way... That would seem counter to any kind of 'recession back to a niche market'. At the same time Anime Conventions are sprouting up everywhere, five years ago I'd have had to drive 500 miles to visit a convention, now I have 3 within 100 miles...
I should also mention companies like Viz found effective solutions to limited growth like doing away with the middleman by merger. But even so some of the biggest US distributors these days are Bandai and Geneon... Both of which are US branches of Japanese companies involved in the production of Anime in the first place...
ADV is known as the 'Terminator' of licensing companies by fansubbers, because as soon as they license a project *normally before it's finished airing in Japan) they sick their lawyers on any and all fansub groups. They also hound bittorrent sites used to distribute fansubs of their licenses at the same time. They are absolutely horrible on fansubbers these days, which is funny (at least to me) since ADV grew out of the fansubbing community in it's early days...
This is simply an attempt by them to give the impression that they might eventually offer online content beyond trailers, while cutting bandwidth expenses on distributing things like trailers. I really doubt they will ever want to release any of their actual products via BT.
Um dude team ninja makes DOA games and Ninja Gaiden, they don't make anything else for Namco and frankly Team Ninja itself wasn't paid anything to use the Xbox... ANotehr team in Namco made Rygar (which frankly I'm not willing to call better than DOA or Ninja Gaiden).
Also in the US MS had alot of 3rd party xbox support with only a few notable exceptions that eventually came over anyways. Japan could have seen better games from Japanese developers if other developers would have just taken a chance, but none did. Well at least not til now with several offshot development companies and Square Enix wanting a piece of the pie...
I will mention some really nice Japanese oriented games that MS had made for xbox and did (to a limited extent) come out in the US as well like Phantom Crash and Phantom Dust (don't ask why they both ahve 'Phantom' in the name). I have owned both (& I kick myself every day for the last year because I traded Phantom Crash in which was a great game I'd still like to play now) and each had interesting gameplay and a very japanese presentation, but got no response from either Japan or the US...
duh. But you know why they are like that? It starts with most Japanese developers shunning the xbox when it came out. Team Ninja (part of Namco) was about the only development team to insist on Xbox. Most developers just ignored it from the start, with no one who developes Japanese games (with the one noted exception) developing for the xbox who was supposed to make Japanese style games for it? US game companies? Eroupian game companies? I don't think they would understand what makes a game a japanese style game...
While certain 'western' things may be 'in' for the Japanese people, in certain cases they are indeed very protectionist of their 'local' brands. Heck even the survey says a huge chunk of those people surveyed would buy a Revolution or PS3 because of the brand. I'll agree that either absolute is true, just like you say, but you do need to admit that their is alot of protectionism in Japan.
Vehicles and Electronics are the biggest things that the Japanese feel protective about when it comes to brands. That said their are exceptions, like 'performance cars' which they are more likely to look at Europe for. For electronics though (which is what consoles are), you don't see very much popularity in the Japanese market for western brands at all. Sony does huge bussiness in the electronics field in Japan and US centric brands like RCA or GE are almost non-existant (also the same with europian brands like Uniden). I'd look up the figures to show you in fancy charts and such, but I think you can handle that on your own....
Well since you mentioned Voom I'll mention last I heard Dish network bought Voom for bargin pricing to get their collective HD channels for use on their own system...
I heard this from Dish directly since I use Dish now (though currently not their 'Dish HD' since they want me to spend more cash than I'm willing to pay for a new box and dish and then charge em more per month).
it must be nice to have all your statiosn in HD... Whiel the parent companies of my local statiosn all air HD signals not even one local station offers HD where I live (right next to a city of 500,000). PBS used to offer HD (though not every day which I always thought was funny), but they just dropped their HD transmissions because of expense. No one else has ever offered it and of the other 5 stations only one even offers a digital signal (which from a conversation with the stations technology director reachers at best 10 miles, compared to 60-80 miles with their analog signal). I am 17 miles from their tower and can't recieve their digital signal at all.
It's depressing and sad such I know what HD looks like, but it looks like my only option for HD signals will be via satellite for quite some time...
Well from my personnal experience I will tell you that reading means many things to many different people. Actual comprehension was always a strong point for me because my mom (before she quit college to have me) was on her way to a elementary education degree I learned the basics school wouldn't get aroudn to teaching me til 2nd grade... On the other hand while I could say... read anything given to me I hated reading. For years school had me read garbage that didn't hold my interest for long and heck I even got bitched at by teachers during school because they couldn't understand I had no problems reading literally anything. Heck as an example at the begining of middle school we had a test to evaluate or current ability in different subjects. My Math ability tested a couple grades higher than I was in (7th or 8th when I was in 6th), but my reading levels were college level or above... But still I hadn't found anything I wanted to read it took a chance encounter at my uncles house with the original dragonlance books for me to find something that actually sparked my interest in reading. But teachers couldn't understand these 'vile' books I was reading and things like book reports where I used a fantasy or sci-fi novel (rather than some scholastic 50 page piece of trash like my classmates) always got me negative scores because of the bias of the teachers. Luckily I'm a stubburn guy and never gave up reading what I liked, though If anything they should have been happy, those books paved my way into alot of other works they probably would have appreciated more (like histories and scientific articles)... Forcing a particular view on what's a good choice of reading materials won't help people read
Also before I stop I'll mention 80% of my time in school I was treated like shit... School wasn't very 'feel good' for me and heck as we should know from slashdot that's still the case for alot of kids now. I think the problem is more that the kids who need that 'feel good' vibe don't get it and the ones who do don't really need it... So it's all wasted.
Btw you also seem to like the shoehorn approach (aka shove them into learning like so and damn them if it doesn't fit them). That's a very narrow minded approach, though one that has as many supporters as opposers. Personally as a kid I was incredibly shy and oral arguments or analysis are things I couldn't do. To this day I'm still a bit shy, but that's taken nearly 30 years now (aka my entire life) to change. It would have never happened in a day or a week just because some teacher insisted I be good at something...
What's really funny si the company behind WeatherBug sells it in stores and people pay $20-30 for it... I mean if people had comon sense when it comes to computers they wouldn't actually pay money to infect themselves...
Uh really I don't see the point in arguing with you since you don't understand your wrong, but I had to differ from what I know to be true...
Oh though I was off on the number of chips AMD wanted to give HP for free... It was 1,000,000 chips of which HP took 150,000 of.
Oh and just a note on laptops... Laptop manufacturers definately undercut the AMD systems with lesser hardware in most cases... I'd also comment on power consumption/battery life and provide a link to a good comparison I read a couple days ago, but I can't find the link right now. But suffice it to say in that comparison the AMD laptops did at least as good (& in at least one case lasted 30 minutes longer) than the Centrino laptops.
Ok I have to call BS on some of the stuff your talking about:
1. "AMD cannot deliver in volume, particularly their high-end stuff." They can to OEM's outside of OEM's things are dependant first and foremost on OEM demand. That means if HP decides suddenly they need 10k more chips AMD will give them 10k from the next batch before serving the rest of the market. They have served OEM's fairly high volume for all high-end chips for quite awhile. They may not have the sheer capacity of Intel (1 and soon 2 fabs versus 30), but they have always been able to meet demand if not exceed it for the past 6 years...
2. "AMD is too unpredictable with their schedules." I've never heard this claim before. I'm also not sure if you mean 'product batch shipment' schedules or 'new product' schedules. Though #1 answered the first and #2 they do as well if not better than Intel.
3. "AMD has too high field failure rates." This should be tossed with the manure it belongs with. I know alot of small bussinesses that provide computers (not true OEM's) and they regularly say AMD cpu's have lower failure rates than Intel for the last several years...
4. "Good AMD motherboards are too pricey." Hmm... Gotta say boards within teh same class cost as much on either side of the line (whether AMD or Intel) and most OEM's use fairly cheap designs for AMD systems which use chips such as the ATI Express 200 which are as complete as anything Intel offers in the same market and for a nearly identical price.
5. "AMD mobile CPUs suck power and are inferior overall." Turion's when tested evenly beat the best Intel 'Centrino' cpu's for battery life. Same goes for Mobile Athlon 64 vs Intel P4. But Intel has had a strangle hold on laptop manufacturers for so long they don't often make systems that are easy to compare fairly between the two.
6. "And they can't provide the same volume discounts because their margins are too small because they are 1-2 years behind Intel in process technology/geometry." Um What? Have you been smoking something? Well no I know you've been smoking soemthing, so let me take that back... They can't provide volume discounts as deep as Intel for a simple reason: They don't have the revenue to give any bigger discounts. Though they have still offered some huge dicounts before. HP for instance was offered 10,000 cpu's from AMD for free! They only ever ended up requesting about 1500 of their free cpu's. As for 'process technology/geometry' this is an area AMD has stayed even with Intle on or beat them for the last 5 years.
How about getting more up to date then commenting, 'k? Oh and stop smoking that stuff Intel sends you, that might help to...
2 comments that need to be made here:
1) AMD ahs a new fab that will be ready before any Intel chip goes into a Mac...
2) AMD had to much space just two years ago (and was renting out part of the Dresden fab). Only recently has demand caused any problems with supply and only because they are supplying 4 segments (server, workstation, desktop, laptop) of the market with the newest using up more wafer space because they are dual core.
No, but then again no bank would ever let them hand them out like candy that way... It's still a high intrest (something like 27% I believe) card with a fairly low point of entry (don't have to make huge amounts of money or have the best credit to get one) though.
Ya know that's exactly what Intel has been doing for years though... I can't even count how many times Intel has gone after AMD over the last decade at least...
I think AMD finally decided enough was enough and have thrown down the gauntlet... Let all the dirty laundry air... etc...
They will also come out a year after Xbox 360 and since we have no idea about actually hardware for this machine that we have only seen the casing for and nothing else... My point is (and was before) that it's to early to guess what the prices will be or who may or may not be making money off of the systems next generation...
They already do offer Sony credit cards... take a careful look at their website some time... It's not Playstation specific, but then again theyed rather you buy one of their $5000 TV's than a PS3 on that card...
Sicne I work for a retail chain (I'm the head of the Software/games department for my store FYI), I cna say that each generation we have bougth the systems for more than we sell them for and that this lasts for up to two years per system...
It's one of the reasons upper management is so uptight about demanding we sell games, accessories, and service contracts on each and every new system we sell... For both the first year of the Xbox and the PS2 both systems cost us $40 more than we sold them for... Most people will also refuse to get any of the three things I just mentioned we use to make up this loss because they already feel the system itself is expensive and don't believe they should have to pay more to make it usable. I've seen someone who owned no games for a brand new system demand that it was extortion because we said he wouldn't eb able to do much of anything with it without something to play on it. That means we took a hit every system we sold... and corporate smiles happily at these losses because in reality the manufacturer gives them truck loads of cash for helping to 'market' these new systems so in the end at the corporate level we break even, but the stores themselves loose money...
I think you may be a bit pre-mature on the cost of the Nintendo Revolution... So far we know next to nothign about it or what it may (or may not) cost... We also have no real idea how much the Xbox 360 may cost at launch either... Or heck even PS3 costs...
After all this was just a bunch of analysts getting together and deciding what they feel will be Sony's asking price for their next system that is still more than a year away in the US or Europe (though Japan will get it next spring)...
It's way way to early to say who will truly be more expensive...
Just a few quick comments...
"Personally, I question whether anyone should be taught or conditioned to equate bloody violence with "fun"."
Humans have always to some degree found 'bloody violence' fun. Otherwise how do you explain Gladiatorial games, public executions, battlefield watchers, etc, etc... Over the last 10,000 years of recorded history? I frankly don't think most people need to 'learn' that it is in any way shape or form 'fun', I think to some degree it's instictive.
Also in response to: "blame parents for not "parenting" ("It's not the game's fault, its the parent's fault for not being involved in the active parenting of their children!") when their children go psycho, a la Columbine, and the video game industry takes a (perhaps) unjustified hit? What do you say when part of active parenting involves limiting exposure to sex and violence?" While I may not want to give say a 7 year old GTA, I know (from persional experience) enough parents won't care what it's rated as or what it's like and so most likely even if I didn't let my child play those games they will probably still see them. It's also pretty wrong to blame the games or the makers of those games because they aren't trying to make a game for kids, it is clearly marked that it's intended for oldwer teens and adults... Heck have you seen the box for Conker: Live and Reloaded? It's got a glowing neon sticker that proclaims it as a game for those 17 years of age and older only...
Personally I have less of a problem with nudity/sex than violence, but the US in general seems to have that ass-backwards dur to religous eliments. It's funny that a religion that teaches peace has always had something of a love affair with violence, but nudity and sexuality is nie forbidden. I don't have a choice with games though, nudity has been forbidden in almost all cases (and what cases I could show are more corny than sexual) and violence becomes the rule because it's an easy way to create 'gameplay'. Sometimes though depending on the story and content violence is required... Other times it's just their to give you something to do before the next level of the same...
Well I think that's enough for now...
Sadly most US companies are really really bad at lettting users do stuff like that... Verizon for instance cripples Bluetooth support so you can't transfer files to the phone like that, not that they have many phones with bluetooth anyways...
I can't think of any non-PDA/cellphones that include a IrDA port, so that's out as well... USB data cables are an option and fairly popular, but even that gets crippled on alot fo models...
I shoudl also mention GSM is less than 40% of the cellular network in the US and it's shrinking, because companies didn't invest enough in it's infrastructure before transitioning over to GSM. In the US you are more likely to get dropped calls on GSM, have les service area, and often more problematic service in general.
I have a Verizon booth near where I work (they aren't GSM) and I watch customers switch all the time from GSM service to Verizon's non-GSM service because fo service issues... So using GSM phones as a comparison is probably a bad idea...