So, we have equations estimating the number of planets that exist in a habitable zone within our galaxy. And from that, we've extrapolated a relatively large number.
But the other equation is, from a perfectly habitable planet, what's the chances of life evolving? There require a lot things to come completely in alignment for life to occur. Who knows, a day later and the earth might have missed out on life entirely. My suspicion is that the chances for life occurring are extremely low. Maybe not as low as 500,000 to 1, but probably lower than the average person would seem to think. Then from that number, what's the chances of life evolving to such a level that they can even develop the means to envision space travel or communication? It's only happened once on earth, after all.
People think that just because there are a lot of planets that there should be lots of aliens. But I think that there are a lot of big equations left to work out. We have a very huge number which is probably countered by a number of very small numbers. I could easily imagine that we eventually find that the chances of life occurring on a "habitable" planet are less than 1 billion to 1, which would make the chances of life occurring elsewhere in our galaxy fairly remote.
Then again, I'm no expert. I'm just trying to bring up the other big questions we have yet to really tackle... at least as far as I'm familiar with.
C) So far removed in time (evolved to spacefaring, lasted for thousands of years, and still died off before we stopped throwing rocks at each other) that we simply missed the evidence that they existed.
Your other arguments have merit, but this one I really don't believe is possible. The more a species spreads out, the greater its chance of survival is. For the most part, any civilization that has developed the ability to move off world in large numbers has freed itself from all known forms of extinction. Any other "what if" scenarios you throw at the equation are likely to be countered by advancements in technology, distance, or rapidly-growing numbers. As I like to say, "humans are just as resistant cockroaches, we just require our technology to do it." The same would be true for any alien species that developed past our level of technology.
On the flip side, with the current level of human technology, we could probably survive (to a non-extinctional level) any of the conditions that made many former species extinct:
Meteor? Early warning defense system, missiles, cave habitation, and post-collision: air filters
Early earth? Lead radiation suits, air conditioning, shelters.
The list continues.
Of course, most of these things would still wipe out huge swaths of the world's population, most likely the poor, less educated, and less technologically sophisticated. But killing enough humans to cause permanent extinction would take something beyond what our world has seen in its lifetime. Of course, something of our own making could, but I highly doubt it would lead to mass extinction. Call me an optimist, but the human race is about as resilient as cockroaches, even though we require technology to be that way.
As a teen, I was always convinced that sexuality was something that the adult world wanted to horde for themselves. As an adult, I still feel this way. There's a strange "mine, not yours" attitude towards sexuality with minors. It's not "protection", there's really nothing to protect from. It stems from a desire by parents to keep their children innocent as long as possible. Reality? Innocence is an adult ideal thrust on children that really doesn't mean anything. There are African and Islander cultures in which children masturbate and have sex with eachother from a fairly early age, and grow up to be perfectly normal members of society, and they are still considered "innocent". This is all cultural, there is nothing biological about this.
Farsi isn't related to Arabic in any shape or form. It's an indo-european language. Closer to Greek and Hindi than it is to Arabic. People often forget that the Persians have no historical connection to the Arabs. Their ancestry came from the migration between India and Europe. Arab ancestry comes from north africa and asia-minor. The languages haven't intermingled much either.
Microsoft have been chasing the big red ball for almost a decade now. Apple made the iPod, they came out with the Zune 4 years late, without the "must have" factor. Apple made the iPhone, Microsoft scrambled, stumbled, fell, and have basically given up. Apple made the iPad, now Balmer wants to chase the ball some more. Problem is, even if they catch the ball, Apple will have already cornered the market, and will have created the next "must have" item, which will likely replace the current one.
If Microsoft REALLY wanted to catch Apple at it's game, they should just bypass the whole Tablet thing, and look ahead at what the next big "must have" is. Apple's probably already working on it, and the only way Balmer will ever beat them to it is if they throw their resources and analysis at THAT. Let Apple take the tablet market, the way Apple is successfull is because they create their own markets. Microsoft should learn to do the same.
I think everyone is defining "casual" and "core" not as amount of time people are putting into games, but the amount of thought. Needless to say, Final Fantasy and MGS are, no matter how you look at them, NOT casual games, and never will be. They are lengthy, complex games that take not only a player's time but patience and full attention. I would argue that those two series are pretty much the antithesis of casual gaming.
Designers HATE Flash. HTML stems from traditional typography layout languages. Designers have been used to and comfortable with that format for over 5 decades. Flash is NOT a designer-friendly environment. It's a motion graphics and video editing-friendly environment... if it's friendly at all. Flash was made popular by the geek teen crowd for making crude animations, and has been picked up by some websites, which more-often-than-not, use it in garashly over-elaborate ways. It's a hack. That's all there is to it. It's buggy, it has compatability issues, and often slows down or prevents users from accessing content that they could have just as easilly gotten with HTML.
As long as I've been a designer and a user, I've hated Flash. I've crossed my fingers from over 5 years ago and hoped that it wouldn't catch on. Thankfully, most of the big sites stay away from it, and that is a credit to their sense of simplicity in design. Flash is just too unstructured.
If that's the case, then why do so many beer lovers drink in small amounts and not get drunk? I think you'll find that it's the one's who don't like beer or don't care that are likely to get drunk so frequently. That's my experience anyway.
I drink maybe one good beer every couple nights. I can't even feel the alchoholic effects of one beer. Why? Because I love the taste. Other people argue about the taste of coffee, or the enjoyment of spicy food, or the taste of seafood. One person's "pile of piss" is another person's luxury, you'll find it in just about any type of food, or music, or even personality traits.
So, if it holds true for opinions of all flavors, why you gotta think that beer is any different?
Oh yeah, because you happen to be one who hates beer. Grow up and accept that not everyone has the same taste buds as you, man.
Not having intercourse with the opposite sex don't necessarily make you a virgin. Realistically, Sir Isaac Newton was homosexual, according to most reports. There are conflicting reports as to whether he had sexual relations with the men he was with. No, he never had heterosexual intercourse, but only because he wasn't inclined to. He likely made the "greatest accomplishment" comment as a sort of joke.
That said, he was devoutly christian, though the church he belonged to seemed to look down at heavy-handed proselytization (not that this is any relevance to the conversation).
I understand that nay-saying humanity is a popular pastime around here, but it's largely irrelevant. Our wars and monstrosities may simply be a natural course for a growing intelligent race it's way through cultural adolescence. Simply assuming that humanity must be "much worse" than anything else out there is kind of like saying that America is much worse than anything else out there. I'm no gung-ho "America is the greatest country on the planet!" whore, but from various subjective and objective standpoints, there is much worse out there.
Don't let your "human guilt" cloud your intelligence. There's nothing to say that humanity's atrocities are any better or worse than any other sapient race. You're right, they could be like the aliens from "The Abyss", and judge that our fighting is a horrible problem to be ended before we become more powerful, or they could also be empathetic enough to realize that we have other sides as well (like the aliens from The Abyss finally did). Who knows.
Here here. I work as a video producer/editor and end up doing a lot of software troubleshooting at work, my main hobbies are music recording and sound design. At the end of the day, when I've finally been able to get myself into "leasure mode"... I don't want to have to do MORE technical things just to relax. It's hard enough to get myself settled into a non-productive mode, why would I want to turn around and risk stressing myself out even more?
Morally, I have no problem with polygomy. But when we're talking about legal contracts that bind financial assets, things can get really complicated really fast. Unlike gay marriage, it also has the ability to be abused fairly severely for purposes completely unrelated to spousal arrangements. I'm not an economist or a lawyer, but I just have a feeling that this would cause a lot of complications and problems. Yes, some would argue that that, in of itself, is not a reason to ban polygomy outright. Maybe it is something we should look into, but that's a different notion altogether.
Homosexual couples are simply asking for the same benefits and legal recognition that is in place for heterosexual marriages. Polygomists, by nature of them being more than 2 people, inherently CAN'T ask for the same exact rights, since what they're asking for doesn't actually exist. And once again, maybe it should... but way too many people use it as an analogy for gay marriage, when it brings up a huge host of new complications that the gay marriage issue does not.
Agreed. Abolish marriage as a legal contract. Allow civil unions to define legal pairings, and let individual churches choose whether or not to recognize certain "marriages". Everybody wins......that is, everybody except those that want to force their hangups on everyone else. I say 'fuck 'em'
And finally, DVD copies simply translate spoken text and pop them up as digital subtitles. For some text and sign heavy anime, that's not good enough. I have a fansub version of Azumanga Daiho where not only do they translate every sign, but they also pop up some footnoots explaining obscure cultural references, for those interested. Yes, that level of detail isn't for everyone, but for a lot of anime fans, it's quite nice.
Tiger is pretty well supported, and that's 5 years old. And I'll echo the others that the Windows XP thing was a complete fluke, and had nothing to do with MS wanting to support people for a while, but because they did such a piss-poor AND late release of their next OS (Vista), that XP remained the de-facto OS for about 9 years. If Apple had waited 7 years to release Leopard and it had sucked, they would be in the same boat. The reason why Apple stops supporting OSs faster than MS is because their users seem to upgrade a lot faster. Maybe it's a trust thing, maybe it's a lack of complexity thing, I'm not sure. Usually a company will stop supporting previous versions when the install base gets to be a negligable percentage. So blame Mac users for keeping with the times.
Sorry, but the poster is right. Humans and animals alike are hard-wired to enjoy things that are familliar to them. There may be the paripheral fascination with exploring new territory, but by-and-large, humans are very slow to accept new things, and are much more likely to choose the familliar over the unfamilliar. In the right setting, with the right mindset, people can be willing to branch out a little, but for the most part, it's contrary to our nature. Playing a song over and over again, in the background (as radio usually is), is a good way to build familliarity, and thus, a comfortable center for individuals. So, when people go down to the record store to buy some music to listen to on a regular basis, they buy the things they've heard, that being the stuff that DJs have shoved down their throats.
Even those of us who claim to enjoy exploration only do so because the act of exploration itself has become familliar and comfortable with us, but we all have our self-imposed limits.
That's really tough to compare. Console manufacturers make the bulk of their money off of game sales. The consoles themselves are usually loss-leaders, except for Nintendo, who consisantly sell their hardware at a profit or at the very least, break even. If you're comparing sheer hardware sales figures, of course the DS has sold a lot more than the iPhone, it's twice as old, and was a quick seller right out the gate. But if you're talking profit made off of games themselves, it's a lot harder to say. Every person who ever put a piece of software, no matter how small, on the App store paid apple $99. I think larger companies who wanted more front and center distrobution may have paid more (not sure). Apple is sitting back and raking in the profits. So is Nintendo. Both business models seem to have worked wonderfully.
I would agree with the first half of your post, but I would disagree with the second, that phone gaming is not taking off. In the past year, I've seen more and more large-scale developers creating phone games. First the Japanese companies like Square-Enix are starting to make iPhone games because it really works over in Japan, and why not port them to the US? Expect to see Final Fantasy XIII Agito on the iPhone. Now more and more US games are having spinoffs or ports to the iPhone too. Assassin's Creed saw one, Spoor saw 2, Rockstar released a GTA for the iPhone that's getting raive reviews. Civilization, Sim City, Broken Swoard (adventure game), and don't forget the Korean market like Zenoia. And that's just a few of the big boys. You're fooling yourself if you think that the iPhone gaming market isn't taking off. Sure, the innitial price point for iPhone games was far too low for most large companies, but that's already changing. We're already starting to see $20 iPhone games, and that will be more and more common. It's all about supply and demand. Sure, grandma won't be getting that $30 Final Fantasy Agito game, she'd rather get that $0.99 Bejeweled game, then again, S-E will make far more profit on the somewhat fewer sales on their game.
To summerize, the iPhone gaming market is skyrocketting. And it's going to quickly turn into any other gaming market, with high priced games and low priced independant titles. It's just basic ecconomics.
Define what you mean by "serious". Point and Click adventures (Myst, Zork, and the like) I would call "serious" games, and those work great on a small touch screen. I've heard that the iPhone version of Myst is one of the finest out there. Turn based RPGs also make a lot of sense on a touch screen. Final Fantasy and the like. At 60 hours+, it doesn't get much more "serious" than that. I've played a number of really great platformers with great control systems for the iPhone... yes, not as "serious", but yet another genre that I've seen first hand can be done well.
If by "serious" you're limitting yourself to FPSs... then yes, the iPhone is not idea. But Who the Hell limits their deffiniton of serious gaming to "FPSs"? I consider myself a serious gamer, and I don't even like FPSs.
Yes, and at the same time, you'd alienate millions of individuals who don't need a game system, and see the additional controls as a waste of pocket space. The iPhone is already a fairly big device for most people to be carrying around in their pockets or on their belts. More controls means larger size, which means less portable. Most business people would see game controls on a phone and immediate look else-where. Putting dedicated gaming controls on a phone is just a bad idea. Contextual buttons make a lot of sense. Sure, they lack tactile feedback, but they're pretty much the only way you're going to get game controls that actually make sense for a phone to have.
Exactly. Consoles evolve. As much as it is a pain in the ass for consumers, it's been happening for over 30 years, and there doesn't seem to be any signs of that stopping. The DS is nearing the end of its lifecycle, and there are already rumors of a next generation Nintendo handheld in the works. The Wii will probably follow suit within about a year or two more. These days, at least the first half of a new generation will maintain backwards compatability, as the DS and PS3 did, to give time for game developers to ease into new hardware and so that adoption rate isn't disuade by the lack of backwards compatability to larger libraries. That makes sense, and it seems to work. I don't really agree with Nintendo or Sony's decision to eventually kill off BC mid-generation, but it seems to have not hurt them too much. The DS2 or whatever will do JUST FINE.
That's because their based on older control schemes to begin with. New Super Mario Bros is based on a series that goes back to 1980, and everyone grew up with playing it on a DPad. To a certain extent, you have to build a game from a ground with the system's control scheme based in mind. That said, after having played and beaten Soosiz which is very much like Mario Bros, I can say that if done correctly, you can actually have fairly traditional control methods on an iPhone and still have it be completely playable. The reason a lot of ports fall apart is because many companies create "virtual D-Pads" on the side of the screen. The buttons are WAY too small to be precise and they're far too touchy. Soosiz uses big left and right buttons (without an up and down) and a big jump button, but ya know what? the screen is wide enough that it really doesn't detract too much from the view, and greatly improves gameplay.
But if you build a game from the ground up, keeping in mind the characteristics of the hardware you have, you can almost always create something great. No, it may not be THE SAME as a game made for another hardware device, but it might be just as good. Thinking in terms of, "game X wouldn't be good if ported to another system" is really not that helpful, because game X wouldn't have been made the way it was if it was on another system, anyway. Curby's Canvas Curse would have never worked on the XBox 360. Metroid Prime 3 would have have worked on the iPhone the way it was. Bounce On would never have worked on the DS.
Slashdot Mirror
So, we have equations estimating the number of planets that exist in a habitable zone within our galaxy. And from that, we've extrapolated a relatively large number.
But the other equation is, from a perfectly habitable planet, what's the chances of life evolving? There require a lot things to come completely in alignment for life to occur. Who knows, a day later and the earth might have missed out on life entirely. My suspicion is that the chances for life occurring are extremely low. Maybe not as low as 500,000 to 1, but probably lower than the average person would seem to think. Then from that number, what's the chances of life evolving to such a level that they can even develop the means to envision space travel or communication? It's only happened once on earth, after all.
People think that just because there are a lot of planets that there should be lots of aliens. But I think that there are a lot of big equations left to work out. We have a very huge number which is probably countered by a number of very small numbers. I could easily imagine that we eventually find that the chances of life occurring on a "habitable" planet are less than 1 billion to 1, which would make the chances of life occurring elsewhere in our galaxy fairly remote.
Then again, I'm no expert. I'm just trying to bring up the other big questions we have yet to really tackle... at least as far as I'm familiar with.
C) So far removed in time (evolved to spacefaring, lasted for thousands of years, and still died off before we stopped throwing rocks at each other) that we simply missed the evidence that they existed.
Your other arguments have merit, but this one I really don't believe is possible. The more a species spreads out, the greater its chance of survival is. For the most part, any civilization that has developed the ability to move off world in large numbers has freed itself from all known forms of extinction. Any other "what if" scenarios you throw at the equation are likely to be countered by advancements in technology, distance, or rapidly-growing numbers. As I like to say, "humans are just as resistant cockroaches, we just require our technology to do it." The same would be true for any alien species that developed past our level of technology.
On the flip side, with the current level of human technology, we could probably survive (to a non-extinctional level) any of the conditions that made many former species extinct:
Meteor? Early warning defense system, missiles, cave habitation, and post-collision: air filters
Early earth? Lead radiation suits, air conditioning, shelters.
The list continues.
Of course, most of these things would still wipe out huge swaths of the world's population, most likely the poor, less educated, and less technologically sophisticated. But killing enough humans to cause permanent extinction would take something beyond what our world has seen in its lifetime. Of course, something of our own making could, but I highly doubt it would lead to mass extinction. Call me an optimist, but the human race is about as resilient as cockroaches, even though we require technology to be that way.
As a teen, I was always convinced that sexuality was something that the adult world wanted to horde for themselves. As an adult, I still feel this way. There's a strange "mine, not yours" attitude towards sexuality with minors. It's not "protection", there's really nothing to protect from. It stems from a desire by parents to keep their children innocent as long as possible. Reality? Innocence is an adult ideal thrust on children that really doesn't mean anything. There are African and Islander cultures in which children masturbate and have sex with eachother from a fairly early age, and grow up to be perfectly normal members of society, and they are still considered "innocent". This is all cultural, there is nothing biological about this.
Farsi isn't related to Arabic in any shape or form. It's an indo-european language. Closer to Greek and Hindi than it is to Arabic. People often forget that the Persians have no historical connection to the Arabs. Their ancestry came from the migration between India and Europe. Arab ancestry comes from north africa and asia-minor. The languages haven't intermingled much either.
Microsoft have been chasing the big red ball for almost a decade now. Apple made the iPod, they came out with the Zune 4 years late, without the "must have" factor. Apple made the iPhone, Microsoft scrambled, stumbled, fell, and have basically given up. Apple made the iPad, now Balmer wants to chase the ball some more. Problem is, even if they catch the ball, Apple will have already cornered the market, and will have created the next "must have" item, which will likely replace the current one.
If Microsoft REALLY wanted to catch Apple at it's game, they should just bypass the whole Tablet thing, and look ahead at what the next big "must have" is. Apple's probably already working on it, and the only way Balmer will ever beat them to it is if they throw their resources and analysis at THAT. Let Apple take the tablet market, the way Apple is successfull is because they create their own markets. Microsoft should learn to do the same.
who had more fun?
I think everyone is defining "casual" and "core" not as amount of time people are putting into games, but the amount of thought. Needless to say, Final Fantasy and MGS are, no matter how you look at them, NOT casual games, and never will be. They are lengthy, complex games that take not only a player's time but patience and full attention. I would argue that those two series are pretty much the antithesis of casual gaming.
Designers HATE Flash. HTML stems from traditional typography layout languages. Designers have been used to and comfortable with that format for over 5 decades. Flash is NOT a designer-friendly environment. It's a motion graphics and video editing-friendly environment... if it's friendly at all. Flash was made popular by the geek teen crowd for making crude animations, and has been picked up by some websites, which more-often-than-not, use it in garashly over-elaborate ways. It's a hack. That's all there is to it. It's buggy, it has compatability issues, and often slows down or prevents users from accessing content that they could have just as easilly gotten with HTML.
As long as I've been a designer and a user, I've hated Flash. I've crossed my fingers from over 5 years ago and hoped that it wouldn't catch on. Thankfully, most of the big sites stay away from it, and that is a credit to their sense of simplicity in design. Flash is just too unstructured.
If that's the case, then why do so many beer lovers drink in small amounts and not get drunk? I think you'll find that it's the one's who don't like beer or don't care that are likely to get drunk so frequently. That's my experience anyway.
I drink maybe one good beer every couple nights. I can't even feel the alchoholic effects of one beer. Why? Because I love the taste. Other people argue about the taste of coffee, or the enjoyment of spicy food, or the taste of seafood. One person's "pile of piss" is another person's luxury, you'll find it in just about any type of food, or music, or even personality traits.
So, if it holds true for opinions of all flavors, why you gotta think that beer is any different?
Oh yeah, because you happen to be one who hates beer. Grow up and accept that not everyone has the same taste buds as you, man.
Not having intercourse with the opposite sex don't necessarily make you a virgin. Realistically, Sir Isaac Newton was homosexual, according to most reports. There are conflicting reports as to whether he had sexual relations with the men he was with. No, he never had heterosexual intercourse, but only because he wasn't inclined to. He likely made the "greatest accomplishment" comment as a sort of joke.
That said, he was devoutly christian, though the church he belonged to seemed to look down at heavy-handed proselytization (not that this is any relevance to the conversation).
I understand that nay-saying humanity is a popular pastime around here, but it's largely irrelevant. Our wars and monstrosities may simply be a natural course for a growing intelligent race it's way through cultural adolescence. Simply assuming that humanity must be "much worse" than anything else out there is kind of like saying that America is much worse than anything else out there. I'm no gung-ho "America is the greatest country on the planet!" whore, but from various subjective and objective standpoints, there is much worse out there.
Don't let your "human guilt" cloud your intelligence. There's nothing to say that humanity's atrocities are any better or worse than any other sapient race. You're right, they could be like the aliens from "The Abyss", and judge that our fighting is a horrible problem to be ended before we become more powerful, or they could also be empathetic enough to realize that we have other sides as well (like the aliens from The Abyss finally did). Who knows.
Human guilt is silly, just as White guilt is.
Here here. I work as a video producer/editor and end up doing a lot of software troubleshooting at work, my main hobbies are music recording and sound design. At the end of the day, when I've finally been able to get myself into "leasure mode"... I don't want to have to do MORE technical things just to relax. It's hard enough to get myself settled into a non-productive mode, why would I want to turn around and risk stressing myself out even more?
Morally, I have no problem with polygomy. But when we're talking about legal contracts that bind financial assets, things can get really complicated really fast. Unlike gay marriage, it also has the ability to be abused fairly severely for purposes completely unrelated to spousal arrangements. I'm not an economist or a lawyer, but I just have a feeling that this would cause a lot of complications and problems. Yes, some would argue that that, in of itself, is not a reason to ban polygomy outright. Maybe it is something we should look into, but that's a different notion altogether.
Homosexual couples are simply asking for the same benefits and legal recognition that is in place for heterosexual marriages. Polygomists, by nature of them being more than 2 people, inherently CAN'T ask for the same exact rights, since what they're asking for doesn't actually exist. And once again, maybe it should... but way too many people use it as an analogy for gay marriage, when it brings up a huge host of new complications that the gay marriage issue does not.
Agreed. Abolish marriage as a legal contract. Allow civil unions to define legal pairings, and let individual churches choose whether or not to recognize certain "marriages". Everybody wins... ...that is, everybody except those that want to force their hangups on everyone else. I say 'fuck 'em'
Having sex with an unconsenting rock.
Two consenting adults is very different.
PS: same goes for marriage.
And finally, DVD copies simply translate spoken text and pop them up as digital subtitles. For some text and sign heavy anime, that's not good enough. I have a fansub version of Azumanga Daiho where not only do they translate every sign, but they also pop up some footnoots explaining obscure cultural references, for those interested. Yes, that level of detail isn't for everyone, but for a lot of anime fans, it's quite nice.
Tiger is pretty well supported, and that's 5 years old. And I'll echo the others that the Windows XP thing was a complete fluke, and had nothing to do with MS wanting to support people for a while, but because they did such a piss-poor AND late release of their next OS (Vista), that XP remained the de-facto OS for about 9 years. If Apple had waited 7 years to release Leopard and it had sucked, they would be in the same boat. The reason why Apple stops supporting OSs faster than MS is because their users seem to upgrade a lot faster. Maybe it's a trust thing, maybe it's a lack of complexity thing, I'm not sure. Usually a company will stop supporting previous versions when the install base gets to be a negligable percentage. So blame Mac users for keeping with the times.
Sorry, but the poster is right. Humans and animals alike are hard-wired to enjoy things that are familliar to them. There may be the paripheral fascination with exploring new territory, but by-and-large, humans are very slow to accept new things, and are much more likely to choose the familliar over the unfamilliar. In the right setting, with the right mindset, people can be willing to branch out a little, but for the most part, it's contrary to our nature. Playing a song over and over again, in the background (as radio usually is), is a good way to build familliarity, and thus, a comfortable center for individuals. So, when people go down to the record store to buy some music to listen to on a regular basis, they buy the things they've heard, that being the stuff that DJs have shoved down their throats.
Even those of us who claim to enjoy exploration only do so because the act of exploration itself has become familliar and comfortable with us, but we all have our self-imposed limits.
That's really tough to compare. Console manufacturers make the bulk of their money off of game sales. The consoles themselves are usually loss-leaders, except for Nintendo, who consisantly sell their hardware at a profit or at the very least, break even. If you're comparing sheer hardware sales figures, of course the DS has sold a lot more than the iPhone, it's twice as old, and was a quick seller right out the gate. But if you're talking profit made off of games themselves, it's a lot harder to say. Every person who ever put a piece of software, no matter how small, on the App store paid apple $99. I think larger companies who wanted more front and center distrobution may have paid more (not sure). Apple is sitting back and raking in the profits. So is Nintendo. Both business models seem to have worked wonderfully.
I would agree with the first half of your post, but I would disagree with the second, that phone gaming is not taking off. In the past year, I've seen more and more large-scale developers creating phone games. First the Japanese companies like Square-Enix are starting to make iPhone games because it really works over in Japan, and why not port them to the US? Expect to see Final Fantasy XIII Agito on the iPhone. Now more and more US games are having spinoffs or ports to the iPhone too. Assassin's Creed saw one, Spoor saw 2, Rockstar released a GTA for the iPhone that's getting raive reviews. Civilization, Sim City, Broken Swoard (adventure game), and don't forget the Korean market like Zenoia. And that's just a few of the big boys. You're fooling yourself if you think that the iPhone gaming market isn't taking off. Sure, the innitial price point for iPhone games was far too low for most large companies, but that's already changing. We're already starting to see $20 iPhone games, and that will be more and more common. It's all about supply and demand. Sure, grandma won't be getting that $30 Final Fantasy Agito game, she'd rather get that $0.99 Bejeweled game, then again, S-E will make far more profit on the somewhat fewer sales on their game.
To summerize, the iPhone gaming market is skyrocketting. And it's going to quickly turn into any other gaming market, with high priced games and low priced independant titles. It's just basic ecconomics.
Define what you mean by "serious". Point and Click adventures (Myst, Zork, and the like) I would call "serious" games, and those work great on a small touch screen. I've heard that the iPhone version of Myst is one of the finest out there. Turn based RPGs also make a lot of sense on a touch screen. Final Fantasy and the like. At 60 hours+, it doesn't get much more "serious" than that. I've played a number of really great platformers with great control systems for the iPhone... yes, not as "serious", but yet another genre that I've seen first hand can be done well.
If by "serious" you're limitting yourself to FPSs... then yes, the iPhone is not idea. But Who the Hell limits their deffiniton of serious gaming to "FPSs"? I consider myself a serious gamer, and I don't even like FPSs.
Yes, and at the same time, you'd alienate millions of individuals who don't need a game system, and see the additional controls as a waste of pocket space. The iPhone is already a fairly big device for most people to be carrying around in their pockets or on their belts. More controls means larger size, which means less portable. Most business people would see game controls on a phone and immediate look else-where. Putting dedicated gaming controls on a phone is just a bad idea. Contextual buttons make a lot of sense. Sure, they lack tactile feedback, but they're pretty much the only way you're going to get game controls that actually make sense for a phone to have.
Exactly. Consoles evolve. As much as it is a pain in the ass for consumers, it's been happening for over 30 years, and there doesn't seem to be any signs of that stopping. The DS is nearing the end of its lifecycle, and there are already rumors of a next generation Nintendo handheld in the works. The Wii will probably follow suit within about a year or two more. These days, at least the first half of a new generation will maintain backwards compatability, as the DS and PS3 did, to give time for game developers to ease into new hardware and so that adoption rate isn't disuade by the lack of backwards compatability to larger libraries. That makes sense, and it seems to work. I don't really agree with Nintendo or Sony's decision to eventually kill off BC mid-generation, but it seems to have not hurt them too much. The DS2 or whatever will do JUST FINE.
That's because their based on older control schemes to begin with. New Super Mario Bros is based on a series that goes back to 1980, and everyone grew up with playing it on a DPad. To a certain extent, you have to build a game from a ground with the system's control scheme based in mind. That said, after having played and beaten Soosiz which is very much like Mario Bros, I can say that if done correctly, you can actually have fairly traditional control methods on an iPhone and still have it be completely playable. The reason a lot of ports fall apart is because many companies create "virtual D-Pads" on the side of the screen. The buttons are WAY too small to be precise and they're far too touchy. Soosiz uses big left and right buttons (without an up and down) and a big jump button, but ya know what? the screen is wide enough that it really doesn't detract too much from the view, and greatly improves gameplay.
But if you build a game from the ground up, keeping in mind the characteristics of the hardware you have, you can almost always create something great. No, it may not be THE SAME as a game made for another hardware device, but it might be just as good. Thinking in terms of, "game X wouldn't be good if ported to another system" is really not that helpful, because game X wouldn't have been made the way it was if it was on another system, anyway. Curby's Canvas Curse would have never worked on the XBox 360. Metroid Prime 3 would have have worked on the iPhone the way it was. Bounce On would never have worked on the DS.