I wonder a little bit whether the episodic content will be "really exclusive", or whether it will be "exclusive" the way GTA3, GTA:VC and GTA:SA were.
I mean, what are the chances that a few months after the last of the XBox 360 "episodes" is released on XBox Live, we'll see a compilation disc with all of the GTA4 "added content" ported to PS3?
I'm thinking back here to when GTA: Liberty Stories was supposed to be the great and powerful savior of the PSP, and once it came out it got really good review scores; but once it was actually released it didn't really make that big a splash, and now a year or so later it's just coming out on the PS2 where the actual customers are.
Well, at least Microsoft's finally figured out how to make XBox Live Arcade good now. $5 horse costumes and games that were on the $20 Midway Arcade Treasures collection 3 years ago = no. Mods and cheap mini-expansion packs = yes!
Low: They kept showing a Mario game (Mario Galaxies or something), but I either missed the details or they didn't talk about it. Where's Mario 128?...That was Mario 128. It has a new name now.
I expect you'll hear about it when it's on the show floor tomorrow?
Personally I thought the Mario Galaxy trailer was the best part of the entire press conference, especially when you got the sense that you could actually see how the controller movements were translating into mario's movements. It just made me really happy, it looks like we're finally getting the 3D mario game Nintendo's been trying to make for years but never quite pulled off.
I was one of those people who played Mario Sunshine and thought the wierd little abstract "bonus levels" were the best part, and went "You know, I wish they'd just release a game of nothing but these Mario Sunshine minilevels". Now they're doing that.
It was odd though how some of the most interesting stuff in that conference just kind of flashed by in four seconds of video. What was that "Disaster: Day of Disaster" thing or whatever? You could have blinked and missed that entire game. In fact I think I did.
I don't even understand why they bother using real numbers in these studies. Why not just move ahead to the logical conclusion, and have the study say that the MPAA loses a zillion bajillion dollars per year to piracy? It would be about as meaningful.
Incidentally, do you ever notice how you never see any studies calculating the exact amount of money the MPAA loses each year from making crappy, unoriginal, cookie-cutter movies; showing the movies in a medium where you have to spend gas money to get to the theater and then more than half the cost of a DVD to get in the theater door; and then once they have your money putting more effort into showing you more ads than they do the movie? That's a study I'd be curious to read.
Lately I have witnessed several signs that Microsoft is in retreat on some fronts; and witnessed several things that Microsoft has done to customers and competitors which at one time they would have gotten away with without comment, yet when they have tried them recently it has resulted in significant public outcry.
I have begun to periodically wonder if this means we are on the verge of some sort of sea change, about to reach some kind of "end of the beginning" point after which we will enter a new era; an era where the overriding theme of the computer industry is Microsoft's influence consistently and gradually waning as they are overcome, one product at a time, by the forces of a competitive market (as opposed to the old era, where the overriding theme was Microsoft's influence consistently and gradually increasing as the competitive market, one competitor at a time, is overcome by the force of Microsoft's monopolistic practices).
However it is now clear to me this cannot be the case. After all, If John Dvorak thinks Microsoft is in trouble, then we can absolutely conclude Microsoft is healthier than they have ever been and is at no risk of finding themselves in trouble anytime soon. Stopped clocks may be right twice a day, but John Dvorak never is.
My question to you would be: why would the MPAA embrace technology, when instead they can just buy off Congressmen and sneak this line item into every damn piece of proposed legislation?
Sure, it hasn't passed so far. All they have to do is keep trying.
So, because of the name everyone's talking about Nintendo's console.
You are wrong.
Before this, a large portion of the internet, including both gaming and non-gaming sites, was talking about Nintendo's console. They were talking about the new Madden. They were talking about Red Steel. They were talking about the console.
Now, no one is talking about Nintendo's console.
Now, everyone is talking about the name of the console.
The more time people spend thinking about the superficial elements like the name, the less time they spend thinking about important things like the actual product itself and the philosophy it represents. This will not bring attention to Nintendo's new system. All it will do is distract from it.
Before this, Nintendo had momentum. They had buzz. They had controversy. They had an ongoing public debate about their console which was drawing attention to the console and setting it apart from the crowd of other, unambitious consoles which it competes against and which have gone before.
Now, all Nintendo has is an internet flamewar.
This is not success. Nintendo has failed. Nintendo has failed in the most extreme way imaginable. This is the worst name that they could have possibly come up with; is an embarrassment, not a triumph; and nothing is so embarrassing as the attempts we are seeing by PR flacks and blogs to desperately spin a name that means "urine" and will never mean anything but "urine".
The emperor has walked out on stage at E3 naked, and now a whole bunch of people on the internet are trying to convince us all that nudism is really a liberating and progressive philosophy and we should really see the benefits of having a naked emperor. The problem is, the emperor simply just doesn't look good naked. If the emperor were really attractive, like if the emperor were Viggo Mortensen or something, people would shrug and come to live with this situation. But that's not the case; it's just unsettling and unpleasant. Everyone would be happier if he'd just put some clothes on.
The slash in my previous post was not intended to be taken as a division symbol, but rather was being used to enumerate a series of alternatives, i.e., the "problem" has been going on for 15 years (IRC) or 75 years (Television) or 110 years (Radio) or 408 years (Novels) or 2600 years (Theatre).
Couldn't you say the same thing about internet relay chat? Or television? Or radio? Or novels? Or theater?
If the desire of persons to temporarily escape reality to live in fantasy as embodied by Second Life represents a problem, it is a problem that has been going on for 15 / 75 / 110 / 408 / 2600 years.
"I'm not really interested in it. I don't think a controller should have that much influence on the enjoyment of games."
A lot of the games that are released are cookie cutter games that are slaves to the limitations of the hardware.
Have you ever played Katamari Damacy? There are a full thirteen buttons on the PS2 controller which Katamari Damacy ignores. The entire game is played with two joysticks. The simplicity is enough to make even the Revolution controller look complicated, and yet it entirely achieves the sense of natural interface that the Revolution controller aspires to.
Keita Takahashi, as a game designer, is not slave to the limitations of the hardware. He is master of the limitations of the hardware. Takahashi is one of those rare people who knows how to play limitations like a harp.
I would imagine this is why he is apparently not all that interested in seeing those limitations removed.
He is, of course, a bit of an aberration. Pretty much all other game designers are working at a quite different level. Among this group of developers ("everybody else"), there are quite a lot of people who are excited by the possibilities the Revolution controller offers nad feel it will allow them to express ideas that otherwise would be impossible to manifest in game form, and a lot of other people who aren't expressing interest in the Revolution but in the whole don't seem to think a whole lot about play control (and so keep churning out games which never quite feel natural or correct when thoughtlessly shoehorned underneath the modern standard maze-of-joysticks-and-buttons game controller). With both of these groups, and I think that's a significant portion of all game developers, both the developers and the resulting games would benefit from the Revolution control idiom if it became standard.
But if anyone has the right to say the revolution controller isn't necessary, it's the guy who, with Katamari Damacy, managed to make a totally revolutionary and unique control scheme out of the Dual Shock 2.
Unfortunately that's A FOUNDER of greenpeace, not greenpeace itself. Greenpeace itself will continue its crusade against nuclear power, despite the clear environmental benefits nuclear power offers over the current standard of fossil fuels. And the media will continue to present greenpeace as if it speaks for the entire environmental movement.
Greenpeace and PETA are between the two of them doing more damage to environmentalism than anyone else in the entire world except the Bush administration itself.
"Terrorism" is not mentioned once in the CNN story and I don't see it anywhere in the summons either. This case has nothing to do with terrorism, nor is the government trying to depict it as such. From reading the subpeona and the CNN article this is about identifying specific people who used specific offshore banking services (they have credit and debit card numbers, just not names or addresses) to transfer money offshore to evade paying taxes, and transferred money through PayPal in the course of doing so. This is being done by the IRS, whose job it is to prevent people from evading paying taxes. I don't know anything about whether this subpeona legally constitutes fishing, or whether it's possible the IRS might claim to be collecting this data for one purpose and then actually use it for another, but in any case it certainly has nothing to do with terrorism.
Actually, it does. Look at GrokLaw and notice the exact things SCO is asking for from the arbiter.
The "new" contract revelation doesn't actually change the details of the suit any. What it does change is the venue. As a result of the "new" contract clauses being brought into play, a small part of the entire SCO-Novell-IBM-Redhat rigamarole, specifically an old contract between Caldera and SUSE, now gets kicked entirely out of the court system and dumped into arbitration. This is important because the rules of arbitration and the rules of a court of law are quite different. Specifically, arbitration is speedy, and hard to delay. Considering the complexity of this situation, and SCO's determination to delay things as much as possible, speed is very important. Remember that the IBM vs SCO court case is still tied up just with IBM trying to get SCO to specify exactly what exactly it was that SCO thinks IBM stole.
Basically, before Novell played the arbitration card, this contract was still important, but it was waiting in line behind a long, LONG list of other issues, and thus ran the risk of nobody seriously looking at it for years or, if SCO self-destructed before anybody could complete discovery issues, not at all. Now, suddenly, this contract is cutting to the front of the line. And that means that certain issues that might otherwise have been decided in another place or in another way are going to be decided here, now, because of this contract.
Most significantly. From Groklaw:
In particular the United Linux members agreed that each member would have an irrevocable, perpetual, and worldwide license to use and unlimitedly exploit any intellectual property rights of the other members in the UnitedLinux Software, which would be transferred to the LLC for this very purpose... Paragraphs 81 and 82 are interesting. They point out that Caldera didn't contribute the Linux kernel to UL, but its infringement claims, although vague, appear to involve the kernel. The [UnitedLinux contracts], therefore, preclude SCO from asserting copyright infringement claims against the Linux kernel, no matter how you examine the issue, and the document does so every possible way, including the requirements of the GPL
Note that these contracts would have been signed after Caldera had already purchased their UNIX properties.
So, if SUSE gets their way, then-- possibly even before IBM gets the chance to complete summary judgements in their case-- this arbitration will rule that SCO has by contract forfeited their right to assert intellectual property claims against the Linux kernel, and the nature of the situation could make that rule apply not just to Novell, but to everyone. Courts can consider arbitration rulings to be binding. So this absolutely can have effect on the IBM case.
And if SCO's long-standing claims against Linux are short-circuited by a legally binding declaration that SCO had forfeited the right to bring claims against the Linux kernel by contracts signed before the allegations even started, that is definitely, as the top level post puts it, a "knew or should have known" kind of situation.
Quantity doesn't mean variety, though. For example, let's say a system gets five Madden NFL Football games. This is definitely at least some quantity. But it isn't any variety at all.
On the other hand, a game library with 20 titles but no variety... well, I don't know what we can say about how much quantity it has, but regardless of the quality of the individual games, that isn't what I'd call a quality launch library. Variety effects quality directly, because most people get bored if they wind up having to play the exact same kind of game over and over.
And you can't possibly say quality over quantity "[made] the post-SNES game libraries suck so hard", because quality over quantity is absolutely not something that describes the Playstation 2 game library at all...
But it's quality, not quantity. The XBox 360 had about 26 titles or something, but most of them were ports and crappy generic EA sports games.
That won't cut it on the Revolution, especially because I don't think Nintendo has that much of the sports games fan market.
We will have to wait to see how many of these 20 titles are "for real" and how many are, shovelware.
Look, you have to understand. If you want to be a "Halo Killer" (and every single game is a halo killer, these days! Don't bother judging the game on its own merits. The only question is, does it kill Halo?), you have to match the control scheme that made Halo popular. And that control scheme is: A clumsy replication of PC FPS controls shoehorned into a Dual Shock II workalike format.
After all, everyone knows that what made Halo popular was the radical and unnatural retraining that is required when you take a control scheme that was designed and perfected for a mouse and keyboard, and just jam it unceremoniously underneath two thumb-controlled joysticks and a maze of randomly positioned multicolored buttons. Unless Nintendo can replicate that kind of hand-eye coordination dissonance, they'll never get anywhere with their Halo killing, I mean console, business. My suggestion: They should duct-tape a cinderblock to the Revolution remote. Then everyone will just eat it right up!
I will agree with you to the extent that it seems at first glance that this fellow did not properly follow sociological practice in the grant proposal (a problem to which the truth or falsehood of the theory of evolution is irrelivant) and if that is the case, the rejection was for that reason reasonable.
However I don't think what you're saying is much of an improvement, as you seem to have a far, far worse understanding of the situation than he did.
ID does not in any way claim that evolution did not happen, only that it may be the method through which an intelligent entity created us.... To study the effects of a belief in a socialogical sense one must first understand the real belief, not the view of the uneducated on the topic
Intelligent Design is not a belief. It is a movement.
Sure, "Intelligent Design" the "theory" or "belief" or whatever you wish to call it technically doesn't claim that evolution did not happen. In fact it doesn't really seem to claim anything at all. Intelligent Design says that some intelligent entity (whatever it was) at some point designed something (whatever that was), maybe. There's no specific or rigorous definition to any of this. This slippery vagueness is purposeful, and makes Intelligent Design useless except as a rhetorical tool; "Intelligent Design", when it comes down to it, at any given moment can mean whatever an intelligent design proponent needs it to mean.
Because of this slipperiness, we can't say a lot about the belief of Intelligent Design. Luckily, we can say something about the movement of Intelligent Design, because movements consist of people, and we can judge these people based on the things they say.
The movement of Intelligent Design is strongly, strongly committed to claiming that "evolution did not happen"-- and in fact does little or nothing else. They are, of course, vague and slippery about this as well. How much evolution happened under the Intelligent Design theory varies depending on which Intelligent Design proponent is talking, and what time it is. Sometimes no evolution happened at all; sometimes alleles got shuffled around and "adaption" occurred, but it wasn't really evolution because no "information" was added; sometimes little changes evolve, but not big ones; sometimes nearly everything evolved and a single common ancestor exists, but "something intelligent" stepped in at a few crucial moments to help the process along. Sometimes everything in the history of the universe evolved, except the bacterial flagellum, which appeared by magic.
But regardless of which ID proponent is talking, who they work for, what year it is, or how much evolution is admitted to exist, the insufficiency of the theory of evolution is the one and only constant. Since Intelligent Design advocates never particularly produce any positive explanations of the universe or repudiate each other over going too far, it appears the only unacceptable view within Intelligent Design concerning the Theory of Evolution is that it explains the diversity of life on earth. Look at any noteworthy Intelligent Design writer, speaker, or organization: Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, the Discovery Institute, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (who wrote Of Pandas and People)... these are the people who represent and define the Intelligent Design movement. Without these people, the term Intelligent Design would not exist, no one would have heard of it. These are the people, if anyone, who decide what "Intelligent Design" means. I challenge you to read anything they said or wrote on the subject of "Intelligent Design" which does not focus centrally or wholly on shortcomings in the theory of Evolution. You will have to keep looking for some time.
You seem to have Intelligent Design confused with what is called "Theistic Evolution". "Theistic Evolution" is the belief that God created all life on earth, and the process of evolution was the instrument he used
This, of course, is really bad for sony with it's apparently much higher price, lateness to the game, and DRM shenanigans.
Because, of course, Microsoft are such anti-DRM pro-consumer crusaders and all.
I'm also not sure why you think Sony's "lateness to the game" is a problem, in the same post you state your preference for the Nintendo Revolution? The Revolution will probably be coming out at about the same time as the PS3, probably novemberish of this year. That's not a bad thing-- I think november of this year will be a time many people will feel ready to buy a new game console. It just seems to me that either coming out "late to the game" in November 2006 is going to be a problem for both Sony and Nintendo, or it will be a problem for neither of them.
It seems to me you really specifically have something against Sony. While you make a number of good points, the worth of your post is significantly brought down by the fact that throughout your post you attack Sony for sins you absentmindedly absolve the other consolemakers of, and you absentmindedly assume that what advantages Sony has will magically disappear. You say "Unless [Sony] can invent a breakthrough franchise a-la GTA or Halo that will be exclusive to them, they're essentially dead in the water."-- What about the four or five franchises that are already exclusive to the Playstation console, a couple of which have already seen early versions demoed running on PS3 hardware, and more of which we are likely to see at E3?
If you don't like or want the Playstation 3, that's fine and reasonable; everyone has preferences. But it seems unreasonable to me that you show signs of such a blatant agenda against Sony in the same post you have the gall to accuse other people of being biased or "fanboys". I hope in future you can try to be more objective on these subjects, because your vendetta against Sony is seriously distracting from the meat of your posts and may turn people away from what good points you do make.
Is MS really that evil that they are breaking laws all over the world illegally using their defacto monopoly?
They were convicted of breaking the law in America.
The court trial in which they were convicted of breaking the law in America never reached the remedy/punishment phase. A new political administration simply quietly terminated the antitrust case with some handwaving before it could complete, with no real-world steps taken to stop Microsoft's existing antitrust violations or prevent them in future.
So Microsoft broke the law in America, was convicted in a court of law, and no one ever did anything to make them stop breaking the law. So is it that surprising that they're breaking the law in the rest of the world as well?
I don't see why Microsoft apologists keep falling back on this talking point of claiming that these fines and such are all about the money. If Microsoft would obey the law, they wouldn't have to pay these fines and settlements and whatnot. The power to end these fines is in Microsoft's hands. Microsoft prefers to pay fines and settlements rather than obey the law. What terrible extortionists these horrible statist states are, making Microsoft pay money until they stop doing illegal things. Who do they think they are? They're almost acting like they think they're autonomous countries with the power to pass and enforce laws within their own borders.
The link you give is to an entirely different article. That article is about a Howard Stinger interview from several weeks ago. This article is about an article written in a Japanese newspaper this morning.
Moreover, the "dupe" you give is wrong. The article slashdot posts there claims the announcement is "official", but the "official announcement" there is nothing but a misquote. The article took a quote from Variety Magazine saying the PS3 would be out "before the holidays", attributed Variety's commentary to Howard Stinger, and made it sound like PS3 would not be out until "the holidays".
This honestly makes me a little suspicious about this article (today's article, the new article you think for some reason is a dupe), to be honest. We've already had one case where Variety implied a November release for the PS3, a video game blog misquoted it as a Sony statement, and Slashdot reprinted the misquote as an "official" announcement. What if we have a case now where a Japanese newspaper implied a November release for the PS3, a video game blog misquoted it as a Sony statement, and Slashdot reprinted the misquote as an "official" announcement? Can we get a corroborating source besides just 1UP, or an actual quote from Sony about this somehow?
Language which falls under the following categories is deemed to be highly inappropriate. Clarification on what constitutes each category can be found by clicking on the links below. ... Sexual Orientation This category includes both clear and masked language which:
* Insultingly refers to any aspect of sexual orientation pertaining to themselves or other players
If a player is found to have used such language, he/she may:
* Be temporarily suspended from the game
There is a category in the table of contents of your link named "sexual orientation", but the actual text of that part of the terms of service refers only to insulting speech, not any speech having to do with sexual orientation at all.
Basically you're wrong-- you're either lying, or you didn't read your own link before pasting it-- you're misquoting the harassment policy, and no, this rule does not at all cover the GLBT chat used by the guild.
It's funny how you're basically saying that in order for World of Warcraft to not be "politically correct", in your way of defining things, World of Warcraft would have to purposefully censor speech which you find objectionable. Funny, sounds to me like you are the one demanding the gay people be "politically correct", by conforming their speech to your politics.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't think of it as changing the story... think of it as a "patch".
Similarly, you can think of CmdrTaco's dupe of this story tomorrow morning as "episodic content".
See? Now XBox Live really is everywhere!!!
I wonder a little bit whether the episodic content will be "really exclusive", or whether it will be "exclusive" the way GTA3, GTA:VC and GTA:SA were.
I mean, what are the chances that a few months after the last of the XBox 360 "episodes" is released on XBox Live, we'll see a compilation disc with all of the GTA4 "added content" ported to PS3?
I'm thinking back here to when GTA: Liberty Stories was supposed to be the great and powerful savior of the PSP, and once it came out it got really good review scores; but once it was actually released it didn't really make that big a splash, and now a year or so later it's just coming out on the PS2 where the actual customers are.
Well, at least Microsoft's finally figured out how to make XBox Live Arcade good now. $5 horse costumes and games that were on the $20 Midway Arcade Treasures collection 3 years ago = no. Mods and cheap mini-expansion packs = yes!
Low: They kept showing a Mario game (Mario Galaxies or something), but I either missed the details or they didn't talk about it. Where's Mario 128? ...That was Mario 128. It has a new name now.
I expect you'll hear about it when it's on the show floor tomorrow?
Personally I thought the Mario Galaxy trailer was the best part of the entire press conference, especially when you got the sense that you could actually see how the controller movements were translating into mario's movements. It just made me really happy, it looks like we're finally getting the 3D mario game Nintendo's been trying to make for years but never quite pulled off.
I was one of those people who played Mario Sunshine and thought the wierd little abstract "bonus levels" were the best part, and went "You know, I wish they'd just release a game of nothing but these Mario Sunshine minilevels". Now they're doing that.
It was odd though how some of the most interesting stuff in that conference just kind of flashed by in four seconds of video. What was that "Disaster: Day of Disaster" thing or whatever? You could have blinked and missed that entire game. In fact I think I did.
I don't even understand why they bother using real numbers in these studies. Why not just move ahead to the logical conclusion, and have the study say that the MPAA loses a zillion bajillion dollars per year to piracy? It would be about as meaningful.
Incidentally, do you ever notice how you never see any studies calculating the exact amount of money the MPAA loses each year from making crappy, unoriginal, cookie-cutter movies; showing the movies in a medium where you have to spend gas money to get to the theater and then more than half the cost of a DVD to get in the theater door; and then once they have your money putting more effort into showing you more ads than they do the movie? That's a study I'd be curious to read.
Lately I have witnessed several signs that Microsoft is in retreat on some fronts; and witnessed several things that Microsoft has done to customers and competitors which at one time they would have gotten away with without comment, yet when they have tried them recently it has resulted in significant public outcry.
I have begun to periodically wonder if this means we are on the verge of some sort of sea change, about to reach some kind of "end of the beginning" point after which we will enter a new era; an era where the overriding theme of the computer industry is Microsoft's influence consistently and gradually waning as they are overcome, one product at a time, by the forces of a competitive market (as opposed to the old era, where the overriding theme was Microsoft's influence consistently and gradually increasing as the competitive market, one competitor at a time, is overcome by the force of Microsoft's monopolistic practices).
However it is now clear to me this cannot be the case. After all, If John Dvorak thinks Microsoft is in trouble, then we can absolutely conclude Microsoft is healthier than they have ever been and is at no risk of finding themselves in trouble anytime soon. Stopped clocks may be right twice a day, but John Dvorak never is.
My question to you would be: why would the MPAA embrace technology, when instead they can just buy off Congressmen and sneak this line item into every damn piece of proposed legislation?
Sure, it hasn't passed so far. All they have to do is keep trying.
So, because of the name everyone's talking about Nintendo's console.
You are wrong.
Before this, a large portion of the internet, including both gaming and non-gaming sites, was talking about Nintendo's console. They were talking about the new Madden. They were talking about Red Steel. They were talking about the console.
Now, no one is talking about Nintendo's console.
Now, everyone is talking about the name of the console.
The more time people spend thinking about the superficial elements like the name, the less time they spend thinking about important things like the actual product itself and the philosophy it represents. This will not bring attention to Nintendo's new system. All it will do is distract from it.
Before this, Nintendo had momentum. They had buzz. They had controversy. They had an ongoing public debate about their console which was drawing attention to the console and setting it apart from the crowd of other, unambitious consoles which it competes against and which have gone before.
Now, all Nintendo has is an internet flamewar.
This is not success. Nintendo has failed. Nintendo has failed in the most extreme way imaginable. This is the worst name that they could have possibly come up with; is an embarrassment, not a triumph; and nothing is so embarrassing as the attempts we are seeing by PR flacks and blogs to desperately spin a name that means "urine" and will never mean anything but "urine".
The emperor has walked out on stage at E3 naked, and now a whole bunch of people on the internet are trying to convince us all that nudism is really a liberating and progressive philosophy and we should really see the benefits of having a naked emperor. The problem is, the emperor simply just doesn't look good naked. If the emperor were really attractive, like if the emperor were Viggo Mortensen or something, people would shrug and come to live with this situation. But that's not the case; it's just unsettling and unpleasant. Everyone would be happier if he'd just put some clothes on.
The slash in my previous post was not intended to be taken as a division symbol, but rather was being used to enumerate a series of alternatives, i.e., the "problem" has been going on for 15 years (IRC) or 75 years (Television) or 110 years (Radio) or 408 years (Novels) or 2600 years (Theatre).
You see.
Couldn't you say the same thing about internet relay chat?
Or television?
Or radio?
Or novels?
Or theater?
If the desire of persons to temporarily escape reality to live in fantasy as embodied by Second Life represents a problem, it is a problem that has been going on for 15 / 75 / 110 / 408 / 2600 years.
Keita Takahashi, as a game designer, is not slave to the limitations of the hardware. He is master of the limitations of the hardware. Takahashi is one of those rare people who knows how to play limitations like a harp.
I would imagine this is why he is apparently not all that interested in seeing those limitations removed.
He is, of course, a bit of an aberration. Pretty much all other game designers are working at a quite different level. Among this group of developers ("everybody else"), there are quite a lot of people who are excited by the possibilities the Revolution controller offers nad feel it will allow them to express ideas that otherwise would be impossible to manifest in game form, and a lot of other people who aren't expressing interest in the Revolution but in the whole don't seem to think a whole lot about play control (and so keep churning out games which never quite feel natural or correct when thoughtlessly shoehorned underneath the modern standard maze-of-joysticks-and-buttons game controller). With both of these groups, and I think that's a significant portion of all game developers, both the developers and the resulting games would benefit from the Revolution control idiom if it became standard.
But if anyone has the right to say the revolution controller isn't necessary, it's the guy who, with Katamari Damacy, managed to make a totally revolutionary and unique control scheme out of the Dual Shock 2.
Unfortunately that's A FOUNDER of greenpeace, not greenpeace itself. Greenpeace itself will continue its crusade against nuclear power, despite the clear environmental benefits nuclear power offers over the current standard of fossil fuels. And the media will continue to present greenpeace as if it speaks for the entire environmental movement.
Greenpeace and PETA are between the two of them doing more damage to environmentalism than anyone else in the entire world except the Bush administration itself.
"Terrorism" is not mentioned once in the CNN story and I don't see it anywhere in the summons either. This case has nothing to do with terrorism, nor is the government trying to depict it as such. From reading the subpeona and the CNN article this is about identifying specific people who used specific offshore banking services (they have credit and debit card numbers, just not names or addresses) to transfer money offshore to evade paying taxes, and transferred money through PayPal in the course of doing so. This is being done by the IRS, whose job it is to prevent people from evading paying taxes. I don't know anything about whether this subpeona legally constitutes fishing, or whether it's possible the IRS might claim to be collecting this data for one purpose and then actually use it for another, but in any case it certainly has nothing to do with terrorism.
... weed ends in 1h2m
my
That explains a lot.
I guess it all gets a bit hard to follow.
:)
SCO has made it that way on purpose. So it's certainly not your fault if you get a bit confused on some issues
The "new" contract revelation doesn't actually change the details of the suit any. What it does change is the venue. As a result of the "new" contract clauses being brought into play, a small part of the entire SCO-Novell-IBM-Redhat rigamarole, specifically an old contract between Caldera and SUSE, now gets kicked entirely out of the court system and dumped into arbitration. This is important because the rules of arbitration and the rules of a court of law are quite different. Specifically, arbitration is speedy, and hard to delay. Considering the complexity of this situation, and SCO's determination to delay things as much as possible, speed is very important. Remember that the IBM vs SCO court case is still tied up just with IBM trying to get SCO to specify exactly what exactly it was that SCO thinks IBM stole.
Basically, before Novell played the arbitration card, this contract was still important, but it was waiting in line behind a long, LONG list of other issues, and thus ran the risk of nobody seriously looking at it for years or, if SCO self-destructed before anybody could complete discovery issues, not at all. Now, suddenly, this contract is cutting to the front of the line. And that means that certain issues that might otherwise have been decided in another place or in another way are going to be decided here, now, because of this contract.
Most significantly. From Groklaw:Note that these contracts would have been signed after Caldera had already purchased their UNIX properties.
So, if SUSE gets their way, then-- possibly even before IBM gets the chance to complete summary judgements in their case-- this arbitration will rule that SCO has by contract forfeited their right to assert intellectual property claims against the Linux kernel, and the nature of the situation could make that rule apply not just to Novell, but to everyone. Courts can consider arbitration rulings to be binding. So this absolutely can have effect on the IBM case.
And if SCO's long-standing claims against Linux are short-circuited by a legally binding declaration that SCO had forfeited the right to bring claims against the Linux kernel by contracts signed before the allegations even started, that is definitely, as the top level post puts it, a "knew or should have known" kind of situation.
Quantity doesn't mean variety, though. For example, let's say a system gets five Madden NFL Football games. This is definitely at least some quantity. But it isn't any variety at all.
On the other hand, a game library with 20 titles but no variety... well, I don't know what we can say about how much quantity it has, but regardless of the quality of the individual games, that isn't what I'd call a quality launch library. Variety effects quality directly, because most people get bored if they wind up having to play the exact same kind of game over and over.
And you can't possibly say quality over quantity "[made] the post-SNES game libraries suck so hard", because quality over quantity is absolutely not something that describes the Playstation 2 game library at all...
But it's quality, not quantity. The XBox 360 had about 26 titles or something, but most of them were ports and crappy generic EA sports games. That won't cut it on the Revolution, especially because I don't think Nintendo has that much of the sports games fan market. We will have to wait to see how many of these 20 titles are "for real" and how many are, shovelware.
Look, you have to understand. If you want to be a "Halo Killer" (and every single game is a halo killer, these days! Don't bother judging the game on its own merits. The only question is, does it kill Halo?), you have to match the control scheme that made Halo popular. And that control scheme is: A clumsy replication of PC FPS controls shoehorned into a Dual Shock II workalike format.
After all, everyone knows that what made Halo popular was the radical and unnatural retraining that is required when you take a control scheme that was designed and perfected for a mouse and keyboard, and just jam it unceremoniously underneath two thumb-controlled joysticks and a maze of randomly positioned multicolored buttons. Unless Nintendo can replicate that kind of hand-eye coordination dissonance, they'll never get anywhere with their Halo killing, I mean console, business. My suggestion: They should duct-tape a cinderblock to the Revolution remote. Then everyone will just eat it right up!
However I don't think what you're saying is much of an improvement, as you seem to have a far, far worse understanding of the situation than he did.
Intelligent Design is not a belief. It is a movement.
Sure, "Intelligent Design" the "theory" or "belief" or whatever you wish to call it technically doesn't claim that evolution did not happen. In fact it doesn't really seem to claim anything at all. Intelligent Design says that some intelligent entity (whatever it was) at some point designed something (whatever that was), maybe. There's no specific or rigorous definition to any of this. This slippery vagueness is purposeful, and makes Intelligent Design useless except as a rhetorical tool; "Intelligent Design", when it comes down to it, at any given moment can mean whatever an intelligent design proponent needs it to mean.
Because of this slipperiness, we can't say a lot about the belief of Intelligent Design. Luckily, we can say something about the movement of Intelligent Design, because movements consist of people, and we can judge these people based on the things they say.
The movement of Intelligent Design is strongly, strongly committed to claiming that "evolution did not happen"-- and in fact does little or nothing else. They are, of course, vague and slippery about this as well. How much evolution happened under the Intelligent Design theory varies depending on which Intelligent Design proponent is talking, and what time it is. Sometimes no evolution happened at all; sometimes alleles got shuffled around and "adaption" occurred, but it wasn't really evolution because no "information" was added; sometimes little changes evolve, but not big ones; sometimes nearly everything evolved and a single common ancestor exists, but "something intelligent" stepped in at a few crucial moments to help the process along. Sometimes everything in the history of the universe evolved, except the bacterial flagellum, which appeared by magic.
But regardless of which ID proponent is talking, who they work for, what year it is, or how much evolution is admitted to exist, the insufficiency of the theory of evolution is the one and only constant. Since Intelligent Design advocates never particularly produce any positive explanations of the universe or repudiate each other over going too far, it appears the only unacceptable view within Intelligent Design concerning the Theory of Evolution is that it explains the diversity of life on earth. Look at any noteworthy Intelligent Design writer, speaker, or organization: Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, the Discovery Institute, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (who wrote Of Pandas and People)... these are the people who represent and define the Intelligent Design movement. Without these people, the term Intelligent Design would not exist, no one would have heard of it. These are the people, if anyone, who decide what "Intelligent Design" means. I challenge you to read anything they said or wrote on the subject of "Intelligent Design" which does not focus centrally or wholly on shortcomings in the theory of Evolution. You will have to keep looking for some time.
You seem to have Intelligent Design confused with what is called "Theistic Evolution". "Theistic Evolution" is the belief that God created all life on earth, and the process of evolution was the instrument he used
This, of course, is really bad for sony with it's apparently much higher price, lateness to the game, and DRM shenanigans.
Because, of course, Microsoft are such anti-DRM pro-consumer crusaders and all.
I'm also not sure why you think Sony's "lateness to the game" is a problem, in the same post you state your preference for the Nintendo Revolution? The Revolution will probably be coming out at about the same time as the PS3, probably novemberish of this year. That's not a bad thing-- I think november of this year will be a time many people will feel ready to buy a new game console. It just seems to me that either coming out "late to the game" in November 2006 is going to be a problem for both Sony and Nintendo, or it will be a problem for neither of them.
It seems to me you really specifically have something against Sony. While you make a number of good points, the worth of your post is significantly brought down by the fact that throughout your post you attack Sony for sins you absentmindedly absolve the other consolemakers of, and you absentmindedly assume that what advantages Sony has will magically disappear. You say "Unless [Sony] can invent a breakthrough franchise a-la GTA or Halo that will be exclusive to them, they're essentially dead in the water."-- What about the four or five franchises that are already exclusive to the Playstation console, a couple of which have already seen early versions demoed running on PS3 hardware, and more of which we are likely to see at E3?
If you don't like or want the Playstation 3, that's fine and reasonable; everyone has preferences. But it seems unreasonable to me that you show signs of such a blatant agenda against Sony in the same post you have the gall to accuse other people of being biased or "fanboys". I hope in future you can try to be more objective on these subjects, because your vendetta against Sony is seriously distracting from the meat of your posts and may turn people away from what good points you do make.
Is MS really that evil that they are breaking laws all over the world illegally using their defacto monopoly?
They were convicted of breaking the law in America.
The court trial in which they were convicted of breaking the law in America never reached the remedy/punishment phase. A new political administration simply quietly terminated the antitrust case with some handwaving before it could complete, with no real-world steps taken to stop Microsoft's existing antitrust violations or prevent them in future.
So Microsoft broke the law in America, was convicted in a court of law, and no one ever did anything to make them stop breaking the law. So is it that surprising that they're breaking the law in the rest of the world as well?
I don't see why Microsoft apologists keep falling back on this talking point of claiming that these fines and such are all about the money. If Microsoft would obey the law, they wouldn't have to pay these fines and settlements and whatnot. The power to end these fines is in Microsoft's hands. Microsoft prefers to pay fines and settlements rather than obey the law. What terrible extortionists these horrible statist states are, making Microsoft pay money until they stop doing illegal things. Who do they think they are? They're almost acting like they think they're autonomous countries with the power to pass and enforce laws within their own borders.
The link you give is to an entirely different article. That article is about a Howard Stinger interview from several weeks ago. This article is about an article written in a Japanese newspaper this morning.
Moreover, the "dupe" you give is wrong. The article slashdot posts there claims the announcement is "official", but the "official announcement" there is nothing but a misquote. The article took a quote from Variety Magazine saying the PS3 would be out "before the holidays", attributed Variety's commentary to Howard Stinger, and made it sound like PS3 would not be out until "the holidays".
This honestly makes me a little suspicious about this article (today's article, the new article you think for some reason is a dupe), to be honest. We've already had one case where Variety implied a November release for the PS3, a video game blog misquoted it as a Sony statement, and Slashdot reprinted the misquote as an "official" announcement. What if we have a case now where a Japanese newspaper implied a November release for the PS3, a video game blog misquoted it as a Sony statement, and Slashdot reprinted the misquote as an "official" announcement? Can we get a corroborating source besides just 1UP, or an actual quote from Sony about this somehow?
The characters in question are incapable of having any kind of sex at all, rendering the roleplay aspect pretty much moot.
Then why can they already marry?
Basically you're wrong-- you're either lying, or you didn't read your own link before pasting it-- you're misquoting the harassment policy, and no, this rule does not at all cover the GLBT chat used by the guild.
It's funny how you're basically saying that in order for World of Warcraft to not be "politically correct", in your way of defining things, World of Warcraft would have to purposefully censor speech which you find objectionable. Funny, sounds to me like you are the one demanding the gay people be "politically correct", by conforming their speech to your politics.