I've always bought whatever was cheapest for the wattage I needed and have never had a PSU fail or a PC fail as a result of anything I can really guess was power related (Well, I suppose technically, it's impossible to know but hard drive failures for example when they don't die outright i.e. crashing heads seem unlikely to be power related).
The only exceptions where I have spent a bit more on a PSU I've found they offered me no notable advantage other than that described (quieter, more cables maybe). Paying more for better featuresets is something you'd expect in most product lines, for example the one I used in my latest machine which I paid a little more for will turn itself back on to let the fans spin and cool down the system once I've already turned it off, this isn't much use unless your PC crashes due to overheating and the system needs to be cooled down quicker, which mine hasn't- so I suppose it just wastes power over letting it just cool naturally after a shut down.
I'm not really convinced there's any more risk with budget PSUs, I just think you're paying for brand name and features, if you need those features, pay for them, if you don't then budget PSUs don't seem to bring any harm.
There is only one exception I've seen to this when I was working in tech support where one supplier used PSUs that all failed within about 6months to a year, but this strikes me more as a problem with that individual product line than an inherent product with cheap PSUs- it's not like we haven't seen expensive named brands such as Fujitsu hard drives, Microsoft XBox 360 have their faulty batch product lines too.
Having worked in support for 7 years in a place where we had over 5000 users and machines from all sorts of suppliers including some from non-big name brands that put together some pretty cheap hardware, and having also built many machines for myself and others over the years I'm convinced if this was an issue then it would be one that was much more prominent. I found things like Maxtor hard drives being the biggest bain back then if anything with a much higher failure rate than any other vendor (ignoring the Fujitsu MPG3 drive line screw up) but then it was telling that they dropped their warranty from 3 to 1 year whilst Seagate and Western digital upped theirs from 3 to 5 years- if anything talks volumes about product confidence that does!
Have others really seen a higher failure rate in systems with cheaper PSUs as a running trend as opposed to a one off?
Partially, it mostly depends what's left, if launch of a nuclear response prevents further nuclear attack then it can still act as a deterrent against further launches.
No, the Quake games didn't on the consoles, I was talking generally.
The original Farcry, Farcry 2 and one or two other games have on the consoles. Games like Halo offer machinima content and such too although that's not gameplay content of course!
Even with consoles only the rate of games released with support for user generated content hasn't grown in 2008 over any other year, this is even more prominent when you factor in other platforms. That's why I'm not sure it can reasonably be called a trend for 2008 specifically.
Thinking about it further though, in terms of user generated content one thing does stand out- XNA community games on Live Arcade for the 360 but again I'm not sure that just because this is a feature released in 2008 it necessarily makes a trend any more than the various indie content tools that have come out in other years make it a trend in those years.
Certainly an ideal view of the world, it's just a shame it's rather naively rose-tinted.
People fight because other people impose their views on each other, people fight because of shortage of resources. Post-nuclear war this wouldn't improve as large portions of the earth become uninhabitable due to fall out.
If you think all of humanity are on the same team and can ever all just get along whilst we only have access to a finite amount of resources to share around then you're grossly mistaken.
It's rather ironic that you should try and take a pot shot as you did in your post with the suggestion that there's something wrong with people who label others the enemy, because this sort of sniping is one example as to why people wont ever all just get along. You are never going to eliminate difference of opinion and it is difference of opinion that separates groups of people and in the most extreme cases, often combined with other factors can lead to conflict between groups. When suggesting separation amongst humans is a problem, generalising about people probably isn't the smartest of followups, it's merely hypocritical.
Unless you have an idea to prevent separation (brainwashing everyone to have the same point of view?) and unless you can solve the resources problem then the rose tinted world you present is nothing more than a dream. At best we can move people to a close enough way of thinking to unify small groups together to produce bigger, stable groups (see post WWII Europe as an example). Besides, if nuclear war were to have happened as in the scenario we were discussing, we certainly wouldn't be living in the world you hope for.
Yeah but it'd act as a warning to other nations in the future if humanity did manage to survive never to go down that route again!
Realistically though it's a very scenario dependant thing, if some allied nations were still ok then it'd be worth doing as a deterrent against attacking them too.
If however all allies are gone it's a much more confusing scenario, I think if everything you and the billions of people who wanted to live in a world the same way as you had gone to be replaced by a lifestyle that you and those people simply aren't happy living under, or perhaps wont even be allowed to live under by the new regime then the justification for not nuking them in revenge just to save the human race is pretty void- why care about saving the human race if humanity is at a point where it's arguably not worth saving?
I'm usually good at playing devils advocate and look at the other point of view when pondering about such things, but I really can't think of any good reason why if the enemy were the only ones remaining that I should allow them to remain after what they'd done. Do you have any reasons why you'd allow them to live their way of life after they destroyed yours and everyone elses you knew? I think perhaps the fact there does seem to be no good justification to let them live is one of the reasons why a nuclear deterrent should in theory work- because there's going to be nothing left if one party goes nuclear, although I suppose we should never underestimate the idiocy of man sometimes.
"and many developers are banking more heavily on user-generated content, as in LittleBigPlanet."
I understand LittleBigPlanet is very good but I do not see how one game defines it as a trend. Quake series, Half-Life series even Farcry series on consoles have had strong support for user generated content so it really doesn't seem to be something new, nor does one or two games make it a specific trend when one or two games per year realistically seems to be the norm for this type of thing.
I'm not even convinced the retro or neo-retro gaming trend is new or growing this year either, it seems pretty constant since the release of Virtual Console at the Wii's release, Xbox live arcade since the 360 release and the downloadable classics from Sony's Playstation store too.
These are all good things, but are they trends specific to or growing in 2008? I don't really think so.
Microsoft do have source sharing programs with some partners. This sort of project would be one example of that.
The reason the Windows 2000 source code got leaked a few years back is not because of lack of security at Microsoft itself but because a partner leaked it.
Even Microsoft realises that the source code needs to be available for some projects and they have a choice of either allowing just that or losing some of the most high paying contracts.
With the Royal Navy's recruitment advert for IT crew where the guy goes on about how complex the equipment is and then finishes the advert with the punch line "but sometimes, I just switch it off and back on again".
Perhaps this is why it's saved tax payers £22 million too, we no longer need high paid IT staff with a clue what they're doing, we can just get 16 year old school drop outs who IT qualifications are that they built their own PC and set up an internet on uncle Joes computer by sticking the AOL disc in. I mean, hey the nuclear missile launch console has failed to fire off our nuclear deterrent after Russia just obliterated Europe in a nuclear attack, just reinstall Windows and make sure you stick the latest nuclear weapons launch drivers on, if not just pop round to the local PC World store and get the Tech Guys (UK equivalent of Geek Squad) to fix it for £125.
I can sleep comfortably knowing that our nuclear deterrent is in safe hands.
I previously tried all resolutions, and have tried both S-Video and Component connections to see if they make a difference. The only way I got it to work was switching to a different screen altogether which is of little use as that TV isn't in this room where I want to play! When I bring up the Wii menu the game display is correct in the background, but as soon as you close the menu it warps back to fucked up mode, so it does seem to be a rendering issue with the Wii itself.
I did find something in some support area on Nintendo's site about the issue about pressing some horribly awkward button combination which made a couple of games work but still didn't solve it for most that had the issue.
I'll admit I haven't tried fixing it again in a while, frankly I gave up with the virtual console because of this- paying for games that don't work and having my e-mails ignored by Nintendo's support team was a little frustrating, so I just kept to XBox live arcade for things like sonic and downloaded emulators and ROMs for the games I'd bought but wouldn't run on the Wii.
Are the settings you mention part of a new update at all or were they always there? as I say it's been a while since I last looked. If they were always there then I'm sure I'll have tried them- I went through every combination of relevant settings possible at the time.
Yep, I've never had anything from Nintendo support, I had an issue with the Wii whereby some of the downloadable games (like super mario world) don't display correctly on my screen. They never got back to me on that either and the fault still exists to this day despite being reported by many.
Many law suits have demonstrated that the idea of a game simply can't be copyrighted, only the name and IP. Arguably the only thing Scrabulous could've been caught on legally in this respect was the name, Scrabulous. A court case against someone for using a similar name wont find a sympathetic ear with a judge even then if the company hasn't at least given the defendant the option of changing the name out of court.
Really, I think the best they could've done legally is taken them to court over the name had they been unwilling to change it after an initial request out of court.
The lawsuit was probably there simply as a scare tactic to try and scare them into ceasing and desisting. This scare tactic worked to an extent, but now we're approaching the time they'd actually have to go to court and that they'd actually have to state their case they've backed off, because they know it was unwinnable based on similar past court cases.
If you could copyright a first person shooter where you have to fight off an alien invasion for example, then that would kill off most the FPS market. If someone however created an FPS called Doomer and it had all the weapons and characters of the original then this would be a valid court case.
The key is to ensure the only thing that's copied is the idea and concept and that the name and assets do not closely resemble the originals.
I don't think the frequency of it really matters, it's the fact it was done at all and done earlier than stated that bugged me.
I could've got a £25 game out of it had anything decent came up so I do feel like I've been somewhat ripped off when I had the decency to buy enough games to get that many points in the first place.
What's more is they said at one point we'd be able to convert points into Wii points to buy Wii arcade games and so originally I was waiting for that to come along. Storing my points costs them nothing, but getting rid of them has cost them my loyalty. I do not see the point in buying brand new Nintendo games anymore, there was little point in the first place, but I did it anyway and this is how I was treated.
I don't think we'll ever eliminate bad games on some specific platform no matter how easy we make it to make games for that platform.
What we will see is an overall increase in games, and with that an increase in good games. It may be that we only get 1 good game for every 100 crap games, but I don't see that as a problem because people will play the good games and ignore the crap ones- as long as there are more good ones out there than that's what we want. Easy to use libraries allow for that, they allow 100 more crap games to be made, but with it they bring 1 good game and again, that's what we want- more good games.
We've seen this happen before with mobile phone games, with flash games and to an extent we're seeing it now with XBox 360 community games and to a point we're seeing it with the Wii, where many games make use of the new control scheme but most are crap, however it's made worth it by the few that are good.
The problem is if you don't have an easy to use platform for creating games in the first place you wont even get most the crap games, let alone the good ones.
There are exceptions to every rule certainly, someone will always go that extra mile and slug their arse off to make a game on an obscure gaming platform (I'd argue Tribal Trouble did this somewhat with the Java platform) but that in itself will lead to creation of easy to use libraries. Some of Popcap's games and games like Fantastic Contraption (There's always going to be bad developers and bad games, this will always be a problem.
Easier to use libraries wont even increase the amount of good games in relation to the amount of bad games.
What it will do though is open the door for a few good developers/innovators that will produce good stuff. I'm not so fussed about quantity, like you I want quality, but they go hand in hand with this sort of thing to an extent, that to have any quality titles you need some amount of quantity, that is, for every 100 crap titles, you might find 1 good one, but it's that 1 good one I'll bother with and the others that I'll ignore. If we only have a 1 in 100 chance of a Javascript game being good and we only have 20 Javascript games out there then there isn't the greatest of chances that any of them will be any good.
I've noticed the same with XNA community games on the XBox 360, there is so much crap on there, but amongst it all there are a couple of gems and to me, they make it all worthwhile.
We can't ever expect every game for a specific technology to be good, no matter what we do this will never happen, but we certainly can start opening up more platforms to game developers and over time things will improve. We've seen this happen before with Flash games and Mobile phone games, we're seeing it happen now with XNA community games on the 360. For all the flash crap there is out there, we eventually end up with excellent games like Fantastic contraption (fantasticcontraption.com) are a testament to the good games that can exist once the tools are available (although in Popcap's case, they made a lot of the tools).
I've recently even seen some games made on the likes of XNA by people who weren't previously programmers, this in no way means they're incapable of making a good game, some of their ideas are great and the ease of XNA (or even other engines, such as Torque Game Builder) have allowed them to realise those ideas. It's the ease of use of the tools that made these, previously non-programmers, produce better games than the guy who can write a full blown engine + game on top of raw Javascript.
In a way, I'm not even sure that production of massive amount of crap is even a bad thing, after all most this crap is produced by teens experimenting with the tools and these teens maybe your John Carmack's of tommorrow, making sure the tools are available again in this case is surely only a good thing.
I think the fundamental point I'm getting at is this- bad games, released free don't actually hurt anyone, there's no downside to having lots of bad games out there, but there are upsides- such as allowing people to learn to make better games.
Where you can amass 6000 points having spent a small fortune on games, only to receive an e-mail telling you unused points will be whiped after 6months. You then wait around for something interesting to come up and when it does you find they already whiped your points... after 3 months.
It is at this point where I decided club nintendo is little more than a con, there is no reason whatsoever than ripping off customers to erase unused points, let alone in a time period less than that stated.
In other words, I simply wouldn't waste my time with it anymore.
Seeing as fox hunting involves a bunch of extremely rich (inherited rich, never worked a minute in their life rich) people with a taste for animal blood riding horses around, sending a small army of dogs after a fox and ripping it to shreds just for the sake of it, I think your analogy is actually better.
I'm not sure there are many rich physicists out there that ride horses round their labs wearing red jackets and joppers, nor am I sure how dogs would help track down dark matter but I am at least sure it's probably not a good idea to let a bunch of dogs try and rip some dark matter to shreds when we do find it.
It's because most game developers wont want to pratt about for weeks trying to get the core Javascript stuff done, they'll want to write games.
The availability of these libraries mean they can do that.
There's the argument that developers always used to have to write their own driver layer and such in the DOS days and then build a graphics engine on top of that so it's not like game developers didn't used to have this barrier and yet still did well. The problem with that argument is back then, everyone had to do that, nowadays people could just go build something with Flash or just do a non-web game with XNA or something instead.
The importance of good and easy to use libraries means Javascript has a more level playing field with other technologies that currently attract game developers.
Messing around developing the underlying APIs, framework and such detracts from the important part of developing games- developing the game itself. The more time that can be spent actually developing games, the more potential there is for the games to be better because more time can be spent on the actual gameplay.
Two examples that IMO worked in MMOs would be the puzzle chests in the PvP dungeon in UO (can't for the life of me remember the name now, began with K I think) and some of the master level challenges in Dark Age of Camelot's Trials of Atlantis expansion.
The problem with the latter is that the execution was horribly, Mythic had a great idea with their ToA addon for DAoC but they rushed it to market and it felt like an early beta/late alpha on release, driving away massive amounts of their player base. It also arguably required too many people at release.
Later on when players figured it out a lot of parts could be done with a group of 8 very skilled players and this seems to be key- make it so the puzzles don't necessarily have to be generated, make it so they don't necessarily have to be straightforward and scripted but make it so it takes some amount of skill to do them. This meant it didn't matter how many guides people read, if they didn't have a well disciplined, well communicating group with good timing and paying attention they couldn't do it. Those that couldn't do it would wait for a 100 person public raid who would simply just brute force the problem (I'm not sure if that's good or bad) but the fact you didn't have to wait for a public raid and could pull it off with a small, skilled team was a very good start. I could imagine the same thing with a more puzzle focussed element- have problems that require knowledgable people, sure you could get 100 people together to figure it out together or alternatively the clever/skilled/good puzzle solvers may be able to go it with just a small group- this means they could get ahead based on their abilities, which to me is what it should all be about. I can't see the point in competitive games where the criteria for competition is amount of time in game instead of say skill or effort.
Essentially the key then seems to be to make the puzzles a challenge and challenges can pull on more than just randomness of puzzles or time/number of players- they can pull on concentration, timing, communication, intelligence and many other human traits. Randomness is certainly a useful tool in re-usable puzzles, but it's so often horribly misused into creating boring, repetitive puzzles.
The funny thing is that that sounds exactly like most modern MMOs.
It's nice to know that decades of experience amongst game designers has led us round in a complete circle but hey, it works, people enjoy it so I guess that's why. Personally though I can't help but think there is room for more interesting, more complex team-based puzzles in games, but I guess games like WoW particularly have to satisfy the lowest common denominator.
The article linked in the summary is misleading and borderline outright false.
The suggestion in the summary, that the iPhone now has a bigger marketshare than the full range of Windows mobile devices is wrong. For starters, the stats available are only relevant to Windows mobile phones- this does not include say Windows mobile PDAs without phone features so to suggest the iPhone has outsold all Windows mobile devices simply isn't true.
More importantly though is the suggestion that the iPhone has a bigger market share than Windows mobile devices, this is only somewhat true. Apple sold more iPhones than Windows mobile phones were sold in quarter 3 2008 by 1%, it has not overtaken all time or annual market share yet. We'll have to wait until next year to find out of this is a continuing pattern, 1% is still a little close to call, but I'd guess the pattern will continue, the iPhone is popular and Windows mobile really has little new to offer.
Speaking of misleading though, in response to the parent post, I'm a little intrigued by this statement:
"And somehow, they hit the number and blew past Microsoft smartphones, Nokia and blackberry."
This doesn't seem to make sense, whilst they've outsold Microsoft Windows Mobile devices for the last quarter they haven't all time, but more importantly they have neither outsold all time or last quarter Nokia and RIM's devices. They're around 1.1million units behind RIM last quarter and 10.7million behind Nokia so it seems an awful jump to suggest they've blown past Nokia and RIM when they haven't surpassed them by any metric. I think the iPhone probably will overtake Windows mobile next quarter and make it a permanent thing and I think there's probably a good chance they'll overtake RIM too to be honest, although maybe a year or two down the road. I'd be surprised if Apple ever overtakes Nokia though either in monthly sales or overall marketshare- the gap just seems too big, although I could be proven wrong of course!
I don't disagree with the sentiment of either the article itself or the parent post, that Apple has done well and that innovation is good. What I do dislike very much is fanboyism distorting fact, isn't it enough that Apple has done well without having to blow it out the water and make it something much much bigger than it really is? I don't blame the people posting here, because I too am guilty of often not only not RTFA, but certainly don't research further, this time I did however and realised how misleading TFA actually is- perhaps it'll teach me to do this a little more often. It's a shame in a way the Slashdot editors don't do their job and check these things and temporarily or permanently blacklist sites if they continue to attempt to spread misinformation.
It only took a little further reading to see how abysmally fanboy infected the linked article is:
"Microsoft, in its zeal to get Windows Mobile onto as many phones as possible, is left with a phone OS that no one wants to use"
Really? there's still 4million+ out there last quarter that would disagree. The iPhone is only 600,000 units up, it's too small a lead to start making grand statements like that, one could equally say no one wants to use the iPhone when compared to Nokia's sales stats but it would be equally wrong, because 4.7million people clearly do.
"and more importantly, one that developers don't want to code for. Developers, who have long been getting chump change for their apps, are starting to see that they can make quite a bit of money developing programs for rival platforms such as the iPhone."
Again, I'm intrigued to know where they got this from- Windows mobile is a pleasure to develop for compared to some platforms, if Microsoft is good at anything it's developer tools. I'm sure a lot of developers want to or are happy coding for it but even the latter part of the statement that it's because of chump change seems odd in light of this article- http://www.the
I don't think it is deliberate, I think it's simply that the Slashdot editors are primarily the types of people who believe anything you tell them, so when you go and whisper into their ear "Hey, I heard everyone is backing off from supportung net neutrality", they jump up, run to their PC, find a relevant article submission or make their own and hit submit.
It strikes me more as really careless and gullable editing than something done with malice or intention. I think you're giving the editors too much credit in suggesting they've put any thought into most the summaries/articles they post.
It's a little more complex than that. You're right as you say, the companies asking for bailouts wouldn't completely collapse, they'd sell off some of their factories that's true.
But not all their factories would get bought up- the whole point is there's overproduction for the market's current demands so a small company isn't going to have anymore demand for their extra supply than the big company did for it's oversupply. Essentially, whatever happens, jobs are going to be lost to cut company costs, and there's the problem.
As jobs are lost because of this sort of thing, there are a greater number of unemployed no longer available to buy products such as DRAM or whatever and so demand falls further, this has the inevitable result of further redundancies and the cycle continuous.
So, particularly in the case of the US car manufacturers where so many people have the potential to lose there jobs there could indeed be an absolutely massive impact. I don't generally subscribe to doomsday scenarios so I don't think we'll see complete melt down, at the end of the day, the guys at the top will fiddle the system and magically conjure up some more money from their magical money device as usual. If things were left to run their natural course though, then there certainly is the theoretical possibility that everything could indeed go down the drain as collapse leads to collapse.
A lot of what you've said really doesn't make sense, I'm not sure why it was modded as insightful unless perhaps it's because of your closing statement.
"most apps will run on most platforms without extra work. Or so I hope (desktop or notebook, don't see a way to make a destop app fit on a phone w/o work)."
So like Java then?
"They'll have an interpreted code, like lisp, which gets compiled (once, not at runtime)"
So er, it's not interpreted then after all, it's compiled?
"It can be fast, doesn't have to be slow this way."
But how fast does it need to be? When you look at the likes of Java and.NET they run perfectly well for most apps with exceptions only being things like games. Even that's rapidly becoming a myth though, XNA games built on the managed.NET platform and even some recent Java games have demonstrated good-looking 3D is becoming perfectly possible with good performance on these platforms.
"So it won't actually be like a script. Java tried to be this universal gateway, but it just never really took off for real apps like a language should."
I'm struggling to understand what you would suggest a real app is? Java is used heavily throughout the business world and there's still a decent amount of desktop apps built for it. It dominates the mobile market still, it's used for the menu system on Bluray discs, many set top devices use it, it's used heavily for some major web sites at the server side. I don't really see how it can be said that it never took off. The only area I'd argue it's somewhat failed is on the client side of the web, you could say it failed in gaming but I don't think it so much failed there as hasn't yet really gotten started, Tribal Trouble for example demonstrates that it's possible though and so it could have potential there. Java certainly has it's fair share of the market.
I'd argue the problem isn't so much a technology one, Java solves most the problems now and as it's open source now it's also open for previous criticisms of it to be solved making it the perfect solution. The problem is a people one, either people don't want to invest time/money in learning a different language and/or porting their tool chains and code libraries over or they're not willing to risk spending time on the change when their existing toolchain works. There's also another issue in that libraries matter a lot too- DirectX overtook OpenGL to completely dominate it nowadays not because DirectX was inherently better, but because it provided the tools and libraries to get things done quicker and easier. This is also why people use.NET over Java sometimes, because Visual Studio and the.NET framework are so much nicer, not necessarily because the technology itself is inherently better as such. Perhaps a bigger problem though is corporate interests which there isn't really a solution for, there will always be some interest in avoiding platform neutrality.
If everyone started using Java tommorrow and time was spent tidying up and fixing the problems with Java then we would indeed be able to run things regardless of platform. The technology is here today, unfortunately the will isn't.
As a final note, I'm not a Java fanboy as much as this post may make it sound, I have to admit I'm part the problem in that I do most my development in.NET or C++ but I do see the theoretical merits of Java, and I do think they could be brought into fruition if the will was there. Even if Java is decided as a no go, it's still a perfectly good proof of concept that the idea could work, paving the way for a new language to solve the same problem but better, again however, only if the will is there.
1) The games industry is already shifting away from the PC to closed platforms like consoles because they claim they make more profit due to not having the piracy issues they get on the PC. To them, this would be seen as a step backwards.
2) If one company manages to screw up the latest console plugin does the company want to be associated with that- Microsoft owned up to the original RROD problems and put money aside to deal with it, they've resolved the issues but to this day get slated for the problem. Would they really want to put themselves in a position where the latest Dell notebook has poor venting around Dell's hardware design is making their component fail and they get the blame for it? It's one thing if it's their fault, but if it's a 3rd party's fault and they risk the blame?
3) Do they really want to spend money offering support to the various hardware developers that want to implement their addons? Do they want to deal with compatibility issues? Do they want to spend and money time keeping their systems secure whilst keeping them open enough to integrate?
I have to admit I actually fell into that category, I too discovered the sandbag thing and when I had them would just sacrifice orca after orca to take their base down on the later missions;)
I played C&C through again about a year or two back when that "C&C: The Last Decade" pack came out, the game was much easier and shorter this time round- I did NOD and GDI in a weekend without needing the sandbag tactic!
It's funny how much a game can change without changing at all, but it didn't change in one area at least- it still utterly rocked and I must have taken a different path to when I used to play as I came across a couple of missions I didn't even recall which was a bonus! The following weekend I did RA but I tried RA2 and C&C2 again and just couldn't get into them. Played Generals some more and I have to admit I've played through C&C3 twice now with each race- once on the PC originally, and once on the XBox 360 when I picked it up for £5 in a bargain bin earlier in the year.
I'm going to try and get into Red Alert 3 again this weekend but from what I've played so far I'm not holding up too much hope.
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I've always bought whatever was cheapest for the wattage I needed and have never had a PSU fail or a PC fail as a result of anything I can really guess was power related (Well, I suppose technically, it's impossible to know but hard drive failures for example when they don't die outright i.e. crashing heads seem unlikely to be power related).
The only exceptions where I have spent a bit more on a PSU I've found they offered me no notable advantage other than that described (quieter, more cables maybe). Paying more for better featuresets is something you'd expect in most product lines, for example the one I used in my latest machine which I paid a little more for will turn itself back on to let the fans spin and cool down the system once I've already turned it off, this isn't much use unless your PC crashes due to overheating and the system needs to be cooled down quicker, which mine hasn't- so I suppose it just wastes power over letting it just cool naturally after a shut down.
I'm not really convinced there's any more risk with budget PSUs, I just think you're paying for brand name and features, if you need those features, pay for them, if you don't then budget PSUs don't seem to bring any harm.
There is only one exception I've seen to this when I was working in tech support where one supplier used PSUs that all failed within about 6months to a year, but this strikes me more as a problem with that individual product line than an inherent product with cheap PSUs- it's not like we haven't seen expensive named brands such as Fujitsu hard drives, Microsoft XBox 360 have their faulty batch product lines too.
Having worked in support for 7 years in a place where we had over 5000 users and machines from all sorts of suppliers including some from non-big name brands that put together some pretty cheap hardware, and having also built many machines for myself and others over the years I'm convinced if this was an issue then it would be one that was much more prominent. I found things like Maxtor hard drives being the biggest bain back then if anything with a much higher failure rate than any other vendor (ignoring the Fujitsu MPG3 drive line screw up) but then it was telling that they dropped their warranty from 3 to 1 year whilst Seagate and Western digital upped theirs from 3 to 5 years- if anything talks volumes about product confidence that does!
Have others really seen a higher failure rate in systems with cheaper PSUs as a running trend as opposed to a one off?
Partially, it mostly depends what's left, if launch of a nuclear response prevents further nuclear attack then it can still act as a deterrent against further launches.
No, the Quake games didn't on the consoles, I was talking generally.
The original Farcry, Farcry 2 and one or two other games have on the consoles. Games like Halo offer machinima content and such too although that's not gameplay content of course!
Even with consoles only the rate of games released with support for user generated content hasn't grown in 2008 over any other year, this is even more prominent when you factor in other platforms. That's why I'm not sure it can reasonably be called a trend for 2008 specifically.
Thinking about it further though, in terms of user generated content one thing does stand out- XNA community games on Live Arcade for the 360 but again I'm not sure that just because this is a feature released in 2008 it necessarily makes a trend any more than the various indie content tools that have come out in other years make it a trend in those years.
Certainly an ideal view of the world, it's just a shame it's rather naively rose-tinted.
People fight because other people impose their views on each other, people fight because of shortage of resources. Post-nuclear war this wouldn't improve as large portions of the earth become uninhabitable due to fall out.
If you think all of humanity are on the same team and can ever all just get along whilst we only have access to a finite amount of resources to share around then you're grossly mistaken.
It's rather ironic that you should try and take a pot shot as you did in your post with the suggestion that there's something wrong with people who label others the enemy, because this sort of sniping is one example as to why people wont ever all just get along. You are never going to eliminate difference of opinion and it is difference of opinion that separates groups of people and in the most extreme cases, often combined with other factors can lead to conflict between groups. When suggesting separation amongst humans is a problem, generalising about people probably isn't the smartest of followups, it's merely hypocritical.
Unless you have an idea to prevent separation (brainwashing everyone to have the same point of view?) and unless you can solve the resources problem then the rose tinted world you present is nothing more than a dream. At best we can move people to a close enough way of thinking to unify small groups together to produce bigger, stable groups (see post WWII Europe as an example). Besides, if nuclear war were to have happened as in the scenario we were discussing, we certainly wouldn't be living in the world you hope for.
Yeah but it'd act as a warning to other nations in the future if humanity did manage to survive never to go down that route again!
Realistically though it's a very scenario dependant thing, if some allied nations were still ok then it'd be worth doing as a deterrent against attacking them too.
If however all allies are gone it's a much more confusing scenario, I think if everything you and the billions of people who wanted to live in a world the same way as you had gone to be replaced by a lifestyle that you and those people simply aren't happy living under, or perhaps wont even be allowed to live under by the new regime then the justification for not nuking them in revenge just to save the human race is pretty void- why care about saving the human race if humanity is at a point where it's arguably not worth saving?
I'm usually good at playing devils advocate and look at the other point of view when pondering about such things, but I really can't think of any good reason why if the enemy were the only ones remaining that I should allow them to remain after what they'd done. Do you have any reasons why you'd allow them to live their way of life after they destroyed yours and everyone elses you knew? I think perhaps the fact there does seem to be no good justification to let them live is one of the reasons why a nuclear deterrent should in theory work- because there's going to be nothing left if one party goes nuclear, although I suppose we should never underestimate the idiocy of man sometimes.
How is this any different to open source though?
Would they be any less or more likely to do a full audit of that and the compiler used to build it?
"and many developers are banking more heavily on user-generated content, as in LittleBigPlanet."
I understand LittleBigPlanet is very good but I do not see how one game defines it as a trend. Quake series, Half-Life series even Farcry series on consoles have had strong support for user generated content so it really doesn't seem to be something new, nor does one or two games make it a specific trend when one or two games per year realistically seems to be the norm for this type of thing.
I'm not even convinced the retro or neo-retro gaming trend is new or growing this year either, it seems pretty constant since the release of Virtual Console at the Wii's release, Xbox live arcade since the 360 release and the downloadable classics from Sony's Playstation store too.
These are all good things, but are they trends specific to or growing in 2008? I don't really think so.
Microsoft do have source sharing programs with some partners. This sort of project would be one example of that.
The reason the Windows 2000 source code got leaked a few years back is not because of lack of security at Microsoft itself but because a partner leaked it.
Even Microsoft realises that the source code needs to be available for some projects and they have a choice of either allowing just that or losing some of the most high paying contracts.
With the Royal Navy's recruitment advert for IT crew where the guy goes on about how complex the equipment is and then finishes the advert with the punch line "but sometimes, I just switch it off and back on again".
Perhaps this is why it's saved tax payers £22 million too, we no longer need high paid IT staff with a clue what they're doing, we can just get 16 year old school drop outs who IT qualifications are that they built their own PC and set up an internet on uncle Joes computer by sticking the AOL disc in. I mean, hey the nuclear missile launch console has failed to fire off our nuclear deterrent after Russia just obliterated Europe in a nuclear attack, just reinstall Windows and make sure you stick the latest nuclear weapons launch drivers on, if not just pop round to the local PC World store and get the Tech Guys (UK equivalent of Geek Squad) to fix it for £125.
I can sleep comfortably knowing that our nuclear deterrent is in safe hands.
I previously tried all resolutions, and have tried both S-Video and Component connections to see if they make a difference. The only way I got it to work was switching to a different screen altogether which is of little use as that TV isn't in this room where I want to play! When I bring up the Wii menu the game display is correct in the background, but as soon as you close the menu it warps back to fucked up mode, so it does seem to be a rendering issue with the Wii itself.
I did find something in some support area on Nintendo's site about the issue about pressing some horribly awkward button combination which made a couple of games work but still didn't solve it for most that had the issue.
I'll admit I haven't tried fixing it again in a while, frankly I gave up with the virtual console because of this- paying for games that don't work and having my e-mails ignored by Nintendo's support team was a little frustrating, so I just kept to XBox live arcade for things like sonic and downloaded emulators and ROMs for the games I'd bought but wouldn't run on the Wii.
Are the settings you mention part of a new update at all or were they always there? as I say it's been a while since I last looked. If they were always there then I'm sure I'll have tried them- I went through every combination of relevant settings possible at the time.
Yep, I've never had anything from Nintendo support, I had an issue with the Wii whereby some of the downloadable games (like super mario world) don't display correctly on my screen. They never got back to me on that either and the fault still exists to this day despite being reported by many.
Many law suits have demonstrated that the idea of a game simply can't be copyrighted, only the name and IP. Arguably the only thing Scrabulous could've been caught on legally in this respect was the name, Scrabulous. A court case against someone for using a similar name wont find a sympathetic ear with a judge even then if the company hasn't at least given the defendant the option of changing the name out of court.
Really, I think the best they could've done legally is taken them to court over the name had they been unwilling to change it after an initial request out of court.
The lawsuit was probably there simply as a scare tactic to try and scare them into ceasing and desisting. This scare tactic worked to an extent, but now we're approaching the time they'd actually have to go to court and that they'd actually have to state their case they've backed off, because they know it was unwinnable based on similar past court cases.
If you could copyright a first person shooter where you have to fight off an alien invasion for example, then that would kill off most the FPS market. If someone however created an FPS called Doomer and it had all the weapons and characters of the original then this would be a valid court case.
The key is to ensure the only thing that's copied is the idea and concept and that the name and assets do not closely resemble the originals.
I don't think the frequency of it really matters, it's the fact it was done at all and done earlier than stated that bugged me.
I could've got a £25 game out of it had anything decent came up so I do feel like I've been somewhat ripped off when I had the decency to buy enough games to get that many points in the first place.
What's more is they said at one point we'd be able to convert points into Wii points to buy Wii arcade games and so originally I was waiting for that to come along. Storing my points costs them nothing, but getting rid of them has cost them my loyalty. I do not see the point in buying brand new Nintendo games anymore, there was little point in the first place, but I did it anyway and this is how I was treated.
I don't think we'll ever eliminate bad games on some specific platform no matter how easy we make it to make games for that platform.
What we will see is an overall increase in games, and with that an increase in good games. It may be that we only get 1 good game for every 100 crap games, but I don't see that as a problem because people will play the good games and ignore the crap ones- as long as there are more good ones out there than that's what we want. Easy to use libraries allow for that, they allow 100 more crap games to be made, but with it they bring 1 good game and again, that's what we want- more good games.
We've seen this happen before with mobile phone games, with flash games and to an extent we're seeing it now with XBox 360 community games and to a point we're seeing it with the Wii, where many games make use of the new control scheme but most are crap, however it's made worth it by the few that are good.
The problem is if you don't have an easy to use platform for creating games in the first place you wont even get most the crap games, let alone the good ones.
There are exceptions to every rule certainly, someone will always go that extra mile and slug their arse off to make a game on an obscure gaming platform (I'd argue Tribal Trouble did this somewhat with the Java platform) but that in itself will lead to creation of easy to use libraries. Some of Popcap's games and games like Fantastic Contraption (There's always going to be bad developers and bad games, this will always be a problem.
Easier to use libraries wont even increase the amount of good games in relation to the amount of bad games.
What it will do though is open the door for a few good developers/innovators that will produce good stuff. I'm not so fussed about quantity, like you I want quality, but they go hand in hand with this sort of thing to an extent, that to have any quality titles you need some amount of quantity, that is, for every 100 crap titles, you might find 1 good one, but it's that 1 good one I'll bother with and the others that I'll ignore. If we only have a 1 in 100 chance of a Javascript game being good and we only have 20 Javascript games out there then there isn't the greatest of chances that any of them will be any good.
I've noticed the same with XNA community games on the XBox 360, there is so much crap on there, but amongst it all there are a couple of gems and to me, they make it all worthwhile.
We can't ever expect every game for a specific technology to be good, no matter what we do this will never happen, but we certainly can start opening up more platforms to game developers and over time things will improve. We've seen this happen before with Flash games and Mobile phone games, we're seeing it happen now with XNA community games on the 360. For all the flash crap there is out there, we eventually end up with excellent games like Fantastic contraption (fantasticcontraption.com) are a testament to the good games that can exist once the tools are available (although in Popcap's case, they made a lot of the tools).
I've recently even seen some games made on the likes of XNA by people who weren't previously programmers, this in no way means they're incapable of making a good game, some of their ideas are great and the ease of XNA (or even other engines, such as Torque Game Builder) have allowed them to realise those ideas. It's the ease of use of the tools that made these, previously non-programmers, produce better games than the guy who can write a full blown engine + game on top of raw Javascript.
In a way, I'm not even sure that production of massive amount of crap is even a bad thing, after all most this crap is produced by teens experimenting with the tools and these teens maybe your John Carmack's of tommorrow, making sure the tools are available again in this case is surely only a good thing.
I think the fundamental point I'm getting at is this- bad games, released free don't actually hurt anyone, there's no downside to having lots of bad games out there, but there are upsides- such as allowing people to learn to make better games.
Where you can amass 6000 points having spent a small fortune on games, only to receive an e-mail telling you unused points will be whiped after 6months. You then wait around for something interesting to come up and when it does you find they already whiped your points... after 3 months.
It is at this point where I decided club nintendo is little more than a con, there is no reason whatsoever than ripping off customers to erase unused points, let alone in a time period less than that stated.
In other words, I simply wouldn't waste my time with it anymore.
Seeing as fox hunting involves a bunch of extremely rich (inherited rich, never worked a minute in their life rich) people with a taste for animal blood riding horses around, sending a small army of dogs after a fox and ripping it to shreds just for the sake of it, I think your analogy is actually better.
I'm not sure there are many rich physicists out there that ride horses round their labs wearing red jackets and joppers, nor am I sure how dogs would help track down dark matter but I am at least sure it's probably not a good idea to let a bunch of dogs try and rip some dark matter to shreds when we do find it.
It's because most game developers wont want to pratt about for weeks trying to get the core Javascript stuff done, they'll want to write games.
The availability of these libraries mean they can do that.
There's the argument that developers always used to have to write their own driver layer and such in the DOS days and then build a graphics engine on top of that so it's not like game developers didn't used to have this barrier and yet still did well. The problem with that argument is back then, everyone had to do that, nowadays people could just go build something with Flash or just do a non-web game with XNA or something instead.
The importance of good and easy to use libraries means Javascript has a more level playing field with other technologies that currently attract game developers.
Messing around developing the underlying APIs, framework and such detracts from the important part of developing games- developing the game itself. The more time that can be spent actually developing games, the more potential there is for the games to be better because more time can be spent on the actual gameplay.
Two examples that IMO worked in MMOs would be the puzzle chests in the PvP dungeon in UO (can't for the life of me remember the name now, began with K I think) and some of the master level challenges in Dark Age of Camelot's Trials of Atlantis expansion.
The problem with the latter is that the execution was horribly, Mythic had a great idea with their ToA addon for DAoC but they rushed it to market and it felt like an early beta/late alpha on release, driving away massive amounts of their player base. It also arguably required too many people at release.
Later on when players figured it out a lot of parts could be done with a group of 8 very skilled players and this seems to be key- make it so the puzzles don't necessarily have to be generated, make it so they don't necessarily have to be straightforward and scripted but make it so it takes some amount of skill to do them. This meant it didn't matter how many guides people read, if they didn't have a well disciplined, well communicating group with good timing and paying attention they couldn't do it. Those that couldn't do it would wait for a 100 person public raid who would simply just brute force the problem (I'm not sure if that's good or bad) but the fact you didn't have to wait for a public raid and could pull it off with a small, skilled team was a very good start. I could imagine the same thing with a more puzzle focussed element- have problems that require knowledgable people, sure you could get 100 people together to figure it out together or alternatively the clever/skilled/good puzzle solvers may be able to go it with just a small group- this means they could get ahead based on their abilities, which to me is what it should all be about. I can't see the point in competitive games where the criteria for competition is amount of time in game instead of say skill or effort.
Essentially the key then seems to be to make the puzzles a challenge and challenges can pull on more than just randomness of puzzles or time/number of players- they can pull on concentration, timing, communication, intelligence and many other human traits. Randomness is certainly a useful tool in re-usable puzzles, but it's so often horribly misused into creating boring, repetitive puzzles.
The funny thing is that that sounds exactly like most modern MMOs.
It's nice to know that decades of experience amongst game designers has led us round in a complete circle but hey, it works, people enjoy it so I guess that's why. Personally though I can't help but think there is room for more interesting, more complex team-based puzzles in games, but I guess games like WoW particularly have to satisfy the lowest common denominator.
The article linked in the summary is misleading and borderline outright false.
The suggestion in the summary, that the iPhone now has a bigger marketshare than the full range of Windows mobile devices is wrong. For starters, the stats available are only relevant to Windows mobile phones- this does not include say Windows mobile PDAs without phone features so to suggest the iPhone has outsold all Windows mobile devices simply isn't true.
More importantly though is the suggestion that the iPhone has a bigger market share than Windows mobile devices, this is only somewhat true. Apple sold more iPhones than Windows mobile phones were sold in quarter 3 2008 by 1%, it has not overtaken all time or annual market share yet. We'll have to wait until next year to find out of this is a continuing pattern, 1% is still a little close to call, but I'd guess the pattern will continue, the iPhone is popular and Windows mobile really has little new to offer.
Speaking of misleading though, in response to the parent post, I'm a little intrigued by this statement:
"And somehow, they hit the number and blew past Microsoft smartphones, Nokia and blackberry."
This doesn't seem to make sense, whilst they've outsold Microsoft Windows Mobile devices for the last quarter they haven't all time, but more importantly they have neither outsold all time or last quarter Nokia and RIM's devices. They're around 1.1million units behind RIM last quarter and 10.7million behind Nokia so it seems an awful jump to suggest they've blown past Nokia and RIM when they haven't surpassed them by any metric. I think the iPhone probably will overtake Windows mobile next quarter and make it a permanent thing and I think there's probably a good chance they'll overtake RIM too to be honest, although maybe a year or two down the road. I'd be surprised if Apple ever overtakes Nokia though either in monthly sales or overall marketshare- the gap just seems too big, although I could be proven wrong of course!
I don't disagree with the sentiment of either the article itself or the parent post, that Apple has done well and that innovation is good. What I do dislike very much is fanboyism distorting fact, isn't it enough that Apple has done well without having to blow it out the water and make it something much much bigger than it really is? I don't blame the people posting here, because I too am guilty of often not only not RTFA, but certainly don't research further, this time I did however and realised how misleading TFA actually is- perhaps it'll teach me to do this a little more often. It's a shame in a way the Slashdot editors don't do their job and check these things and temporarily or permanently blacklist sites if they continue to attempt to spread misinformation.
It only took a little further reading to see how abysmally fanboy infected the linked article is:
"Microsoft, in its zeal to get Windows Mobile onto as many phones as possible, is left with a phone OS that no one wants to use"
Really? there's still 4million+ out there last quarter that would disagree. The iPhone is only 600,000 units up, it's too small a lead to start making grand statements like that, one could equally say no one wants to use the iPhone when compared to Nokia's sales stats but it would be equally wrong, because 4.7million people clearly do.
"and more importantly, one that developers don't want to code for. Developers, who have long been getting chump change for their apps, are starting to see that they can make quite a bit of money developing programs for rival platforms such as the iPhone."
Again, I'm intrigued to know where they got this from- Windows mobile is a pleasure to develop for compared to some platforms, if Microsoft is good at anything it's developer tools. I'm sure a lot of developers want to or are happy coding for it but even the latter part of the statement that it's because of chump change seems odd in light of this article- http://www.the
I don't think it is deliberate, I think it's simply that the Slashdot editors are primarily the types of people who believe anything you tell them, so when you go and whisper into their ear "Hey, I heard everyone is backing off from supportung net neutrality", they jump up, run to their PC, find a relevant article submission or make their own and hit submit.
It strikes me more as really careless and gullable editing than something done with malice or intention. I think you're giving the editors too much credit in suggesting they've put any thought into most the summaries/articles they post.
It's a little more complex than that. You're right as you say, the companies asking for bailouts wouldn't completely collapse, they'd sell off some of their factories that's true.
But not all their factories would get bought up- the whole point is there's overproduction for the market's current demands so a small company isn't going to have anymore demand for their extra supply than the big company did for it's oversupply. Essentially, whatever happens, jobs are going to be lost to cut company costs, and there's the problem.
As jobs are lost because of this sort of thing, there are a greater number of unemployed no longer available to buy products such as DRAM or whatever and so demand falls further, this has the inevitable result of further redundancies and the cycle continuous.
So, particularly in the case of the US car manufacturers where so many people have the potential to lose there jobs there could indeed be an absolutely massive impact. I don't generally subscribe to doomsday scenarios so I don't think we'll see complete melt down, at the end of the day, the guys at the top will fiddle the system and magically conjure up some more money from their magical money device as usual. If things were left to run their natural course though, then there certainly is the theoretical possibility that everything could indeed go down the drain as collapse leads to collapse.
A lot of what you've said really doesn't make sense, I'm not sure why it was modded as insightful unless perhaps it's because of your closing statement.
"most apps will run on most platforms without extra work. Or so I hope (desktop or notebook, don't see a way to make a destop app fit on a phone w/o work)."
So like Java then?
"They'll have an interpreted code, like lisp, which gets compiled (once, not at runtime)"
So er, it's not interpreted then after all, it's compiled?
"It can be fast, doesn't have to be slow this way."
But how fast does it need to be? When you look at the likes of Java and .NET they run perfectly well for most apps with exceptions only being things like games. Even that's rapidly becoming a myth though, XNA games built on the managed .NET platform and even some recent Java games have demonstrated good-looking 3D is becoming perfectly possible with good performance on these platforms.
"So it won't actually be like a script. Java tried to be this universal gateway, but it just never really took off for real apps like a language should."
I'm struggling to understand what you would suggest a real app is? Java is used heavily throughout the business world and there's still a decent amount of desktop apps built for it. It dominates the mobile market still, it's used for the menu system on Bluray discs, many set top devices use it, it's used heavily for some major web sites at the server side. I don't really see how it can be said that it never took off. The only area I'd argue it's somewhat failed is on the client side of the web, you could say it failed in gaming but I don't think it so much failed there as hasn't yet really gotten started, Tribal Trouble for example demonstrates that it's possible though and so it could have potential there. Java certainly has it's fair share of the market.
I'd argue the problem isn't so much a technology one, Java solves most the problems now and as it's open source now it's also open for previous criticisms of it to be solved making it the perfect solution. The problem is a people one, either people don't want to invest time/money in learning a different language and/or porting their tool chains and code libraries over or they're not willing to risk spending time on the change when their existing toolchain works. There's also another issue in that libraries matter a lot too- DirectX overtook OpenGL to completely dominate it nowadays not because DirectX was inherently better, but because it provided the tools and libraries to get things done quicker and easier. This is also why people use .NET over Java sometimes, because Visual Studio and the .NET framework are so much nicer, not necessarily because the technology itself is inherently better as such. Perhaps a bigger problem though is corporate interests which there isn't really a solution for, there will always be some interest in avoiding platform neutrality.
If everyone started using Java tommorrow and time was spent tidying up and fixing the problems with Java then we would indeed be able to run things regardless of platform. The technology is here today, unfortunately the will isn't.
As a final note, I'm not a Java fanboy as much as this post may make it sound, I have to admit I'm part the problem in that I do most my development in .NET or C++ but I do see the theoretical merits of Java, and I do think they could be brought into fruition if the will was there. Even if Java is decided as a no go, it's still a perfectly good proof of concept that the idea could work, paving the way for a new language to solve the same problem but better, again however, only if the will is there.
1) The games industry is already shifting away from the PC to closed platforms like consoles because they claim they make more profit due to not having the piracy issues they get on the PC. To them, this would be seen as a step backwards.
2) If one company manages to screw up the latest console plugin does the company want to be associated with that- Microsoft owned up to the original RROD problems and put money aside to deal with it, they've resolved the issues but to this day get slated for the problem. Would they really want to put themselves in a position where the latest Dell notebook has poor venting around Dell's hardware design is making their component fail and they get the blame for it? It's one thing if it's their fault, but if it's a 3rd party's fault and they risk the blame?
3) Do they really want to spend money offering support to the various hardware developers that want to implement their addons? Do they want to deal with compatibility issues? Do they want to spend and money time keeping their systems secure whilst keeping them open enough to integrate?
I have to admit I actually fell into that category, I too discovered the sandbag thing and when I had them would just sacrifice orca after orca to take their base down on the later missions ;)
I played C&C through again about a year or two back when that "C&C: The Last Decade" pack came out, the game was much easier and shorter this time round- I did NOD and GDI in a weekend without needing the sandbag tactic!
It's funny how much a game can change without changing at all, but it didn't change in one area at least- it still utterly rocked and I must have taken a different path to when I used to play as I came across a couple of missions I didn't even recall which was a bonus! The following weekend I did RA but I tried RA2 and C&C2 again and just couldn't get into them. Played Generals some more and I have to admit I've played through C&C3 twice now with each race- once on the PC originally, and once on the XBox 360 when I picked it up for £5 in a bargain bin earlier in the year.
I'm going to try and get into Red Alert 3 again this weekend but from what I've played so far I'm not holding up too much hope.