The final production testing is done by skilled female technicians who have the ability to test two at a time, in tandem...
The fact that production testing is done by a human at all, regardless of how "skilled" they may be, is very telling as to the quality of the motherboards. The author does not get this. I made the mistake of of purchasing an ECS motherboard because it was the cheapest. I am on my third motherboard, after returning the first two that died within a week. The third mobo has only 1 working usb port, but I figured another exchange was futile and I was too poor at the time to buy anything better...
60% of the highly moderated comments are of the "heh heh, they said 'female', heh heh" category. What is this, fucking junior high? Grow up.
Finally, why the need to point out that the testers are female in the first place? Is the implication that we should be surprised that females can do the job, that females have the job, or was the author just a pathetic horndog that has to call females out whenever he sees them? I don't get it.
"...two at a time, in tandem..." Huh? Like there's any other way? I know it's a nitpick but can't this article not suck in some way?
I couldn't agree more. Besides the cost implications of having the HD come standard, I'm sure that Sony feels that the reception of the ps3 by the media and gamer community was so much greater than Xbox360 that they could safely take the hit in perception and still wind up a winner. An expensive gamble. I'd agree that ps3 probably has more buzz... but not THAT much more buzz.
You can almost hear the sound of mass high-fiving coming from Redmond. Not only does do they have the HD advantage, but there is simply no way that Sony is going to be able to put a cap on the royalty-free homebrew gaming exchange. My guess is that they figure the homebrew market wont big enough to be a concern, or maybe this is a move prompted by Nintendo (the rumor is that, like iTunes music store, indy developers will be able to create content for the Revolution's download service).
However, I still think Sony can change their mind. When they announced that the PSP would have 8 megs of RAM, the community balked and the developers were in a riot. A couple months of bad press and Sony revised the specs and upped the RAM to 32megs ("what? 8 megs? we never said 8 megs!").
Rest assured that if the media love-fest dies, or if the 360 gets too popular, sony will do an about-face. By then, however, the damage will be done on the first generation titles.
So if RIAA sent you a bouquet of flowers with a cute, humorous, handwritten greeting card personally signed by the PR manager informing your court appearance date, it wouldn't be so bad?
Well, if I was serving up MP3's of $.50's latest album, yeah, it wouldn't be as bad. But your question is apples/oranges anyway. Yours is a piracy issue whereas Gogglemaps is a Terms of Use violation.
Me and a friend were discussing just this very thing. In spite of what some Google employees might say about how they like to foster innovation and so on, if the terms of use say you can't do it you can pretty well expect that you will probably run afoul of Google. Without getting into the legality argument of certain Terms of Use, let me limit this to just an analysis of likelihood of getting on the wrong side of a lawyer.
Caveat Scriptor. You are asking for trouble if:
You take someone elses content and pass it off as yours (even if you say "gee thanks google")
Violate a Terms of Use agreement. Even if it's the ToU is hopelessly vague you can bet that you'll get a call as soon as your site gets popular enough
You rush headlong into making a beta API the centerpiece of your website. Yeah, do it because it's neat, but don't whine when it breaks unless you want people to say "what the hell were you even thinking?". Even if it's Google's endless beta phase, if you rely on behaviour of a beta app, and then your site/app breaks... tough noogies.
The gyst is that Google is a company that makes a product and wants to make money and has investors blah blah blah..., just like Microsoft or Wallmart. You can argue tell your blue in the face about right/wrong, nice/not nice, good/evil, but the simple fact is that if you do something that legalize says you shouldn't do, and you get burned... don't be surprised. Google is going to oversee what people are doing with the googemaps... if they like it, they'll take the idea and incorporate it into their business model, if they don't like it (don't like == taxes resources or threatens revenue), the lawyers come knocking.
Granted, 1000 hotspots is alot of hotspots in and of itself. But to have 1000 DS hotspots in Japan is staggering. To give you an idea, Japan is a little smaller than California. There are less than 1000 mcdonalds in california (and in Cali, there's a friggin McDonalds EVERYWHERE). So I imagine you wont be able to walk down the street in Japan without passing by a DS zone.
You replied to my thread, thought I'd hop the fence and reply to yours.
It's encouraging to see efforts being made along this way. As I'm sure that the current iteration of tools will appeal more to coders than to artists, It will interesting to see what comes out of of the "programmer" camp. The stigma with Flash was it provided a lot of interesting opportunites in terms of the way websites interact with users, but it ended up being seen as a tool to create ever-more obnoxious Hamsterdance animations.
That said, what bothers me the most about Flash isn't necessarily how it's applied, but the cultural aspect of it. Flash is a complete break with the egalitarian history of the web and how web developers learned their stuff. Call me a commie, but one of the main reasons why the internet took off back in the mid 90's was because the spec was open, many of the tools for viewing and creating (and even hosting) content were free, and if you wanted to learn html all you had to do was go to some good sites, select "View Source", and see how other people did what you wanted to do.
With Flash, all that is broken. Macromedia piggy-backed on a ubuiqitous platform -- made so by free tools and open standards -- hooked users on visuals that rivaled anything on the web before.... and then slapped an $800 price tag on the authoring tools. Bastards.
You just wait: if the OSS crowd creates design tools that are 1/10th as good as Flash MX, I promise you'll see a massive price drop, or a free "Flash MX Lite". Just like how MySql prompted SQL Server Express from M$.
To be honest, I wound up being dissapointed because I thought that GPLFlash might be an open-source Flash authoring tool.
As far as I can tell, no such tool exists (please correct me if I'm wrong). All I found was MTASC, which is just an actionscript compiler (no gui).
So, both in terms of impact (who is affected, who would use) and interest (pool of people who'd volunteer), it seems to me that an open source replacement to Flash MX ($200 upgrade / $700 full price, OSX and WinXP only, sure to go up in price thansks to the adobe buyout) is a much better time investment to the player (Free-as-in-beer, which runs on Mac, PC, Sun, Irix, and several Linux distros).
Nevermind the terminal game of catch-up that will be played: GPLFlash will *always* be behind the curve to Macromedia. Obviously the same is true for the authoring tools, but your Flash 5 content will still run on your latest-greatest Flash Player -- the reverse is not true.
Is it the fear of being sued? Is it much harder to create an author tool than a player (consider implementing all of the video/audio/video codecs that you'll need to implement on the player side vs. a GUI that outputs.swf on the authoring tool)?
Why replace the free, widely available player and not the expensive-as-hell, mac or pc only authoring tool? I don't get it.
Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken
on
Inside the Xbox 360
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· Score: 1
Finally! Someone else gets it! I couldn't agree more. I went to E3, but I refused to wait in a 4 hour line because it only looked like they were showing off the physical design and some pre-rendered movies... but not one piece of journalism (gaming or mainstream) would say otherwise. Sony showed off a hollow plastic box and some CG animations, yet everyone happily ate it up.
For some reason, the media and the geek community are giving Sony a pass, in spite of being shown next to nothing, and in spite of Sonys semi-obnoxious level of overhype. All we really know is that the ps3 is at least as powerful as the Sega Saturn, which can also playback pre-rendered animations.
Xbox 360 was also a dissapointment but for different reasons. Prettier, derivitive games that, and nothing to address the very real threat of spiraling development costs and development cycle times.
In the rush towards "Ajaxifiying" their websites, a lot of developers are not thinking about the usability implications.
I see a few sites that are replacing traditional navigation w/ Ajax components that update on-the-fly when users click on a link (for example, changing what's displayed on a multipurpose widget that appears beside your blog entries). Yeah, you're using ajax and that's neat, but once the user clicks the "back" button they go back to the site before they went to your site. Oops. Not what the user expects. It's 2005 and you've just implemented Frames. And not just the ugly Frames you see today, but the downright nasty frames of Netscape 2. Goodbye Back-button, and goodbye bookmarks.
On the other hand, using Ajax as part of a stateful transaction could be well-utilized. In some cases it improves back-button behaviour because it avoids letting user roll back to a page that reflects a state that doesn't exist on the server. Soo... my humble opinion
Ajax navigation: bad Ajax multi-staged transactions: good (maybe)
The Back button's existence has long drawn the ire of web app developers, It's difficult to handle on the server side, and extremely diffifult to uphold the functionality that the user expects. For example, if user clicks "back" because they accidentally added something to their shopping cart... the implementation of the behaviour that the user expects ("if I click back, I won't have it my shopping cart anymore") could fill a book.
Still, it's a good metaphor, and I think developers should try as best they can to preserve it in their apps.
The XMLHTTP object was introduced w/ IE5, and that has been around for awhile (pretty sure since 2001, maybe longer). I can see how this might make the Microsoft apologists bitter now that this 4 year old feature is now in vogue, but I think at the time there wasn't the critical mass (in spite of IE's market share).
Now that it's implemented on multiple browsers, and it has a Killer App (Gmail), developers are starting to see the potential.
Jimmy's Mom doesn't care about backwards compatible chipsets, or an xbox VM, or just-in-time native code swapping, or any of that.
As a previous post said, Jimmy's Mom is going to ask "Will it be able to play his XBox games?". "Yes" or "No" are really about as technical as you need to get (though it is important if "Yes" is contingent upon an XBox live subscription).
My guess is that "Compatibility" could be implemented in a couple ofways:
Kludges in firmware and/or harddrive. 360 detects legacy game, looks it up in "Compatibility DB", if found, game loads and 360 does realtime swaps of unsupported instructions w/ native hacks. If this route, my guess is that the compatibility DB would include a core of top selling games, but could grow over time (via XBL or as a stowaway on a demo disc). My hunch is that this is the most likely scenario.
Recompiled Binaries Same compatibility db check, but recompiled binaries get loaded up (and stay resident) in the roomier 512MB, and disc is still used for media (music, sounds, images, fmv, etc). This would actually be very cool, as it could open the potential for better visuals and performance for legacy games on the newer hardware. This would almost require an XBL subscription, IMHO. However, it's unlikely simply because it would require developer/publisher cooperation ("hey EA, give us your source for madden 2k4, okay?"), and you just know that one of the developers would have squeeled to the press by now.
Few people remember that PS2 compatibility was also limited (though probably not to the degree that XBox will be). If developers stuck to the API you were okay, but if your PS1 games tried to go against the metal or leveraged undocumented features that presumed a particular chipset... you were toast. My guess is that the same will hold true for PS3.
Regardless of the question, these "How do I do XYZ" articles always generate a fair amount of "Don't do that!" answers. That said... how can the parent post be insightful? He didn't ask: "Hey, do you think it's a good idea to listen to thought-provoking audio in the car?". As such, your thoughts are off-topic.
Not that they were insightful otherwise -- a lot of people can listen to something other than bubblegum pop while driving and manage to live to tale the tale. In fact, I'd argue that the increased mental alertness would be a good thing that would possibly make your driving better
Yeah, I agree. The voice acting was right up there with B-List porn. Add some chickabowwow guitar riffs to that dual-saber fight and you'd have the perfect lead-in to the obligatory girl-on-girl scene.
Oh come on! Tell me you weren't thinking the same thing. You're a perverted bastard and you know it.
Definitely agreed that less ram is needed on a console than a pc for a variety of reasons. You don't have nearly as many concurrent processes, you typically deal with lower resolutions (even 1080i will be lower than what most pc games can run at nowadays) and a console game doesn't have to use less efficient code in order to handle disparate hardware configurations.
That said, PC's have video RAM and (sometimes) audio RAM. So, even though you have windows and it's background processes crowding the system RAM, you probably have an extra 128MB video card holding textures and geometry.
So, even though 256MB is more than it seems for a console, I still think they should have included more. Consoles are always held back towards the end of their lifecycle because of it. Programmers are able to eek every bit out of the cpu, but in the end they just need more RAM (Halo 2's popping textures, Majora's mask requiring the 4mb expansion back, etc. etc.)
Now, 384MB would have been perfect. But nothing is set in stone -- when developers squaked at the 8MB originally planned for the PSP, Sony upped it to 32MB just months before the launch date.
Okay, agreed -- the UI is pretty over-the-top. I won't even argue that.
However, I think that the general attitude on./ is that Netscape has somehow "wronged" the Firefox team and the Firefox community by releasing this product, or that they don't "deserve" to rebrand firefox in such a way. I probably wont use it (the GUI hurts), but I don't have a problem with Netscape/AOL releasing it, considering:
Netscape not only opened the source code, they also provided manpower, hardware , and cash. AOL was the single largest donor to the Mozilla foundation (2 million cash, but also assets such as webservers and bandwidth). Without Netscape and AOL, Firefox would not exist.
Netscape is abiding by the mozilla public license, right? If so, what's the problem? Why do so many open source zealots villify large corporations for engaging in behaviour that is expressly condoned (even encouraged)?
Though standards zealots will disagree, at least some people will like the dual rendering engine feature. So it's not like they didn't bring anything to the table and shamelessly replaced all the firefox logos with netscape logos.
Isn't this really an open source success story? "If you open the source code to your product, other developers will extend it and improve it in ways that you couldn't dream of (let alone afford), and you will be free to incorporate these improvements back into your product!". Isn't this the return on investment that the OSS community talks about?
Netscape's name-brand recognition among the great uneducated masses of Internet users might actually convince millions of otherwise-competent people to use this abomination.
If we're talking about the same uneducated mass of Internet users that were convinced to use IE because of Microsoft's brand recognition, isn't that a good thing?
Well, that's why I put it in quotes: it was a tongue-in-cheek reference that, while incorrect literally, got the point across. Perhaps you overlooked this in your zeal to create an "insightful" post.
Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong. Feel free to jot down the comment id and shove it my face in a couple years if the Xbox2 ends up being the "Kuso".
Knowing Xbox had the shortest life cycle in the history of any successful console. I'd say Xbox2 will be in the market for almost 2 years before Xbox3 arrives.
Sorry, I failed to catch your logic train.
First off, I don't see how conclude that the xbox2 will have a 2 year cycle when the xbox had a 4 year cycle.
Next, you've associated console cycle time with "bang for the buck". Did the ps1 suddenly stop selling after the introduction of ps2? No, quite the opposite in fact. Games continued to be released for psone several years after ps2's introduction. Same will go for xbox2 (EA already has stated that the first wave of xbox2 games will have xbox1 versions).
However, you're right on the final point -- you can't sell a "gaijin" console in Japan.
Okay, I'm sorry.. I just can't take it anymore. This is not an innovation by any stretch of the imagination (you say "portable turbine", I say "little windmill"). Second, the application and practicality are extremely limited. Let's look at the scenarios.
Scenario 1: You live someplace windy Supposing you take this turbine, stick out your window that receives good airflow in an area that has *continuous* wind (let's say you live in a lighthouse). Given the average cost of electricity, It'll take 25 hours of contuous charging to save yourself one penny. If this thing costs $4, it'll take 10,000 hours to pay for itself.
Scenario 2: You stick this on the top of your car Yeah, this will charge your cell phone, but conservation of energy says that the increased drag on your car will result in decreased fuel efficiency in equal proportion. Seeing as how your car already has a device that converts engine cycles into electricity (the alternator) you're better off just plugging in your car charging kit.
I'm all for clean power but a semester of physics tells you that there's little (or nothing) to be gained here. I hope I didn't offend the parent post, but I felt I had to bring about a reality check before somebody suggested charging their phone by clipping their turbine to an electric fan -- and then I would have to kill.
Why not have a film like Episode III at Cannes? Let's say, worst case scenario, that the film is so bad that it makes Episode I look like Raging Bull. So What? Looks like lucas will comply with the cannes requirements, so who cares. The only sticking point may be article 1:
The spirit of the Festival de Cannes is one of friendship and universal cooperation. Its aim is to reveal and focus attention on works of quality in order to contribute to the progress of the motion picture arts and to encourage the development of the film industry throughout the world.
But of course this is one of those "eye of the beholder" deals. Have you ever seen The Brown Bunny? Be thankful if the answer is "no". If they let that utter crap show at cannes, it would be pretentious and hypocritical to bar Episode III, or even question it's legitimacy to be shown.
On the (semi) serious tip... you could have a "Bullet Time" button that slows down for the framerate for a coupla seconds but ups the pitch to "normal sounding" levels.
For what, you say? Well... it'd kinda be schweet to watch really spectacular hits in football or car crashes on indy 500 (or Cops, if you're into that sorta thing). Even better, it could add the "swoosh" sound as it goes back to regular speed.
I find it disgraceful how in America there is such a contradiction. We're guys are so loud and clear about free speech yet we're the first to blast anyone who uses their right if it happens to bother someone in the process
Hmm... I thorougly understand your point. It has caused me to spend a few hours of soul-searching, believe you me. I think, though, that I might (just possibly) be able to help you out a bit by bringing to light a point which you may have overlooked:
IT'S A FUCKING VIDEO GAME
While on the subject: If the parent's post resonates with you, please reply with the subject line: "w00t xutopia!", so that I can easily discern who needs to be added to the List of People Who Must Not be Allowed to Reproduce. Thanks.
Re:Apparently they never heard of the Cappuccino P
on
Mac mini to PC Hack
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· Score: 5, Insightful
While I agree that a Cheap-o OSX box is awesome in-and-of itself, I disagree that Kevin misses the point. Many people have accused the the Mac Mini of being a poor value because it matches the price of an entry-level Dell pc but doesn't include a keyboard or display.
The point of Kevin's article (or at least, what I took away from it) was that it's damn hard to match the value of the mini when you consider it's size. Even with the Mocha PC it starts at $495, and that is without RAM, a hard drive, CPU, or even a CD-Drive!.
Look, think about it from the school's perspective. Lawyers will try to find even the most obscure link between a shooting and the video games the shooter may have played. If the school *did* allow this tournament to happen, you just know that if there was a shooting five years down the line that the school district would be the first in line to be sued.
Don't blame the school, blame the sue-happy culture and the negative stigma of videogames for forcing their hand.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't agree more. Besides the cost implications of having the HD come standard, I'm sure that Sony feels that the reception of the ps3 by the media and gamer community was so much greater than Xbox360 that they could safely take the hit in perception and still wind up a winner. An expensive gamble. I'd agree that ps3 probably has more buzz... but not THAT much more buzz.
You can almost hear the sound of mass high-fiving coming from Redmond. Not only does do they have the HD advantage, but there is simply no way that Sony is going to be able to put a cap on the royalty-free homebrew gaming exchange. My guess is that they figure the homebrew market wont big enough to be a concern, or maybe this is a move prompted by Nintendo (the rumor is that, like iTunes music store, indy developers will be able to create content for the Revolution's download service).
However, I still think Sony can change their mind. When they announced that the PSP would have 8 megs of RAM, the community balked and the developers were in a riot. A couple months of bad press and Sony revised the specs and upped the RAM to 32megs ("what? 8 megs? we never said 8 megs!").
Rest assured that if the media love-fest dies, or if the 360 gets too popular, sony will do an about-face. By then, however, the damage will be done on the first generation titles.
Thank you.
Now *there's* a UI worth complaining about
- You take someone elses content and pass it off as yours (even if you say "gee thanks google")
- Violate a Terms of Use agreement. Even if it's the ToU is hopelessly vague you can bet that you'll get a call as soon as your site gets popular enough
- You rush headlong into making a beta API the centerpiece of your website. Yeah, do it because it's neat, but don't whine when it breaks unless you want people to say "what the hell were you even thinking?". Even if it's Google's endless beta phase, if you rely on behaviour of a beta app, and then your site/app breaks... tough noogies.
The gyst is that Google is a company that makes a product and wants to make money and has investors blah blah blah..., just like Microsoft or Wallmart. You can argue tell your blue in the face about right/wrong, nice/not nice, good/evil, but the simple fact is that if you do something that legalize says you shouldn't do, and you get burned... don't be surprised. Google is going to oversee what people are doing with the googemaps... if they like it, they'll take the idea and incorporate it into their business model, if they don't like it (don't like == taxes resources or threatens revenue), the lawyers come knocking.Granted, 1000 hotspots is alot of hotspots in and of itself. But to have 1000 DS hotspots in Japan is staggering. To give you an idea, Japan is a little smaller than California. There are less than 1000 mcdonalds in california (and in Cali, there's a friggin McDonalds EVERYWHERE). So I imagine you wont be able to walk down the street in Japan without passing by a DS zone.
You replied to my thread, thought I'd hop the fence and reply to yours.
It's encouraging to see efforts being made along this way. As I'm sure that the current iteration of tools will appeal more to coders than to artists, It will interesting to see what comes out of of the "programmer" camp. The stigma with Flash was it provided a lot of interesting opportunites in terms of the way websites interact with users, but it ended up being seen as a tool to create ever-more obnoxious Hamsterdance animations.
That said, what bothers me the most about Flash isn't necessarily how it's applied, but the cultural aspect of it. Flash is a complete break with the egalitarian history of the web and how web developers learned their stuff. Call me a commie, but one of the main reasons why the internet took off back in the mid 90's was because the spec was open, many of the tools for viewing and creating (and even hosting) content were free, and if you wanted to learn html all you had to do was go to some good sites, select "View Source", and see how other people did what you wanted to do.
With Flash, all that is broken. Macromedia piggy-backed on a ubuiqitous platform -- made so by free tools and open standards -- hooked users on visuals that rivaled anything on the web before.... and then slapped an $800 price tag on the authoring tools. Bastards.
You just wait: if the OSS crowd creates design tools that are 1/10th as good as Flash MX, I promise you'll see a massive price drop, or a free "Flash MX Lite". Just like how MySql prompted SQL Server Express from M$.
To be honest, I wound up being dissapointed because I thought that GPLFlash might be an open-source Flash authoring tool.
.swf on the authoring tool)?
As far as I can tell, no such tool exists (please correct me if I'm wrong). All I found was MTASC, which is just an actionscript compiler (no gui).
So, both in terms of impact (who is affected, who would use) and interest (pool of people who'd volunteer), it seems to me that an open source replacement to Flash MX ($200 upgrade / $700 full price, OSX and WinXP only, sure to go up in price thansks to the adobe buyout) is a much better time investment to the player (Free-as-in-beer, which runs on Mac, PC, Sun, Irix, and several Linux distros).
Nevermind the terminal game of catch-up that will be played: GPLFlash will *always* be behind the curve to Macromedia. Obviously the same is true for the authoring tools, but your Flash 5 content will still run on your latest-greatest Flash Player -- the reverse is not true.
Is it the fear of being sued? Is it much harder to create an author tool than a player (consider implementing all of the video/audio/video codecs that you'll need to implement on the player side vs. a GUI that outputs
Why replace the free, widely available player and not the expensive-as-hell, mac or pc only authoring tool? I don't get it.
Finally! Someone else gets it! I couldn't agree more. I went to E3, but I refused to wait in a 4 hour line because it only looked like they were showing off the physical design and some pre-rendered movies... but not one piece of journalism (gaming or mainstream) would say otherwise. Sony showed off a hollow plastic box and some CG animations, yet everyone happily ate it up.
For some reason, the media and the geek community are giving Sony a pass, in spite of being shown next to nothing, and in spite of Sonys semi-obnoxious level of overhype. All we really know is that the ps3 is at least as powerful as the Sega Saturn, which can also playback pre-rendered animations.
Xbox 360 was also a dissapointment but for different reasons. Prettier, derivitive games that, and nothing to address the very real threat of spiraling development costs and development cycle times.
I see a few sites that are replacing traditional navigation w/ Ajax components that update on-the-fly when users click on a link (for example, changing what's displayed on a multipurpose widget that appears beside your blog entries). Yeah, you're using ajax and that's neat, but once the user clicks the "back" button they go back to the site before they went to your site. Oops. Not what the user expects. It's 2005 and you've just implemented Frames. And not just the ugly Frames you see today, but the downright nasty frames of Netscape 2. Goodbye Back-button, and goodbye bookmarks.
On the other hand, using Ajax as part of a stateful transaction could be well-utilized. In some cases it improves back-button behaviour because it avoids letting user roll back to a page that reflects a state that doesn't exist on the server.
Soo... my humble opinion
The Back button's existence has long drawn the ire of web app developers, It's difficult to handle on the server side, and extremely diffifult to uphold the functionality that the user expects. For example, if user clicks "back" because they accidentally added something to their shopping cart... the implementation of the behaviour that the user expects ("if I click back, I won't have it my shopping cart anymore") could fill a book.
Still, it's a good metaphor, and I think developers should try as best they can to preserve it in their apps.
The XMLHTTP object was introduced w/ IE5, and that has been around for awhile (pretty sure since 2001, maybe longer). I can see how this might make the Microsoft apologists bitter now that this 4 year old feature is now in vogue, but I think at the time there wasn't the critical mass (in spite of IE's market share).
Now that it's implemented on multiple browsers, and it has a Killer App (Gmail), developers are starting to see the potential.
As a previous post said, Jimmy's Mom is going to ask "Will it be able to play his XBox games?". "Yes" or "No" are really about as technical as you need to get (though it is important if "Yes" is contingent upon an XBox live subscription).
My guess is that "Compatibility" could be implemented in a couple ofways:
Few people remember that PS2 compatibility was also limited (though probably not to the degree that XBox will be). If developers stuck to the API you were okay, but if your PS1 games tried to go against the metal or leveraged undocumented features that presumed a particular chipset... you were toast. My guess is that the same will hold true for PS3.
Regardless of the question, these "How do I do XYZ" articles always generate a fair amount of "Don't do that!" answers. That said... how can the parent post be insightful? He didn't ask: "Hey, do you think it's a good idea to listen to thought-provoking audio in the car?". As such, your thoughts are off-topic.
Not that they were insightful otherwise -- a lot of people can listen to something other than bubblegum pop while driving and manage to live to tale the tale. In fact, I'd argue that the increased mental alertness would be a good thing that would possibly make your driving better
Yeah, I agree. The voice acting was right up there with B-List porn. Add some chickabowwow guitar riffs to that dual-saber fight and you'd have the perfect lead-in to the obligatory girl-on-girl scene.
Oh come on! Tell me you weren't thinking the same thing. You're a perverted bastard and you know it.
Definitely agreed that less ram is needed on a console than a pc for a variety of reasons. You don't have nearly as many concurrent processes, you typically deal with lower resolutions (even 1080i will be lower than what most pc games can run at nowadays) and a console game doesn't have to use less efficient code in order to handle disparate hardware configurations.
That said, PC's have video RAM and (sometimes) audio RAM. So, even though you have windows and it's background processes crowding the system RAM, you probably have an extra 128MB video card holding textures and geometry.
So, even though 256MB is more than it seems for a console, I still think they should have included more. Consoles are always held back towards the end of their lifecycle because of it. Programmers are able to eek every bit out of the cpu, but in the end they just need more RAM (Halo 2's popping textures, Majora's mask requiring the 4mb expansion back, etc. etc.)
Now, 384MB would have been perfect. But nothing is set in stone -- when developers squaked at the 8MB originally planned for the PSP, Sony upped it to 32MB just months before the launch date.
However, I think that the general attitude on
Isn't this really an open source success story? "If you open the source code to your product, other developers will extend it and improve it in ways that you couldn't dream of (let alone afford), and you will be free to incorporate these improvements back into your product!". Isn't this the return on investment that the OSS community talks about?
If we're talking about the same uneducated mass of Internet users that were convinced to use IE because of Microsoft's brand recognition, isn't that a good thing?
Well, that's why I put it in quotes: it was a tongue-in-cheek reference that, while incorrect literally, got the point across. Perhaps you overlooked this in your zeal to create an "insightful" post.
Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong. Feel free to jot down the comment id and shove it my face in a couple years if the Xbox2 ends up being the "Kuso".
Sorry, I failed to catch your logic train.
However, you're right on the final point -- you can't sell a "gaijin" console in Japan.
NO IT IS NOT!!!!!! AUUGH!!!!
Okay, I'm sorry.. I just can't take it anymore. This is not an innovation by any stretch of the imagination (you say "portable turbine", I say "little windmill"). Second, the application and practicality are extremely limited. Let's look at the scenarios.
Scenario 1: You live someplace windy Supposing you take this turbine, stick out your window that receives good airflow in an area that has *continuous* wind (let's say you live in a lighthouse). Given the average cost of electricity, It'll take 25 hours of contuous charging to save yourself one penny. If this thing costs $4, it'll take 10,000 hours to pay for itself.
Scenario 2: You stick this on the top of your car Yeah, this will charge your cell phone, but conservation of energy says that the increased drag on your car will result in decreased fuel efficiency in equal proportion. Seeing as how your car already has a device that converts engine cycles into electricity (the alternator) you're better off just plugging in your car charging kit.
I'm all for clean power but a semester of physics tells you that there's little (or nothing) to be gained here. I hope I didn't offend the parent post, but I felt I had to bring about a reality check before somebody suggested charging their phone by clipping their turbine to an electric fan -- and then I would have to kill.
On the (semi) serious tip... you could have a "Bullet Time" button that slows down for the framerate for a coupla seconds but ups the pitch to "normal sounding" levels.
For what, you say? Well... it'd kinda be schweet to watch really spectacular hits in football or car crashes on indy 500 (or Cops, if you're into that sorta thing). Even better, it could add the "swoosh" sound as it goes back to regular speed.
While on the subject: If the parent's post resonates with you, please reply with the subject line: "w00t xutopia!", so that I can easily discern who needs to be added to the List of People Who Must Not be Allowed to Reproduce. Thanks.
While I agree that a Cheap-o OSX box is awesome in-and-of itself, I disagree that Kevin misses the point. Many people have accused the the Mac Mini of being a poor value because it matches the price of an entry-level Dell pc but doesn't include a keyboard or display.
The point of Kevin's article (or at least, what I took away from it) was that it's damn hard to match the value of the mini when you consider it's size. Even with the Mocha PC it starts at $495, and that is without RAM, a hard drive, CPU, or even a CD-Drive!.
Look, think about it from the school's perspective. Lawyers will try to find even the most obscure link between a shooting and the video games the shooter may have played. If the school *did* allow this tournament to happen, you just know that if there was a shooting five years down the line that the school district would be the first in line to be sued.
Don't blame the school, blame the sue-happy culture and the negative stigma of videogames for forcing their hand.