Sorry for the late reply, but yeah, something like that. Basically the concern that the guy pushing this thing has is that low quality detectors are going to give a bunch of false positives and tie up police personnel investigating them. Now, normally I'd probably say so what, but considering the kinds of reactions we've seen out of the police departments lately (shutting down huge chunks of cities and then blowing up anything remotely suspicious looking) this might actually be something that's worthwhile to try to avoid. That being said, I totally disagree with the proposed legislation, as the way to prevent it isn't to require licensing to own detectors, but to require detectors to be licensed. I don't know if the UL license on detectors has any sort of quality requirements on it, but if it did, some legislation that made it illegal to sell non-UL licensed detectors in NYC would definitely take care of any potential problems with false positives (those that could be avoided at any rate). I like this approach better then the one proposed by someone else of making it illegal to file a claim if it's later found out to be false (that is, punish the person filing the report if it turns out they got a false positive from their detection equipment). I don't think it's a good idea to discourage people from reporting potentially serious problems with that kind of legislation, but something that might improve the quality of detection equipment available to people seems ok enough.
Maybe they're a really slow reader?
Seriously though, even if you don't trust the recommendation of this user, the book seems to have gotten fairly good reviews over on amazon as well.
I'm not entirely certain I'm following you here, but I think you're asking for elaboration on why Symantec is crap and/or a recommendation for non-crap AV. If that is in fact what you're asking, then first of all Symantec is crap because it's an absolute hog and your system might actually perform better if you un-installed Symantec and installed the spyware instead. Second I can recommend three AV solutions, one of them free for home use, and the other two requiring paid subscriptions. First there's Avast which is free for personal use and generally does a decent job, but may not be up to the task of protecting a computer that has to open a lot of files from "high virus risk" senders as you put it. Second is AVG which is usually reviewed as one of the top recommended AV products out there, and generally finishes at the top of the pack in any AV software benchmarks. Last up is a little known one called NOD32 which was recently rolled into a bundle called ESET SmartSecurity by it's manufacturer. NOD32 is nearly always the best rated AV product for detection of viruses, and is probably the best bet for a high risk environment. Any of those three should do a better job then Symantec, although the last two may work out better then Avast. For a home user, I'd recommend Avast any day, but for commercial environments, either AVG or NOD32 are probably a better choice.
Or you know, you could configure your browser to be secure (easier in some browsers than others), and just not run any crap you download from said sites (including installing strange codecs).
And good luck trying to convince someone to read that. I don't know why, but it's often easier to talk someone into reading a book about something then it is to get them to go to a website about it. Another factor is how well laid out the information on about.com is. Will the person doing the research have to know to search for certain terms? Is there a single "page" with links to all the information provided, or is it divided up into different sections. If it's not all available without having to do any searching at all, that's often a deal breaker with the technically inept.
Symantec is crapware. It's not much better then a lot of the spyware floating around the internet, a certain competes with it for annoying popups and resource hogging. That being said, the reason you should listen to what this book has to say, is because a fellow slashdot reader read it and says they did a good job. The review however points out that this isn't a book for the likes of your typical slashdot reader, but rather one that you might want to pick up so next time an annoying relative asks you a question about internet security, you can lob this book at their head and hopefully get back to doing something useful.
$20 for information that can be quickly gleaned in 5 minutes from a couple of big sites like about.com? Oooookay.
Nice review. No idea why you posted it here though. Maybe because some of us have clueless relatives and being able to hand them a relatively simple (and authoritative in their eyes) book to read, rather then spend 3 hours trying to pound common sense into their heads is an attractive concept. Yes pretty much everyone on slashdot knows all this stuff, and further knows how to research anything we don't know, but trying to impart that information to others is often a trying experience, particularly in the case of relatives that often as not are not particularly inclined to listen to someone they don't view as an authority figure. We know Symantec is crap, but for a large portion of the population it's what they think of when they think about AV and Firewall software, and recommendations coming from them will most likely be given more thought and consideration then the same coming from "that one cousin that's into that computer stuff".
I haven't read the actual legislation, but based on the quotes from the article, this law would make possession of basically any detector a misdemeanor, unless you got a special license for possession from the police department. Your suggestion, that detectors should be required to be certified, makes sense, and the requirement to possess that certification should be on the vendor of the detector. If need be, make it a misdemeanor to sell an unlicensed detector, but I see no reason at all to make possession of the devices illegal. One example given in the counter-arguments for the legislation was that someone with a air quality monitor, merely transferring flights in NYC during a multi-flight trip, would be committing a misdemeanor by getting off the plane (or possibly by being on the plane when it lands, depending on how you figure jurisdictions). Of course, IANAL, take with a grain of salt, and all that.
I would say that your only real hope at this point is to get yourself a clue and switch to Free software. Actually I do use quite a bit of free software. But I also used Windows, sometimes out of necessity because some games just don't perform well enough in WINE for them to be playable in Linux, and sometimes because I have no choice, such as when my employer dictates what OS I use. Likewise there are many people in a similar situation to mine. Seeing as using some form of Windows, at least for the short term appears unavoidable, I'd much rather it be as good a version as possible.
WTF, so in your world everyone has to be a security expert to be allowed to use the internet, and it's all the victims fault? get a clue. caveat emptor.
Go look up "technical standard" like Laser Disk, MicroSD or mini-USB. All minority technologies labeled a "standard" I wouldn't call Laser Disk a "standard" by any stretch of the imagination, that format is utterly dead. It never reach standard status. I also wouldn't call MicroSD or mini-USB minority technologies, they're very widespread. They also serve niche-markets not served by the more common standards, namely USB and SD. If you recall I said they're can be several competing standards when there are differences in capabilities that allow them to service different niche markets.
Mircosoft only supplied some software they licensed to the HD DVD group. Toshiba is the one who led the group. Both have put the technology in a product. Microsoft was as much a player in HD-DVD as Sony was in Blu-Ray, it's just that Sony makes standalone DVD players as well, a major investment in the technology. You're still missing the point though. On one hand you're essentially saying, if a company takes part of producing a standard of course their going to put it in their newest product, but then you turn around and seem to be trying to claim that Microsoft didn't play a big enough roll in the development of HD-DVD, so of course they wouldn't put it in their newest product. Which in a roundabout fashion is kind of the argument I was making. That is, Sony put it in PS3, because they want to sell more standalone Blu-Ray players, and the best way to do that is to make Blu-Ray the standard. Microsoft, not having invested all that much in HD-DVD anyway (not having any standalone players to sell), didn't feel particularly obligated to increase the production costs of the 360 by including one in it.
No you are just interjecting logically incoherent rants into the discussion. The logic is only incoherent if you can't follow it, try harder. I'm done here.
I never said MS was better. Also, the issue isn't the media, it's the players. Sony is interested in winning the HD war because it means more hardware sales in the form of Blu-Ray players. They're leveraging their gaming platform to try and get people to commit to the Blu-Ray format. MS has no such commitment because they don't make standalone HD-DVD players, so the format they store their games on isn't as critical to them. In other words, Sony has more at stake here then MS, hence their decision to bundle a Blu-Ray player even though it set back their shipping drastically and increases the cost to make the PS3.
And my point was that I wasn't arguing about it being proprietary, that really makes rather little difference, it's this whole standards thing that's at issue. I also meant standards in the sense of common and general accepted, not standards in the sense of being designated by a formal body (which my be better described as managed or defined). Where we seem to have gotten off track is that I misunderstood your argument to mean you didn't believe Blu-Ray to be proprietary, and you misunderstood my argument by assuming that the issue was whether it was proprietary or not.
I thought everyone on 4chan was an angsty teenager with a real reason to cry, being that no human woman will ever touch them. Funny, a quick browsing of 4chan leads me to believe most everyone on 4chan is really a collection of cleverly written troll bots. They certainly don't seem capable of passing a turing test. You know, that would be a great experiment. Write a bot that posts random images out of a shared folder with appropriate descriptive comments, and randomly replies to other posts from a database of oft used memes and see how long before someone notices it's actually a bot. My money is on at least 2 months.
Actually, I think this is more of a threat to myspace itself. After all, they were hosting all of these pictures... when people discover how much kidporn is stored on myspace (I'm sure there's a significant amount of it), THEN there will be a public outcry, and no one is going to care about the people who downloaded the leaked photos. The backlash will be against myspace itself, by the "think of the children!" nutjobs.
Figures... and they just put further measures in place to attempt to "protect" children from themselves. Oh well, I have a hard time feeling sorry for myspace since (a) it's myspace and (b) it's owned by News Corp. This does bring up the interesting question though, of how one deals with kidporn that's being posted by the kids in the pictures. Obviously the nutjubs are going to go after whatever company is doing the hosting, but unless I'm missing something, if they're not aware of the content then all they have to do is make a good faith effort to delete anything they find, much like the case with copyright violations. Any legal experts on the laws concerned here no for sure what sort of issues this brings up?
Have you actually seen the crap on MySpace? It's like the sewer of the internet. It's the sort of place you visit and come back with a headache, a lower IQ, and probably a malware infection. I also think it's disingenuous to refer to the pictures posted there as private. At best they're public, and semi-public. You want my sympathy, tell me someplace with a little substance behind it got exploited. Similarly I won't lose any sleep if someone puts all their tax records on a fresh install XP SP1, then hooks it up to the internet without a firewall and has their records stolen. In order to be bothered by a security breach, one must assume there was some actual security in the first place, a feature most definitely not associated with MySpace. So yeah, all I got to say is, so?
At one point in time, I and some friends thought about developing a console video game, and as part of that we did some research on the three major players at the time (MS, Sony, Nintendo, which were XBox, PS2, N64/GC at the time). What was rather interesting was comparing the way they each related to developers. Nintendo basically said if we don't know you, and you're not an established industry player, fuck off. Sony let more or less anyone develop that could afford the ~$10,000 or so for the development kit, and you had to go through an approval process if you wanted the official Sony logo on anything. MS would talk with anyone, but you had to be willing to front loads of cash, sign NDAs, and they had final say on everything. Of course, this is from the standpoint of an independent developer, I'm sure it's a bit different if you're a major developer with an established reputation, but interesting nonetheless.
I think not targeting hardcore gamers directly was a great idea for Nintendo. Kind of pisses off third party developers, but I think that's largely because a lot of them just don't "get it". Part of the reason the Wii is seeing such low attachment figures as some others have mentioned is because most of the third party games are not designed for the Wii's core market, so most of the top sellers are Nintendo's own properties. Several of the biggest 3rd party developers have gotten sort of complacent, and expect to be able to write effectively 1 game, and then port it to whatever platform by more or less linking to different libraries and remapping a few control inputs. Taking that approach with the Wii is almost a guaranteed recipe for disaster. Those few games however that have actually taken the time to give the Wii's capabilities some thought have done fairly well. It should also be apparent that most of the games for other platforms that are targeted at hardcore players like Medal of Honor will tend to do rather poorly on the Wii because the kinds of people attracted to those games will have purchased another system in addition to the Wii for playing titles such as that (baring a compelling reason to play it on the Wii such as very intuitive control system).
Totally correct, although I'd also like to toss out the ME was a testing ground for a lot of the tech that made it into 2K/XP. Part of the reason it was such a utter piece of crap was because it was using a lot of XP tech shoehorned into the 9x kernel. Hopefully Vista will fill a similar roll as ME and will be reflected on as the OS that MS used to work all the kinks out of 7 before they shipped it.
You can call anything a standard, but it doesn't count as jack unless it's actually used by the majority of people. I could come up with my own disc and declare it a standard, but it wouldn't be "standard"* in the sense that most people use the term. Part of the reason we're even having a "format war" right now, is because we have two potential standards, but we're still waiting for the market to decide which will in fact become the actual standard. You can of course sometimes have several standards, but in the case of physical media that's very rare and usually only exists in cases where several different media have very different capabilities and thus serve distinctly different market niches.
Also, following your argument about putting the latest format into your equipment, assuming you're correct, it seems that MS doesn't make much sense, seeing as how they developed a format, and then didn't put it in their latest electronics.
All of this of course doesn't matter at all, because I never really wanted to debate the merits of Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD, nor of Sony vs. MS, I was just trying to highlight why it was that they made various decisions and to show how the latest developments mesh well with Sony's previous decisions.
*Taken from http://merriam-webster.com/dictionary Standard [adj]: a: regularly and widely used, available, or supplied b: well-established and very familiar
Also, his point specifically was that most media is proprietary. I don't understand why you tell him he misses the point and then repeat his point.
Actually I read his point to be that Blu-Ray isn't proprietary because Sony isn't the sole owner.
What I was trying to get at, is that Sony has a bad history of coming up with new formats, and then making them the only option on their products. They've improved in that regard somewhat, but I have a PSP with only UMD and those gumstick memory cards as options to show they haven't totally learned. It might have sounded like I was slamming Sony for bundling Blu-Ray with the PS3, but that wasn't the point I was trying to get at. I was trying to show that Sony almost always uses their products to push formats, usually their own exclusive one, but not always. Essentially the PS3 was the expected behavior from Sony, which was meant as a contrast to MS which wasn't particularly inclined to use their console to push any sort of format other then the native games for the system. I'm going to post this without karma as I think we're drifting dangerously far from the topic as you (sort of) pointed out.
Eh, the gaming market is a very interesting animal. The short product life-cycles, combined with the limited competition, large costs, and proprietary nature of the products, plus the added confusion of customer and developer loyalties and tastes makes it very hard to make any accurate predictions.
Just as a quick example take a look at what's happened to Nintendo over the years, particularly the last two generations of consoles. Nintendo went from the top contender with the SNES, dropped to second with the N64, and then trailed a distant third with the Gamecube, only to make a surprise comeback with the Wii. Prior to it's launch no one was really certain how the Wii would do, and in fact many of the top analysts were predicting that it might be the system that finally killed Nintendo. Obviously looking at just the raw specs for the system it doesn't look like much of a contender when put up against the likes of the 360 and PS3. But there's more to it of course then raw specs, as the Wii's surprise success has shown.
As for the developer relations MS earned with the 360, I don't know. It definitely won't hurt them I think, but time will tell if the sacrifices they made rushing the 360 to market (most obvious seems to be the ridiculous 30% defect rate) was worth it or not. It may turn out that could have gotten the same result by simply bribing developers, but then again, maybe not. One things for certain, the choices that Sony made up till this point definitely don't seem to be working in their favor, but of course they still have plenty of time to turn it around and prove all the doubters wrong. It will be interesting to see if after the dust settles on this and Blu-Ray is declared the winner of the format war, sales of PS3s will pickup.
So was CD, DVD, 3'5", Cassettes, 8 tracks, records, LPs, VHS etc... All from consortium which took licensing fees You just reduced your argument from silly to absurd. You're missing the point here. Nearly all physical formats are proprietary in some shape. When an entire industry adopts it then it becomes a de facto standard (or at least a large enough portion that it doesn't matter) much like DVD, VHS, etc. The important thing though is that Sony made their bed with Blu-Ray, which isn't a standard yet, de facto or otherwise. All of Sony's previous formats they would also have loved to have made a standard, which is part of why they pushed them so hard. The only real difference here is that Sony had some friends this time, so we're actually seeing a decent amount of uptake. Had there been no HD-DVD to oppose Blu-Ray, we'd be arguing over whether it's actually worth it to upgrade from DVD to Blu-Ray right now. My main point was that Sony always puts whatever new format they're pushing into their latest electronics. Usually it's one that they're the sole backer of, but not always as in the case with Blu-Ray.
Yeah, Blu-Ray is definitely the lesser of all the evils. I don't know about Sony getting it though. Sony has got to be the most schizophrenic company I've ever seen. On one hand they go and do bone-headed things like putting rootkits on cds, then they turn around and offer kits to install Linux on PS2s and even support Linux out of the box on a PS3. To a certain extent of course the strange behavior is explained by the separate divisions within Sony that produce the various products. Obviously some of them (notably the gaming division) do actually seem to "get it", while others (music division) very clearly do not. Hopefully the people making the decisions in the gaming division will manage to convince the rest of the company that they do in fact know what they're talking about vis a vis consumer rights. What would interest me however is finding out if Sony was behind the JVM decision for BD-J or if one of the other members of the Blu-Ray consortium made that call.
I didn't mean to imply that MS made a mistake by opting not to bundle the HD-DVD player with the 360. It was just pointing out why it was that MS made that decision, but Sony didn't. Essentially Sony was using the PS3 to boost Blu-ray sales and help out some of their non-gaming divisions. To a certain extent it's obvious why MS didn't feel particularly motivated to push HD-DVD. Even though they would profit some, being one of the backing companies for the format, not being a hardware manufacturer (to any real extent) they actually have little profit motive, and they also know that the biggest money maker on their console outside the games themselves is the online content of Live. Bundling a HD-DVD player would have just jacked up the price and reduced console sales. They would very likely never see an adequate return on investment from that strategy even if it had lead HD-DVD to dominate. Sony on the other hand, had they not bundled Blu-ray with the PS3 might have seen better sales of the PS3, but would take a hit selling Blu-ray DVD players.
There is more then Sony behind Blu-ray. It's like saying 3'5" is proprietary or CD or DVD. It's just a silly statement. Blu-ray is a proprietary format, it's just the rights to it are owned by a consortium instead of one corporation. No matter how you slice it if you want to put out blu-ray hardware you're going to be paying a licensing fee which Sony gets a cut of.
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Sorry for the late reply, but yeah, something like that. Basically the concern that the guy pushing this thing has is that low quality detectors are going to give a bunch of false positives and tie up police personnel investigating them. Now, normally I'd probably say so what, but considering the kinds of reactions we've seen out of the police departments lately (shutting down huge chunks of cities and then blowing up anything remotely suspicious looking) this might actually be something that's worthwhile to try to avoid. That being said, I totally disagree with the proposed legislation, as the way to prevent it isn't to require licensing to own detectors, but to require detectors to be licensed. I don't know if the UL license on detectors has any sort of quality requirements on it, but if it did, some legislation that made it illegal to sell non-UL licensed detectors in NYC would definitely take care of any potential problems with false positives (those that could be avoided at any rate). I like this approach better then the one proposed by someone else of making it illegal to file a claim if it's later found out to be false (that is, punish the person filing the report if it turns out they got a false positive from their detection equipment). I don't think it's a good idea to discourage people from reporting potentially serious problems with that kind of legislation, but something that might improve the quality of detection equipment available to people seems ok enough.
Maybe they're a really slow reader?
Seriously though, even if you don't trust the recommendation of this user, the book seems to have gotten fairly good reviews over on amazon as well.
I'm not entirely certain I'm following you here, but I think you're asking for elaboration on why Symantec is crap and/or a recommendation for non-crap AV. If that is in fact what you're asking, then first of all Symantec is crap because it's an absolute hog and your system might actually perform better if you un-installed Symantec and installed the spyware instead. Second I can recommend three AV solutions, one of them free for home use, and the other two requiring paid subscriptions. First there's Avast which is free for personal use and generally does a decent job, but may not be up to the task of protecting a computer that has to open a lot of files from "high virus risk" senders as you put it. Second is AVG which is usually reviewed as one of the top recommended AV products out there, and generally finishes at the top of the pack in any AV software benchmarks. Last up is a little known one called NOD32 which was recently rolled into a bundle called ESET SmartSecurity by it's manufacturer. NOD32 is nearly always the best rated AV product for detection of viruses, and is probably the best bet for a high risk environment. Any of those three should do a better job then Symantec, although the last two may work out better then Avast. For a home user, I'd recommend Avast any day, but for commercial environments, either AVG or NOD32 are probably a better choice.
Or you know, you could configure your browser to be secure (easier in some browsers than others), and just not run any crap you download from said sites (including installing strange codecs).
And good luck trying to convince someone to read that. I don't know why, but it's often easier to talk someone into reading a book about something then it is to get them to go to a website about it. Another factor is how well laid out the information on about.com is. Will the person doing the research have to know to search for certain terms? Is there a single "page" with links to all the information provided, or is it divided up into different sections. If it's not all available without having to do any searching at all, that's often a deal breaker with the technically inept.
Symantec is crapware. It's not much better then a lot of the spyware floating around the internet, a certain competes with it for annoying popups and resource hogging. That being said, the reason you should listen to what this book has to say, is because a fellow slashdot reader read it and says they did a good job. The review however points out that this isn't a book for the likes of your typical slashdot reader, but rather one that you might want to pick up so next time an annoying relative asks you a question about internet security, you can lob this book at their head and hopefully get back to doing something useful.
Nice review. No idea why you posted it here though. Maybe because some of us have clueless relatives and being able to hand them a relatively simple (and authoritative in their eyes) book to read, rather then spend 3 hours trying to pound common sense into their heads is an attractive concept. Yes pretty much everyone on slashdot knows all this stuff, and further knows how to research anything we don't know, but trying to impart that information to others is often a trying experience, particularly in the case of relatives that often as not are not particularly inclined to listen to someone they don't view as an authority figure. We know Symantec is crap, but for a large portion of the population it's what they think of when they think about AV and Firewall software, and recommendations coming from them will most likely be given more thought and consideration then the same coming from "that one cousin that's into that computer stuff".
I haven't read the actual legislation, but based on the quotes from the article, this law would make possession of basically any detector a misdemeanor, unless you got a special license for possession from the police department. Your suggestion, that detectors should be required to be certified, makes sense, and the requirement to possess that certification should be on the vendor of the detector. If need be, make it a misdemeanor to sell an unlicensed detector, but I see no reason at all to make possession of the devices illegal. One example given in the counter-arguments for the legislation was that someone with a air quality monitor, merely transferring flights in NYC during a multi-flight trip, would be committing a misdemeanor by getting off the plane (or possibly by being on the plane when it lands, depending on how you figure jurisdictions). Of course, IANAL, take with a grain of salt, and all that.
I never said MS was better. Also, the issue isn't the media, it's the players. Sony is interested in winning the HD war because it means more hardware sales in the form of Blu-Ray players. They're leveraging their gaming platform to try and get people to commit to the Blu-Ray format. MS has no such commitment because they don't make standalone HD-DVD players, so the format they store their games on isn't as critical to them. In other words, Sony has more at stake here then MS, hence their decision to bundle a Blu-Ray player even though it set back their shipping drastically and increases the cost to make the PS3.
And my point was that I wasn't arguing about it being proprietary, that really makes rather little difference, it's this whole standards thing that's at issue. I also meant standards in the sense of common and general accepted, not standards in the sense of being designated by a formal body (which my be better described as managed or defined). Where we seem to have gotten off track is that I misunderstood your argument to mean you didn't believe Blu-Ray to be proprietary, and you misunderstood my argument by assuming that the issue was whether it was proprietary or not.
Figures... and they just put further measures in place to attempt to "protect" children from themselves. Oh well, I have a hard time feeling sorry for myspace since (a) it's myspace and (b) it's owned by News Corp. This does bring up the interesting question though, of how one deals with kidporn that's being posted by the kids in the pictures. Obviously the nutjubs are going to go after whatever company is doing the hosting, but unless I'm missing something, if they're not aware of the content then all they have to do is make a good faith effort to delete anything they find, much like the case with copyright violations. Any legal experts on the laws concerned here no for sure what sort of issues this brings up?
Have you actually seen the crap on MySpace? It's like the sewer of the internet. It's the sort of place you visit and come back with a headache, a lower IQ, and probably a malware infection. I also think it's disingenuous to refer to the pictures posted there as private. At best they're public, and semi-public. You want my sympathy, tell me someplace with a little substance behind it got exploited. Similarly I won't lose any sleep if someone puts all their tax records on a fresh install XP SP1, then hooks it up to the internet without a firewall and has their records stolen. In order to be bothered by a security breach, one must assume there was some actual security in the first place, a feature most definitely not associated with MySpace. So yeah, all I got to say is, so?
At one point in time, I and some friends thought about developing a console video game, and as part of that we did some research on the three major players at the time (MS, Sony, Nintendo, which were XBox, PS2, N64/GC at the time). What was rather interesting was comparing the way they each related to developers. Nintendo basically said if we don't know you, and you're not an established industry player, fuck off. Sony let more or less anyone develop that could afford the ~$10,000 or so for the development kit, and you had to go through an approval process if you wanted the official Sony logo on anything. MS would talk with anyone, but you had to be willing to front loads of cash, sign NDAs, and they had final say on everything. Of course, this is from the standpoint of an independent developer, I'm sure it's a bit different if you're a major developer with an established reputation, but interesting nonetheless.
I think not targeting hardcore gamers directly was a great idea for Nintendo. Kind of pisses off third party developers, but I think that's largely because a lot of them just don't "get it". Part of the reason the Wii is seeing such low attachment figures as some others have mentioned is because most of the third party games are not designed for the Wii's core market, so most of the top sellers are Nintendo's own properties. Several of the biggest 3rd party developers have gotten sort of complacent, and expect to be able to write effectively 1 game, and then port it to whatever platform by more or less linking to different libraries and remapping a few control inputs. Taking that approach with the Wii is almost a guaranteed recipe for disaster. Those few games however that have actually taken the time to give the Wii's capabilities some thought have done fairly well. It should also be apparent that most of the games for other platforms that are targeted at hardcore players like Medal of Honor will tend to do rather poorly on the Wii because the kinds of people attracted to those games will have purchased another system in addition to the Wii for playing titles such as that (baring a compelling reason to play it on the Wii such as very intuitive control system).
Totally correct, although I'd also like to toss out the ME was a testing ground for a lot of the tech that made it into 2K/XP. Part of the reason it was such a utter piece of crap was because it was using a lot of XP tech shoehorned into the 9x kernel. Hopefully Vista will fill a similar roll as ME and will be reflected on as the OS that MS used to work all the kinks out of 7 before they shipped it.
You can call anything a standard, but it doesn't count as jack unless it's actually used by the majority of people. I could come up with my own disc and declare it a standard, but it wouldn't be "standard"* in the sense that most people use the term. Part of the reason we're even having a "format war" right now, is because we have two potential standards, but we're still waiting for the market to decide which will in fact become the actual standard. You can of course sometimes have several standards, but in the case of physical media that's very rare and usually only exists in cases where several different media have very different capabilities and thus serve distinctly different market niches.
Also, following your argument about putting the latest format into your equipment, assuming you're correct, it seems that MS doesn't make much sense, seeing as how they developed a format, and then didn't put it in their latest electronics.
All of this of course doesn't matter at all, because I never really wanted to debate the merits of Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD, nor of Sony vs. MS, I was just trying to highlight why it was that they made various decisions and to show how the latest developments mesh well with Sony's previous decisions.
*Taken from http://merriam-webster.com/dictionary
Standard [adj]: a: regularly and widely used, available, or supplied b: well-established and very familiar
Actually I read his point to be that Blu-Ray isn't proprietary because Sony isn't the sole owner.
What I was trying to get at, is that Sony has a bad history of coming up with new formats, and then making them the only option on their products. They've improved in that regard somewhat, but I have a PSP with only UMD and those gumstick memory cards as options to show they haven't totally learned. It might have sounded like I was slamming Sony for bundling Blu-Ray with the PS3, but that wasn't the point I was trying to get at. I was trying to show that Sony almost always uses their products to push formats, usually their own exclusive one, but not always. Essentially the PS3 was the expected behavior from Sony, which was meant as a contrast to MS which wasn't particularly inclined to use their console to push any sort of format other then the native games for the system. I'm going to post this without karma as I think we're drifting dangerously far from the topic as you (sort of) pointed out.
Eh, the gaming market is a very interesting animal. The short product life-cycles, combined with the limited competition, large costs, and proprietary nature of the products, plus the added confusion of customer and developer loyalties and tastes makes it very hard to make any accurate predictions.
Just as a quick example take a look at what's happened to Nintendo over the years, particularly the last two generations of consoles. Nintendo went from the top contender with the SNES, dropped to second with the N64, and then trailed a distant third with the Gamecube, only to make a surprise comeback with the Wii. Prior to it's launch no one was really certain how the Wii would do, and in fact many of the top analysts were predicting that it might be the system that finally killed Nintendo. Obviously looking at just the raw specs for the system it doesn't look like much of a contender when put up against the likes of the 360 and PS3. But there's more to it of course then raw specs, as the Wii's surprise success has shown.
As for the developer relations MS earned with the 360, I don't know. It definitely won't hurt them I think, but time will tell if the sacrifices they made rushing the 360 to market (most obvious seems to be the ridiculous 30% defect rate) was worth it or not. It may turn out that could have gotten the same result by simply bribing developers, but then again, maybe not. One things for certain, the choices that Sony made up till this point definitely don't seem to be working in their favor, but of course they still have plenty of time to turn it around and prove all the doubters wrong. It will be interesting to see if after the dust settles on this and Blu-Ray is declared the winner of the format war, sales of PS3s will pickup.
Yeah, Blu-Ray is definitely the lesser of all the evils. I don't know about Sony getting it though. Sony has got to be the most schizophrenic company I've ever seen. On one hand they go and do bone-headed things like putting rootkits on cds, then they turn around and offer kits to install Linux on PS2s and even support Linux out of the box on a PS3. To a certain extent of course the strange behavior is explained by the separate divisions within Sony that produce the various products. Obviously some of them (notably the gaming division) do actually seem to "get it", while others (music division) very clearly do not. Hopefully the people making the decisions in the gaming division will manage to convince the rest of the company that they do in fact know what they're talking about vis a vis consumer rights. What would interest me however is finding out if Sony was behind the JVM decision for BD-J or if one of the other members of the Blu-Ray consortium made that call.
I didn't mean to imply that MS made a mistake by opting not to bundle the HD-DVD player with the 360. It was just pointing out why it was that MS made that decision, but Sony didn't. Essentially Sony was using the PS3 to boost Blu-ray sales and help out some of their non-gaming divisions. To a certain extent it's obvious why MS didn't feel particularly motivated to push HD-DVD. Even though they would profit some, being one of the backing companies for the format, not being a hardware manufacturer (to any real extent) they actually have little profit motive, and they also know that the biggest money maker on their console outside the games themselves is the online content of Live. Bundling a HD-DVD player would have just jacked up the price and reduced console sales. They would very likely never see an adequate return on investment from that strategy even if it had lead HD-DVD to dominate. Sony on the other hand, had they not bundled Blu-ray with the PS3 might have seen better sales of the PS3, but would take a hit selling Blu-ray DVD players.