Nope. All it really says is: "We (the author(s)) are REALLY, REALLY, REALLY excited about the PS3. Here's some boilerplate stuff about the Wii. See how the PS3 is cool?"
I agree with you. However, this day an age, journalism, with the advent of the online medium, is shifting towards opinion pieces than objective journalism. One only has to look to traditional media to see biased reporting, on many levels.
I personally attribute this to the fact that I think people are drawn to news of scandal and such in much the same say they're drawn to 'negative' news. It's more enjoyable to talk about. Afterall, why else would 'reality TV' be popular, rarely see 'good news', the explosion of online journals (blogs), etc. Women have always known this. They've been watching Soap operas forever. =P It's all about the water cooler gossip. It's not fun to debate something if everyone agrees!
Or as a 2nd job for some extra money because they have an interest in gaming and enjoy talk with others about games. Game discounts is just a perk, among other things (like lifetime WoW subscriptions for sale records being broken).
It's not like there aren't other jobs
Sure, they could go flip burgers or become a sandwich artist and come home smelling like the garbage disposal.
$7.75 an hour
Wow, I didn't think hourly pay was that good! In all seriousness. I would have guessed it was closer to $6.00/hr.
It's sad when a crappy box store like TRU beats out a specialty shop in terms of service and early availability.
Well, I can argue against calling Toys R'Us crappy. They do what they mean to do. I almost never go to TRU, however, I stopped there on a whim the other day and ended up getting an amazing deal. I bought 2 new DDR games, and got 2 free dance pads with it ($40 value total), it also happened that if I bought 2 new games, I would get a third free. I picked up the Devil May Cry 5th Anniv. collection. That's 3 more games (DMC1,2,3 spec. ed.) for free. So, I ended up with 2 new DDR games, 3 Devil May Cry games, and 2 dance pads for $70.
Now, I've played them and realize I don't like the home DDR games (since they force you to unlock the other songs, which I don't enjoy doing as I'm not that great at DDR), I'll be selling them back to GameStop for trade in credit for the Wii. I've been trading in a lot of games and building up credit for the Wii. I've got about 50% of it paid for from trade-ins, which includes 4 new games and 2 more controllers.
So, they have a purpose. I just need to call them and ask about their DVD trade-in policy. I have a ton of DVD's I just never watch (when I had a DVD collection phase), and I want to free up some room. So, I'm hoping to get another 20% of the system covered to the point that I won't have paid much at all for the Wii.
I cannot complain about EB/GameStop or TRU. Though, if a salesman is too busy playing games than improving the store, then I say that particular store has management issues. I'm sure game stores do suffer from this kind of lazy management (since game stores attract people thinking it's just going to be playing games all day and not doing normal day to day chores), but it's still probably a minority.
The GameStop near my house, the guys are all real nice and it's easy to strike up a conversation with them while shopping. However, that doesn't mean they'll ignore their customers. Though, I do see groups of people 'hanging out' at the register a lot, who don't seem to be looking to buy anything... at least at the moment.
Props, to my fellow Wisconsinite. Where you around for the snow store that blew through the SE on Friday? Just to let you know, Wal-Mart has listed in their latest flyer that they will sell at 12:01am the day of. They also claimed (strangely enough) that all stores will have a minimum of 20 Wii's and 10 PS3.
Good luck. I'll be at Wally World only to pickup 2 extra controllers, since GameStop isn't pre-ordering them anymore and I stupidly thought the classic controller was a stand-alone, when it's just a Wii mote attachment (oddly enough?).
Least of all the Democrats, because now there's one question on their plates "We promised X, how are we going to do it?". They have 2 years to prove they know how to lead, and that's definatly not going to be enough time. I heard so many boasts about everything, from getting us out of Iraq, to restoring the country, homeland security, FEMA, yet I never heard a single plan that would work in anything other than the short term or feel good ways.
yes, but they still have a scape goat if something goes wrong. They'll still blame Bush. Heck, Bush will be blamed for American short-comings for probably 2 presidential terms after him.
One thing about future prospect... do you think the company will be around in 5-10-20years? The small shop sounds awesome, but an almost 50% pay increase would weight highly with myself.
My first consideration is money. At this point in my life, I'm heavy in debt with school loans, new car loan, engagement ring on the 0% CC, rent, and paying for 2 people (my fiancee is foreign, a student, and limited to what she can afford). So, money is important for me and I'm sure it is for most people. The difference between going from say $40,000 salary to $48,000 (20%) or $66,400(66%) is huge.
Second, would be the type of work. This plays into the 'enjoy your job' factor. If you're going to be working on web applications or video games or something that's "fun" to you and an area you want to continue to grow in, then that's important. Lets put it this way... lots of people would take a pay cut to work for Blizzard if they could play WoW at work. =P
Third, responsibility. Are you someone's 'gofer' ('go for' this, 'go for' that) or are you 'the man'? Your position at a company can be important. Some people enjoy management while others enjoy just being told what to do and then doing it.
Fourth, hours. Got a wife and kids? No? Then 60+ hour work weeks might not bother you. Yes? Then 40+ hour work weeks might. Are your hours flexable?
Fifth, do you like the area you live in? Simple. Is it the same state? Is it a large city, medium city, or small town? Does that suit your lifestyle?
Sixth, do you have a key to the supply cabinet, so you can take home Pens and CD-R's hehe.
Thanks, I knew enough about flash card in-general, though I've never used an SD card yet. It appears that here in the U.S., these cards will go for about $75 for 2gig at big box retailers (Wal-Mart... that's Asda in the U.K.). Crucial, who confirmed to me that they didn't know yet, but assumed it would if it follows the format, are selling them for about $45 on their site for 2gig.
1) They're probably not fans, but eBayers (if they were fans, it would have been easy enough to get a pre-order)
2) They where probably lying about waiting for PS3's
Does anyone know what the SD card is all about? I cannot seem to find much info about it.
Is this going to be strictly for saved games or is this going to improve performance somehow? And does any SD card type work or is this going to be a Nintendo Wii only proprietary format?
I just talked to a rep. at Crucial and they don't know if it's compatible or not yet.
one of the main resons i like sonys consoles is the fact that they make is easy to make games for it
You'll have to explain what you mean by 'make games'. Fact is, the PS2 was not 'easy' to develop for. It was more difficult to develop for than the GameCube, due to it's hardware (also, why the PS2 was 'more powerful'). The GameCube's simpler (and less powerful in some regards) hardware also made it easier and faster to develop on. The XBox was "easier" as well as it used DirectX which was already being used by lots of programmers for computer games.
Otherwise, I think that the licensing fees where pretty comparable for both systems, but I cannot recall ever reading an article that made developing games easier for the GameCube/PS2 due to company licenses. I do recall reading that Nintendo lost a large 3rd party support with it's NES due to their Monopolistic license fees, which carried over the SNES (as well as it's late release) and caused plenty of people to jump ship to Sony when they released their PSOne and had very relaxed fees. That was the foundation for the whole PlayStation empire.
Just the number of games a console has, is not a very strong indication of how easy it is to develop for. In fact, the reason Sony has so many games is simply because it has the largest market share. It's the same phenomenon that the NES had in it's day. The NES had tons of crappy games with a few real winners, much like the PS2. Of course, that's an overly simplistic view, as I'm sure there are a lot more market factors, but for the most part, this would be the biggest reason.
Of course, once a system gets so many people working on it, soon code gets shared and libraries get built that make it easier to take advantage of the hardware. It's one of the reasons why game engines such as Unreal get sold to other developers. They did the 'hard' part already, so the development teams can focus on other things.
So, he can tell researchers that they can't say global warming exists, or that pollution is causing people to die, etc.That sounds like maintaining the status quo to you? It sounds to me like an attempt to mislead people by not allowing freedom of information.
Note that Akamai has a vested interest in this study.
Agreed, also, I would say the old humorous adage of...
Statistics show that 70% of statistics are wrong.
I'd also think that this is more FUD, since of course people are going to say "I'll never return to that website because once it never loaded for me". Of course, if said website was Amazon.com, I'm going to go all in and say that they will most likely return and that they where just unhappy at the time.
Also, what where the survey questions? Where they worded to direct people to answer in a certain way? For example, where they written like this...Would you visit a website again if you had recurring bad experience with it?. Most experts agree that 4 seconds and more is a long time for a website to load and contribute this to a bad user experience. Would you agree?.
Finally, this is a bit of a moot point, but page load times are not always the fault of the web server. Case in point, my wireless router sucks (hey, I got it from best buy for like $20 after rebates, I'm not complaining) and it will often just drop the wireless signal. This makes it appear that when you try to access a website, when you where just accessing another website just fine, that the website takes a long time to load or more often than not, doesn't load at all, making you think there are issues with that site, when there is not.
I'd rather point out the obvious when it comes to the Internet... people expect to find broken sites. It's just the way everyone has grown up with the 'net. Crappy designed sites with stale content and broken links, multiple browsers (IE(win), IE(Mac) , Netscape/Mozilla, Safari) on multiple systems (Mac, Unix/Linux, Windows), security issues, internet issues with their ISP, web servers that go down, etc, etc, etc. People know that the nature of the Internet is volatile. Sure, they'll get angry and might never return if your site is a small 'mom and pop' shop, but when it comes to the 'major' sites such as CNN, MSN, Amazon, eBay, etc; then they will most likely return, even if it takes more than 4-seconds (which it does on CNN and if I remember right, they use Akamai).
Saying 4 second load time will make customers never return is slightly FUD (since it's subjective). Saying a customer won't return if they type their zip code into their address bar, and your site claims it's invalid (when it's not) will probably do the trick. That's something web developers can change. Load times isn't alway in their hands. But that's not to say they shouldn't review their code for efficiency in execution.
Ah, you don't need to defend yourself bro... you did in your sig. =P People can get easily offended if they feel something they enjoy/care about is being attacked. Magnify that by a few when it's in an online medium. =D
Slashdot: A place where I'm +5 Insightful when I tried really hard to be stupid.
... says that demand for the Wii is very low. They're not expecting to sell very many at all. The PS3 pre-orders, though, were snapped up in 5
Odd, the manager at our EB-Games said just the opposite. He had around 60 people on the 'call' list when it went on Pre-sale. He had, I think, 12 consoles. Took him over 24 hours to fill his pre-order. The Wii? 16 gone in the first 10mins.
The funny thing is, the 60 people on the 'call' list where mostly like "How much? Oh, never mind". Though that did pre-order probably planned on selling them on E-Bay. I'm sure there's a PS3 market, but for the most part, it's likely those professional football players who can afford to not care and bribe the Circuit-City guy to put him on the lit. (That happened to a buddy of mine, who's doing the EBay thing, but thought $100 over the price wasn't asking enough for a Pro-Football star.)
I would bet a place like Wal-Mart will get enough in stock to not sell out instantly. might actually take a few hours. Of course, then there's guys like me, who's anniversary is on the 19th. Arggh... Pickup my Wii or incur the wraith of my game-hating significant other! *shudder*
I hope their new PR guy is good. They do have a lot overcome. However, there has been a lot of doom and gloom viral marketing for the PS3 which is not entirely true. Even though I've speculated a lot on/. about Sony's poor choices on the PS3 and how it expect it to hurt their sales, I have also been (finally) seeing more information on their games and their hardware and I'm pretty interested in it. Some of their screen shots are breathtaking.
Was the most controversial, Blu-Ray, the right thing to do? Hmm... I'm still going to say no. However, like I've said in the past, looking at the perspective of adding it or leaving it, I can only defend adding it, all things considered once I think about it...
Add a stand alone Blu-ray option? No, it's a game machine, it should have a standard media and not duel/split media. I'd hate to see a game developed 'exclusively' for the Blu-Ray player.
Price? I cannot comment directly, but for some reason, I just don't see the price dropping significantly. Sony is already taking a big chunk of the cost of new units. Without Blu-Ray, Sony will be just taking less of a hit, but still charging $500. And lets face it. When it comes to gamers who can spend $400 on the latest video card, $500 for a full system can be justified for them. Such, it does suck when the competition is at $250 and $400, but hey, those are the rules.
Blu-Ray as a medium? This is Sony's baby. If they don't start forcing this down people's throats, it might not make it in the next-format wars. Sony's set to reap tons of profits off Blu-Ray licenses, likely more so than anything the PS3 could do, given the fact that if Blu-Ray becomes the adopted standard, it could very well last for well over a decade, much longer than any game console has lasted.
While I think Sony has been doing things ass-backwards as far as Public Relations and response to the 'shock' of the new system on gamers, they do have room to make amends if they just started being a little more respectful and talking up their system on a positive aspect instead of the "you're n00b!" approach.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you. However, this day an age, journalism, with the advent of the online medium, is shifting towards opinion pieces than objective journalism. One only has to look to traditional media to see biased reporting, on many levels.
I personally attribute this to the fact that I think people are drawn to news of scandal and such in much the same say they're drawn to 'negative' news. It's more enjoyable to talk about. Afterall, why else would 'reality TV' be popular, rarely see 'good news', the explosion of online journals (blogs), etc. Women have always known this. They've been watching Soap operas forever. =P It's all about the water cooler gossip. It's not fun to debate something if everyone agrees!
Cheers,
Fozzy
The only thing that popped into my mind is... why is Bobbitt the first thing on your mind, to associate it with this article?
Or as a 2nd job for some extra money because they have an interest in gaming and enjoy talk with others about games. Game discounts is just a perk, among other things (like lifetime WoW subscriptions for sale records being broken).
Sure, they could go flip burgers or become a sandwich artist and come home smelling like the garbage disposal.
Wow, I didn't think hourly pay was that good! In all seriousness. I would have guessed it was closer to $6.00/hr.
Well, I can argue against calling Toys R'Us crappy. They do what they mean to do. I almost never go to TRU, however, I stopped there on a whim the other day and ended up getting an amazing deal. I bought 2 new DDR games, and got 2 free dance pads with it ($40 value total), it also happened that if I bought 2 new games, I would get a third free. I picked up the Devil May Cry 5th Anniv. collection. That's 3 more games (DMC1,2,3 spec. ed.) for free. So, I ended up with 2 new DDR games, 3 Devil May Cry games, and 2 dance pads for $70.
Now, I've played them and realize I don't like the home DDR games (since they force you to unlock the other songs, which I don't enjoy doing as I'm not that great at DDR), I'll be selling them back to GameStop for trade in credit for the Wii. I've been trading in a lot of games and building up credit for the Wii. I've got about 50% of it paid for from trade-ins, which includes 4 new games and 2 more controllers.
So, they have a purpose. I just need to call them and ask about their DVD trade-in policy. I have a ton of DVD's I just never watch (when I had a DVD collection phase), and I want to free up some room. So, I'm hoping to get another 20% of the system covered to the point that I won't have paid much at all for the Wii.
I cannot complain about EB/GameStop or TRU. Though, if a salesman is too busy playing games than improving the store, then I say that particular store has management issues. I'm sure game stores do suffer from this kind of lazy management (since game stores attract people thinking it's just going to be playing games all day and not doing normal day to day chores), but it's still probably a minority.
The GameStop near my house, the guys are all real nice and it's easy to strike up a conversation with them while shopping. However, that doesn't mean they'll ignore their customers. Though, I do see groups of people 'hanging out' at the register a lot, who don't seem to be looking to buy anything... at least at the moment.
Cheers,
Fozzy
yeah, it was just sarcasm =)
Why buy a PS3 when you can buy a Wii and Xbox 360 for the same price? Sony needs to stop forcing people with their proprietary lazer pointing systems!
Props, to my fellow Wisconsinite. Where you around for the snow store that blew through the SE on Friday? Just to let you know, Wal-Mart has listed in their latest flyer that they will sell at 12:01am the day of. They also claimed (strangely enough) that all stores will have a minimum of 20 Wii's and 10 PS3.
Good luck. I'll be at Wally World only to pickup 2 extra controllers, since GameStop isn't pre-ordering them anymore and I stupidly thought the classic controller was a stand-alone, when it's just a Wii mote attachment (oddly enough?).
Cheers,
Fozzy
I agree. I think Sony's trying to take a double edged sword here. It's what I've been thinking as well.
Cheers,
Fozzy
It is, and that's why Duke Nukem Forever is changing formats!
Cheers,
Fozzy
yes, but they still have a scape goat if something goes wrong. They'll still blame Bush. Heck, Bush will be blamed for American short-comings for probably 2 presidential terms after him.
the customer is going to end up paying for this directly.
One thing about future prospect... do you think the company will be around in 5-10-20years? The small shop sounds awesome, but an almost 50% pay increase would weight highly with myself.
My first consideration is money. At this point in my life, I'm heavy in debt with school loans, new car loan, engagement ring on the 0% CC, rent, and paying for 2 people (my fiancee is foreign, a student, and limited to what she can afford). So, money is important for me and I'm sure it is for most people. The difference between going from say $40,000 salary to $48,000 (20%) or $66,400(66%) is huge.
Second, would be the type of work. This plays into the 'enjoy your job' factor. If you're going to be working on web applications or video games or something that's "fun" to you and an area you want to continue to grow in, then that's important. Lets put it this way... lots of people would take a pay cut to work for Blizzard if they could play WoW at work. =P
Third, responsibility. Are you someone's 'gofer' ('go for' this, 'go for' that) or are you 'the man'? Your position at a company can be important. Some people enjoy management while others enjoy just being told what to do and then doing it.
Fourth, hours. Got a wife and kids? No? Then 60+ hour work weeks might not bother you. Yes? Then 40+ hour work weeks might. Are your hours flexable?
Fifth, do you like the area you live in? Simple. Is it the same state? Is it a large city, medium city, or small town? Does that suit your lifestyle?
Sixth, do you have a key to the supply cabinet, so you can take home Pens and CD-R's hehe.
Good luck!
Thanks, I knew enough about flash card in-general, though I've never used an SD card yet. It appears that here in the U.S., these cards will go for about $75 for 2gig at big box retailers (Wal-Mart... that's Asda in the U.K.). Crucial, who confirmed to me that they didn't know yet, but assumed it would if it follows the format, are selling them for about $45 on their site for 2gig.
1) They're probably not fans, but eBayers (if they were fans, it would have been easy enough to get a pre-order) 2) They where probably lying about waiting for PS3's
Does anyone know what the SD card is all about? I cannot seem to find much info about it.
Is this going to be strictly for saved games or is this going to improve performance somehow? And does any SD card type work or is this going to be a Nintendo Wii only proprietary format?
I just talked to a rep. at Crucial and they don't know if it's compatible or not yet.
Cheers,
Fozzy
You'll have to explain what you mean by 'make games'. Fact is, the PS2 was not 'easy' to develop for. It was more difficult to develop for than the GameCube, due to it's hardware (also, why the PS2 was 'more powerful'). The GameCube's simpler (and less powerful in some regards) hardware also made it easier and faster to develop on. The XBox was "easier" as well as it used DirectX which was already being used by lots of programmers for computer games.
Otherwise, I think that the licensing fees where pretty comparable for both systems, but I cannot recall ever reading an article that made developing games easier for the GameCube/PS2 due to company licenses. I do recall reading that Nintendo lost a large 3rd party support with it's NES due to their Monopolistic license fees, which carried over the SNES (as well as it's late release) and caused plenty of people to jump ship to Sony when they released their PSOne and had very relaxed fees. That was the foundation for the whole PlayStation empire.
Just the number of games a console has, is not a very strong indication of how easy it is to develop for. In fact, the reason Sony has so many games is simply because it has the largest market share. It's the same phenomenon that the NES had in it's day. The NES had tons of crappy games with a few real winners, much like the PS2. Of course, that's an overly simplistic view, as I'm sure there are a lot more market factors, but for the most part, this would be the biggest reason.
Of course, once a system gets so many people working on it, soon code gets shared and libraries get built that make it easier to take advantage of the hardware. It's one of the reasons why game engines such as Unreal get sold to other developers. They did the 'hard' part already, so the development teams can focus on other things.
Cheers,
Fozzy
Thanks for the link! Being at work, I didn't spend any time digging through links. Helps answer one of my questions. =)
Cheers,
Fozzy
I'd call that status quo for politics... yes.
Agreed, also, I would say the old humorous adage of...
I'd also think that this is more FUD, since of course people are going to say "I'll never return to that website because once it never loaded for me". Of course, if said website was Amazon.com, I'm going to go all in and say that they will most likely return and that they where just unhappy at the time.
Also, what where the survey questions? Where they worded to direct people to answer in a certain way? For example, where they written like this...Would you visit a website again if you had recurring bad experience with it?. Most experts agree that 4 seconds and more is a long time for a website to load and contribute this to a bad user experience. Would you agree?.
Finally, this is a bit of a moot point, but page load times are not always the fault of the web server. Case in point, my wireless router sucks (hey, I got it from best buy for like $20 after rebates, I'm not complaining) and it will often just drop the wireless signal. This makes it appear that when you try to access a website, when you where just accessing another website just fine, that the website takes a long time to load or more often than not, doesn't load at all, making you think there are issues with that site, when there is not.
I'd rather point out the obvious when it comes to the Internet... people expect to find broken sites. It's just the way everyone has grown up with the 'net. Crappy designed sites with stale content and broken links, multiple browsers (IE(win), IE(Mac) , Netscape/Mozilla, Safari) on multiple systems (Mac, Unix/Linux, Windows), security issues, internet issues with their ISP, web servers that go down, etc, etc, etc. People know that the nature of the Internet is volatile. Sure, they'll get angry and might never return if your site is a small 'mom and pop' shop, but when it comes to the 'major' sites such as CNN, MSN, Amazon, eBay, etc; then they will most likely return, even if it takes more than 4-seconds (which it does on CNN and if I remember right, they use Akamai).
Saying 4 second load time will make customers never return is slightly FUD (since it's subjective). Saying a customer won't return if they type their zip code into their address bar, and your site claims it's invalid (when it's not) will probably do the trick. That's something web developers can change. Load times isn't alway in their hands. But that's not to say they shouldn't review their code for efficiency in execution.
Cheers,
Fozzy
Ah, you don't need to defend yourself bro... you did in your sig. =P People can get easily offended if they feel something they enjoy/care about is being attacked. Magnify that by a few when it's in an online medium. =D
They don't need the internet to look at pr0n they have... [ERROR: USER HAS BEEN SMITTED]
Odd, the manager at our EB-Games said just the opposite. He had around 60 people on the 'call' list when it went on Pre-sale. He had, I think, 12 consoles. Took him over 24 hours to fill his pre-order. The Wii? 16 gone in the first 10mins.
The funny thing is, the 60 people on the 'call' list where mostly like "How much? Oh, never mind". Though that did pre-order probably planned on selling them on E-Bay. I'm sure there's a PS3 market, but for the most part, it's likely those professional football players who can afford to not care and bribe the Circuit-City guy to put him on the lit. (That happened to a buddy of mine, who's doing the EBay thing, but thought $100 over the price wasn't asking enough for a Pro-Football star.)
I would bet a place like Wal-Mart will get enough in stock to not sell out instantly. might actually take a few hours. Of course, then there's guys like me, who's anniversary is on the 19th. Arggh... Pickup my Wii or incur the wraith of my game-hating significant other! *shudder*
Cheers,
Fozzy
Good thing I use a PC! Mwuahahah
(it's just a joke)
I hope their new PR guy is good. They do have a lot overcome. However, there has been a lot of doom and gloom viral marketing for the PS3 which is not entirely true. Even though I've speculated a lot on /. about Sony's poor choices on the PS3 and how it expect it to hurt their sales, I have also been (finally) seeing more information on their games and their hardware and I'm pretty interested in it. Some of their screen shots are breathtaking.
Was the most controversial, Blu-Ray, the right thing to do? Hmm... I'm still going to say no. However, like I've said in the past, looking at the perspective of adding it or leaving it, I can only defend adding it, all things considered once I think about it...
While I think Sony has been doing things ass-backwards as far as Public Relations and response to the 'shock' of the new system on gamers, they do have room to make amends if they just started being a little more respectful and talking up their system on a positive aspect instead of the "you're n00b!" approach.
Cheers,
Fozzy
Download Free Porn - Click Here To Read How!