A supercharged/turbocharged (such as a TSI) will accelerate a lot faster. Hell, even naturally aspirated engines will hold their own.
Not to mention the cost of the increased weight on handling. But you compared muscle cars to sports cars, there's a world of difference between the two. Muscle cars are designed to go fast in a straight line but you can forget about corners, sports cars are designed for speed and handling.
Why? Seems to me to be a good idea- electric motors have gobs of torque even at standstill (Hence the use in locomotives) Why not put a second engine in that performs best where the V12 is at its worst? So long as you can keep the weight of the system down enough it should be a big win.
Because sports cars are meant to be light and have good handling. Sports cars typically have low torque because of their low weight.
We're going to see a few more of these soon, Honda are releasing a hybrid NSX and Toyota are releasing a hybrid Supra. Its kind of sad to see these venerable sports cars being turned into hybrids.
Mar 07 04:08:02.040 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.5 feet
OK,
The date/time would be in ISO format (like Linux), the UID would be the planes S/N or at the very least, registration, not the flight no and altimeter readings would be in meters not feet.
So it would be:
20130307 04:08:02 VH-EBL Altimeter: 10897.24
20130307 04:08:02 VH-EBL Altimeter: 10897.23
20130307 04:08:02 VH-EBL Altimeter: 10897.24
20130307 04:08:02 VH-EBL Altimeter: 10897.25
But if the designers had half a brain (and I refuse to believe that Boeing _or_ Airbus are hiring idiots) they'd separate these out into individual logs, I.E. altitude.log, fuel.log, temp.log, engine1.log, engine2.log, so on and so forth, even if they do have one giant log they'd also have smaller logs with the same info just for simplicities sake.
The Pwn2Own contest offers cash prizes, they have done this since 2011. In fact they haven't given away a laptop since 2010. This year it's US$60,000 for first place, US$30,000 for second and US$15,000 for third. Laptop type has nothing to do with it, in fact they're targeting browsers exclusively which are running on a fully patched Win7 or latest OSX version. Points are awarded for each exploit, 0day's are worth the most, known exploits (2 have been left deliberately unpatched and will be announced) are worth fewer points. The winner is the team with the most number of points and must include at least one 0day.
Sorry, but the idea that OSX is targeted first because it's more desirable is a complete myth made up by sad fanboys. The entire Pwn2Own competition was created to demonstrate the insecurity of OS X. The first competition only included OS X (Windows and Linux were introduced in the second P2O).
And through an odd technicality, English Cricket Bats were never banned.
I'd be more concerned about the Cricket stumps rather than the bat.
Stumps are basically large wooden sticks slightly less than 1 metre long and tapered to a point at one end so they can be driven into the ground. Basically they are a long stake (or a short spear).
And through an odd technicality, English Cricket Bats were never banned.
Overheard on a recent BA flight into JFK.
English guy 1: I say old bean, what do you say to hijacking this plane before stumps. English guy 2: Oooh yes, and we can fly it into the pavilion. English guy 1: Smashing. English guy 2: Jolly good.
Spoken like someone who hasn't actually used a latest gen SSD yet. I used to be on your bandwagon, thinking my striped raid was good enough.
An off the shelf SSD I bought a year ago is still giving me read and write times far in excess of what I get out of an IBM 8Ki RAID card with an array of 15K RPM drives (RAID 5). No need for the latest gen SSD to prove that.
EA treats you gamers like shit all the time and you keep coming back game after game like an addict needing a fix. All this crying and bitching and I guarantee every single complainer here will be first in line for the next EA launch.
Not me.
I gave up on EA a while ago. I said Sim City would be shit and glad to be proven right (feel free to put this to an image of Grumpy Cat).
EA now pander to the brainless COD crowd, they have nothing left that interests me and their few "properties" I do care about such as System Shock I'm glad to see EA doing absolutely nothing with.
In a few years, EA's going to be broken up like THQ. Then I'll start caring about SShock. Ubi's probably going to break up first though but AFAIK, they've got nothing I care about (Silent Hunter maybe, but I dont play very many SIM's).
Its unlikely that many of your games will end up on the cache seeing as its only 8 GB.
You don't know how this works. The firmware recognizes individual HD sectors that are frequently read, and transparently copies them to the SSD.
I think the point was that if you're a gamer, you'll already have an SSD. 120GB SSD's are under A$100 now and gamers tend to be willing to drop a bit of coin on their rig. I bought my first 256GB SSD when it reached $330, I bought another 512GB SSD when they dropped under $550.
Hybrid drives aren't for gamers, rather for users that regularly use a small subset of applications and want better performance. Someone who has 140 GB of media, but only uses Word, Excel and VLC on their laptop.
Even better is such a DRM scheme requires zero intervention on the user's computer
I'll spare you another round of sarcastic laughing. EA requires Origin, Ubisoft requires Uplay. All of these things are exactly what you described above.
Ubisoft has been trying this shit with their games for a while now. FarCry 3 was meant to have the same DRM, it was cracked before release day. I downloaded it, installed sans that Uplay shit and played it with no problems... Especially compared to the problems people who legitimately bought the game had.
Piracy now solves more technical problems then it creates. I remember the days when you had to run a variety of filter programs and CD emulators to get around Starforce, now I just install a crack and it works better than the original.
The real irony is, I was going to give Ubisoft money for FC3, up until the point I found out about the always online DRM. Instead I pirated it and gave my money to another publisher. I spend quite a bit of money on games, I'm also willing to wait until the game gets to Oz from the US or UK (Australian prices are screwed, we pay twice as much for games) but I wont pay for a game that can be deactivated and leave me with an unplayable mess (and if you dont think the Sim City servers wont be deactivated, I've got a few bridges to sell you).
How quickly you change gear makes absolutely no difference to performance. *When* you change gear is crucial, and no automatic gearbox can solve that problem.
So what you are saying, is that I can take 17 seconds to change a gear, but if I change it at just the right moment, ill lose no performance at all compared with somebody who changes gears in 1 second?
Sir, I am in awe of your logic.
You clearly dont drive a manual.
I can accelerate into a corner, put the clutch in, slow and gear down as I turn and use heel to toe whilst releasing the clutch as I come out of the turn for better acceleration. Admittedly, I do this at roundabouts more often than I should.
An Automatic gearbox has to wait until I start to accelerate to drop back down a gear. Automatic gearboxes are always reactionary, a good manual driver is proactive. There is no way, any current production auto can pre-empt what a driver is going to do. Maybe when we've invented enough AI but then again, if we have computers advanced enough to tell what a person will do with that regularity, a person will be sitting in the back sipping martini's whilst the car does all the work.
When I drive auto's, especially "sports" automatic transmissions, they always gear up when I put my foot down, then when they realise I've put my foot down they drop a gear and jump 2000 RPM. Not smooth at all.
What the GP should have said, is that when you drive a manual, you can be in gear before you need it, an Auto is always going to be in gear after you need it... then again if you drove a manual you'd know that (or be really, really crap at driving a manual, in either case my point stands).
Apple's fucked. They have no future. Their latest iPhone was a large "meh."
To be more accurate, Apple has nowhere to go but down. Their stock price is still in a giant bubble compared to the companies actual worth (market cap is what someone would THEORETICALLY pay not what someone would actually pay).
Apple's stock price got that high because they were very good at marketing. The Iphone had the cool factor but like all fads it's wearing off fast.
I dont think Apple will be destroyed, rather it will be a shadow of it's former self as people become less enamoured with their products and competitors continue to produce superior competing products. Apple never really had the edge in technology, their entire advantage came from being popular, but popularity is a fickle mistress and will abandon them as fast as it came to them. This has already started to happen, Apple wont be destroyed, but it will end up with under 10% of the market (Windows Phone will probably have less than 2%). Their share price will shrink to below pre-iphone levels.
Ultimately, as the cool factor wears off, Apple's customers will begin to realise how abusive Apple is. This is going to hurt them more than anything else. To their competitors Microsoft was as bad as Apple, but MS at least had the wisdom not to abuse their customers and this is why MS is still a juggernaught.
In the last generation the Wii proved dominant by simply setting a reasonable price point and being somewhat novel. Most Wii owners will admit that the machine only sees occasional use (sometimes only as a Netflix player at that) outside of major first party releases.
If by most Wii owners you mean Xbox/PS fanboys, then you're right.
Most Wii owners who also have an Xbox or PS3 will see the Wii out more often than the other consoles because that's where the fun games are. The Xbox is a dust collector and the PS3 might get dragged out as blu-ray player once in a while.
the real reason that the Wii was dominant wasn't simply the price point, rather the good casual games were on the Wii. The PS2 had a higher price point than the Game Cube, but the PS2 still sold better because it had the good casual games like Guitar Hero (Game Cube at release US$199, PS2 at release US$299). Put simply, the Wii was fun, not just for gamers but for non-gamers too. This is why Sony and Microsoft scrambled to recreate the "gimmicks" of the Wii with the Playstation Move and Kinect.
I can almost guarantee that if Microsoft releases an XBox 720 (only one SKU) for $200 that they will be the undisputed champions of this generation.
Lets ignore the fact that will never happen. Even with the lucrative Windows/Office divisions propping the Xbox up, they could never afford to sell at such a loss without a shareholder revolt.
It wont work because most people wan to play Mario Kart, not Halo.
If the WiiU "wins" this generation it won't be due to any brilliance on its part, it will be because Sony and Microsoft both made colossal blunders.
When,
When the Wii U outsells and well and truly makes a giant profit for Nintendo, a large part of that will be owed to the fact that Sony and Microsoft made one giant blunder, thinking that consoles are "hardcore" and not casual.
I for one, think the Wii U is nothing special, but then again no-one is actually offering a competing console. The Xbox and Playstation are foolishly trying to compete against my PC, which is something consoles can never do. So I'll end up getting a Wii U... When the Wii stops being fun (which might take a while, Wii sports and Mario Kart are still quality).
Maybe a console with the same concept as the Ouya, but something like that which can compete with the Wii U is at lest 2 years away.
It seems like the next generation MS and Sony consoles essentially run high-end commodity PC x86(-64) hardware with Blu-Ray drives and huge gobs of system and video memory (8GB combined GDDR5 in the case of PS4). No more Cell, powerpc, whatever have you and horrible graphics memory limitations (like 256MB, wtf).
This is what they did for the last generation. All of it was off the shelf hardware (Cell processors are IBM's power architecture, previously used in Mac's), Graphics cards literally were PC graphics cards, the Xbox 360 used an ATI R500, the PS3 used a Geforce 7800. Both had been superseded on the PC at the time of their release and were outdated within 18 months.
It'll be the same with the next Xbox/Playstation.
Oh, and the graphics limitations came from Sony/Microsoft designs, not the Power architecture as the same limitations didn't exist on PowerPC Mac's.
Nintendo has missed the boat.
Actually, Nintendo is the only one on the boat.
Consoles are casual. This is where the money is. Even the PS2, it sold because of casual games like Guitar Hero. By trying to be "hardcore" (the domain of the PC, consoles have never truly cracked this despite trying to declare the PC "dead" at least twice a year) they have handed the market back to Nintendo by default. The Wii U will sell better and make money not because it's a significant improvement over the Wii, but because the competition isn't really competing.
Once again, Sony and Microsoft are competing for second place and have no-one to blame but themselves.
The reason the Wii did so well is plain as day, the Wii is simple, casual fun. The kind of console I can play when my non-gamer friends come around. As I said, casual games always rule the roost on consoles, Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter, Guitar Hero, Mario Kart... All staples of a good night with mates, no-one wants to play Halo or COD as they're not really fun.
Sony and Microsoft are barking up the wrong tree. They never made money from their previous consoles, never recouped their R&D costs, never made it into the black. If they insist on taking the same money losing path as they did before at least one of them wont be in the console business in 5 years. Probably Sony as MS can keep throwing money from Windows/Office into their Xbox division.
Many studies have show that massive penalties don't work as a deterrent because perpetrators never plan to get caught.
Financial penalties don't work.
If you fine a driver for DUI, he pays the fine and keeps drink driving (in his mind, he doesn't even make the connection between drink driving and punishment. He'll call the fine "revenue raising"). If you take away his license or make him spend a few weeks in jail he now has a real incentive.
Fraud has no such disincentive. Especially fraud perpetrated by large corporations who can simply write a fine down as a loss.
Slashdot story that has fallen through a wormhole from 2015.
Official: Sony removes ability to play used games.
Posted by samzenpus on Friday February 20, @06:19AM
From the but-they-promised department.
An anonymous readers writes
Despite initially permitting Playstation 4 owners to play used games, a recent update silently removed this feature. Responding to outrage on the Sony forums Sony stated that the cause of the removal was increased rates of piracy, you don't want to be a pirate don't you. Sony also reminded users that they are too financially and emotionally invested in the Playstation already to go to any of their competitors so they should just suck it up and take it. Another poster pointed out that according to the Playstation 4 EULA, Sony owned their dicks.
I love those plugs. I've lived in many countries and I've frequently had trouble with sockets that don't reliably make contact, wall warts that fall out of sockets and sockets that spark like July 4. The British plug doesn't have these problems. It just works. And you soon learn not to leave them lying about.
No argument here. the 2 pin US and Euro plugs seem to fall out if so much as a slight breeze hits them. A shame these plugs are so prevalent in Asia.
The Australian plug is the same, once it's in you know it'll take force to remove it, but a bit less deadly to tread on.
As my console friends remind me. There's a much greater simplicity and ease of use of the consoles versus the PCs in their eyes.
They will still buy consoles, for the same reason that your parents don't run virtualized environments to emulate other operating systems, and the same reason that most people I've met haven't cracked their Wii... it's all too complicated and frustrating for them. This doesn't preclude other people setting it up for them, but they often don't feel comfortable with it.
And this is exactly why Sony and Microsoft are barking up the wrong tree by going after the "hardcore" market. People who play console games are casual gamers. This is why the Wii won the last generation, even the PS2 owes its success to casual games like Guitar Hero and Buzz. The Wii was so successful because it was simple, casual fun. Games for average people not for gamers (nothing wrong with that, I have a Wii so I can play games with my non-gamer friends).
People who are serious about gaming still game on the PC. The shortness of most console games is evident of this, you breeze through the latest Call of Halo or whatever in 6 hours.
I'll be the first to admit the Wii U is nothing special and more than a bit gimmick-y, but Sony and Microsoft seem intent on making the same mistake they made in the last generation and handing this generation to Nintendo by default.
The real dark horse in this console generation with be the "mobile" consoles like Ouya. Ouya wont be a smashing success, but it will be enough of a success to make people take it seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, he respects users so much, he won't let them use software he helped with.
No, he will let them use the software. It's Apple that's saying no, it must all be locked up.
Then you haven't driven any sports cars then.
A supercharged/turbocharged (such as a TSI) will accelerate a lot faster. Hell, even naturally aspirated engines will hold their own.
Not to mention the cost of the increased weight on handling. But you compared muscle cars to sports cars, there's a world of difference between the two. Muscle cars are designed to go fast in a straight line but you can forget about corners, sports cars are designed for speed and handling.
Why? Seems to me to be a good idea- electric motors have gobs of torque even at standstill (Hence the use in locomotives) Why not put a second engine in that performs best where the V12 is at its worst? So long as you can keep the weight of the system down enough it should be a big win.
Because sports cars are meant to be light and have good handling. Sports cars typically have low torque because of their low weight.
For a 6.2 Litre engine, that is not thirsty.
We're going to see a few more of these soon, Honda are releasing a hybrid NSX and Toyota are releasing a hybrid Supra. Its kind of sad to see these venerable sports cars being turned into hybrids.
sudo make me a sammich
#> Cannot locate object "sammich". Consult correctenglish.log for more info.
OK,
The date/time would be in ISO format (like Linux), the UID would be the planes S/N or at the very least, registration, not the flight no and altimeter readings would be in meters not feet.
So it would be:
20130307 04:08:02 VH-EBL Altimeter: 10897.24
20130307 04:08:02 VH-EBL Altimeter: 10897.23
20130307 04:08:02 VH-EBL Altimeter: 10897.24
20130307 04:08:02 VH-EBL Altimeter: 10897.25
But if the designers had half a brain (and I refuse to believe that Boeing _or_ Airbus are hiring idiots) they'd separate these out into individual logs, I.E. altitude.log, fuel.log, temp.log, engine1.log, engine2.log, so on and so forth, even if they do have one giant log they'd also have smaller logs with the same info just for simplicities sake.
VH-EBL is a QANTAS A330 if anyone is interested.
Erm, no.
The Pwn2Own contest offers cash prizes, they have done this since 2011. In fact they haven't given away a laptop since 2010. This year it's US$60,000 for first place, US$30,000 for second and US$15,000 for third. Laptop type has nothing to do with it, in fact they're targeting browsers exclusively which are running on a fully patched Win7 or latest OSX version. Points are awarded for each exploit, 0day's are worth the most, known exploits (2 have been left deliberately unpatched and will be announced) are worth fewer points. The winner is the team with the most number of points and must include at least one 0day.
Sorry, but the idea that OSX is targeted first because it's more desirable is a complete myth made up by sad fanboys. The entire Pwn2Own competition was created to demonstrate the insecurity of OS X. The first competition only included OS X (Windows and Linux were introduced in the second P2O).
It won't fit under the seat in front of you or the overhead bin.
The flight attendants would take it and store it with the suits. They'd hand it back as you disembarked.
And through an odd technicality, English Cricket Bats were never banned.
I'd be more concerned about the Cricket stumps rather than the bat.
Stumps are basically large wooden sticks slightly less than 1 metre long and tapered to a point at one end so they can be driven into the ground. Basically they are a long stake (or a short spear).
I dare say, it seems the TSA was bowled for six.
And through an odd technicality, English Cricket Bats were never banned.
Overheard on a recent BA flight into JFK.
English guy 1: I say old bean, what do you say to hijacking this plane before stumps.
English guy 2: Oooh yes, and we can fly it into the pavilion.
English guy 1: Smashing.
English guy 2: Jolly good.
An off the shelf SSD I bought a year ago is still giving me read and write times far in excess of what I get out of an IBM 8Ki RAID card with an array of 15K RPM drives (RAID 5). No need for the latest gen SSD to prove that.
EA treats you gamers like shit all the time and you keep coming back game after game like an addict needing a fix. All this crying and bitching and I guarantee every single complainer here will be first in line for the next EA launch.
Not me.
I gave up on EA a while ago. I said Sim City would be shit and glad to be proven right (feel free to put this to an image of Grumpy Cat).
EA now pander to the brainless COD crowd, they have nothing left that interests me and their few "properties" I do care about such as System Shock I'm glad to see EA doing absolutely nothing with.
In a few years, EA's going to be broken up like THQ. Then I'll start caring about SShock. Ubi's probably going to break up first though but AFAIK, they've got nothing I care about (Silent Hunter maybe, but I dont play very many SIM's).
Its unlikely that many of your games will end up on the cache seeing as its only 8 GB.
You don't know how this works. The firmware recognizes individual HD sectors that are frequently read, and transparently copies them to the SSD.
I think the point was that if you're a gamer, you'll already have an SSD. 120GB SSD's are under A$100 now and gamers tend to be willing to drop a bit of coin on their rig. I bought my first 256GB SSD when it reached $330, I bought another 512GB SSD when they dropped under $550.
Hybrid drives aren't for gamers, rather for users that regularly use a small subset of applications and want better performance. Someone who has 140 GB of media, but only uses Word, Excel and VLC on their laptop.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
/wipes tear from eye
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
And I'm done.
I'll spare you another round of sarcastic laughing. EA requires Origin, Ubisoft requires Uplay. All of these things are exactly what you described above.
Ubisoft has been trying this shit with their games for a while now. FarCry 3 was meant to have the same DRM, it was cracked before release day. I downloaded it, installed sans that Uplay shit and played it with no problems... Especially compared to the problems people who legitimately bought the game had.
Piracy now solves more technical problems then it creates. I remember the days when you had to run a variety of filter programs and CD emulators to get around Starforce, now I just install a crack and it works better than the original.
The real irony is, I was going to give Ubisoft money for FC3, up until the point I found out about the always online DRM. Instead I pirated it and gave my money to another publisher. I spend quite a bit of money on games, I'm also willing to wait until the game gets to Oz from the US or UK (Australian prices are screwed, we pay twice as much for games) but I wont pay for a game that can be deactivated and leave me with an unplayable mess (and if you dont think the Sim City servers wont be deactivated, I've got a few bridges to sell you).
Buy her two iPads.
He asked what do those of us who _dont_ hate our mums do.
Besides, mine's menopausal. She's got no use for pads these days.
Work exactly 40 hours per week, and not at all from home.
Sitting on 37.5 per week ATM.
But I dont get a paid lunch break. Plus side is I can take 2 hours for lunch as long as I still do 7.5 hours a day.
How quickly you change gear makes absolutely no difference to performance. *When* you change gear is crucial, and no automatic gearbox can solve that problem.
So what you are saying, is that I can take 17 seconds to change a gear, but if I change it at just the right moment, ill lose no performance at all compared with somebody who changes gears in 1 second?
Sir, I am in awe of your logic.
You clearly dont drive a manual.
I can accelerate into a corner, put the clutch in, slow and gear down as I turn and use heel to toe whilst releasing the clutch as I come out of the turn for better acceleration. Admittedly, I do this at roundabouts more often than I should.
An Automatic gearbox has to wait until I start to accelerate to drop back down a gear. Automatic gearboxes are always reactionary, a good manual driver is proactive. There is no way, any current production auto can pre-empt what a driver is going to do. Maybe when we've invented enough AI but then again, if we have computers advanced enough to tell what a person will do with that regularity, a person will be sitting in the back sipping martini's whilst the car does all the work.
When I drive auto's, especially "sports" automatic transmissions, they always gear up when I put my foot down, then when they realise I've put my foot down they drop a gear and jump 2000 RPM. Not smooth at all.
What the GP should have said, is that when you drive a manual, you can be in gear before you need it, an Auto is always going to be in gear after you need it... then again if you drove a manual you'd know that (or be really, really crap at driving a manual, in either case my point stands).
To be more accurate, Apple has nowhere to go but down. Their stock price is still in a giant bubble compared to the companies actual worth (market cap is what someone would THEORETICALLY pay not what someone would actually pay).
Apple's stock price got that high because they were very good at marketing. The Iphone had the cool factor but like all fads it's wearing off fast.
I dont think Apple will be destroyed, rather it will be a shadow of it's former self as people become less enamoured with their products and competitors continue to produce superior competing products. Apple never really had the edge in technology, their entire advantage came from being popular, but popularity is a fickle mistress and will abandon them as fast as it came to them. This has already started to happen, Apple wont be destroyed, but it will end up with under 10% of the market (Windows Phone will probably have less than 2%). Their share price will shrink to below pre-iphone levels.
Ultimately, as the cool factor wears off, Apple's customers will begin to realise how abusive Apple is. This is going to hurt them more than anything else. To their competitors Microsoft was as bad as Apple, but MS at least had the wisdom not to abuse their customers and this is why MS is still a juggernaught.
In the last generation the Wii proved dominant by simply setting a reasonable price point and being somewhat novel. Most Wii owners will admit that the machine only sees occasional use (sometimes only as a Netflix player at that) outside of major first party releases.
If by most Wii owners you mean Xbox/PS fanboys, then you're right.
Most Wii owners who also have an Xbox or PS3 will see the Wii out more often than the other consoles because that's where the fun games are. The Xbox is a dust collector and the PS3 might get dragged out as blu-ray player once in a while.
the real reason that the Wii was dominant wasn't simply the price point, rather the good casual games were on the Wii. The PS2 had a higher price point than the Game Cube, but the PS2 still sold better because it had the good casual games like Guitar Hero (Game Cube at release US$199, PS2 at release US$299). Put simply, the Wii was fun, not just for gamers but for non-gamers too. This is why Sony and Microsoft scrambled to recreate the "gimmicks" of the Wii with the Playstation Move and Kinect.
I can almost guarantee that if Microsoft releases an XBox 720 (only one SKU) for $200 that they will be the undisputed champions of this generation.
Lets ignore the fact that will never happen. Even with the lucrative Windows/Office divisions propping the Xbox up, they could never afford to sell at such a loss without a shareholder revolt.
It wont work because most people wan to play Mario Kart, not Halo.
If the WiiU "wins" this generation it won't be due to any brilliance on its part, it will be because Sony and Microsoft both made colossal blunders.
When,
When the Wii U outsells and well and truly makes a giant profit for Nintendo, a large part of that will be owed to the fact that Sony and Microsoft made one giant blunder, thinking that consoles are "hardcore" and not casual.
I for one, think the Wii U is nothing special, but then again no-one is actually offering a competing console. The Xbox and Playstation are foolishly trying to compete against my PC, which is something consoles can never do. So I'll end up getting a Wii U... When the Wii stops being fun (which might take a while, Wii sports and Mario Kart are still quality).
Maybe a console with the same concept as the Ouya, but something like that which can compete with the Wii U is at lest 2 years away.
It seems like the next generation MS and Sony consoles essentially run high-end commodity PC x86(-64) hardware with Blu-Ray drives and huge gobs of system and video memory (8GB combined GDDR5 in the case of PS4). No more Cell, powerpc, whatever have you and horrible graphics memory limitations (like 256MB, wtf).
This is what they did for the last generation. All of it was off the shelf hardware (Cell processors are IBM's power architecture, previously used in Mac's), Graphics cards literally were PC graphics cards, the Xbox 360 used an ATI R500, the PS3 used a Geforce 7800. Both had been superseded on the PC at the time of their release and were outdated within 18 months.
It'll be the same with the next Xbox/Playstation.
Oh, and the graphics limitations came from Sony/Microsoft designs, not the Power architecture as the same limitations didn't exist on PowerPC Mac's.
Nintendo has missed the boat.
Actually, Nintendo is the only one on the boat.
Consoles are casual. This is where the money is. Even the PS2, it sold because of casual games like Guitar Hero. By trying to be "hardcore" (the domain of the PC, consoles have never truly cracked this despite trying to declare the PC "dead" at least twice a year) they have handed the market back to Nintendo by default. The Wii U will sell better and make money not because it's a significant improvement over the Wii, but because the competition isn't really competing.
Once again, Sony and Microsoft are competing for second place and have no-one to blame but themselves.
The reason the Wii did so well is plain as day, the Wii is simple, casual fun. The kind of console I can play when my non-gamer friends come around. As I said, casual games always rule the roost on consoles, Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter, Guitar Hero, Mario Kart... All staples of a good night with mates, no-one wants to play Halo or COD as they're not really fun.
Sony and Microsoft are barking up the wrong tree. They never made money from their previous consoles, never recouped their R&D costs, never made it into the black. If they insist on taking the same money losing path as they did before at least one of them wont be in the console business in 5 years. Probably Sony as MS can keep throwing money from Windows/Office into their Xbox division.
Financial penalties don't work.
If you fine a driver for DUI, he pays the fine and keeps drink driving (in his mind, he doesn't even make the connection between drink driving and punishment. He'll call the fine "revenue raising"). If you take away his license or make him spend a few weeks in jail he now has a real incentive.
Fraud has no such disincentive. Especially fraud perpetrated by large corporations who can simply write a fine down as a loss.
I just checked the Wine AppDB. Perhaps it would be more appropriate in your future trolls to complain that Ubuntu actually can run Colonial Marines.
Its not that I cant run Colonial Marines on Ubuntu... It's just that I really dont want to.
Official: Sony removes ability to play used games.
Posted by samzenpus on Friday February 20, @06:19AM
From the but-they-promised department.
An anonymous readers writes
I love those plugs. I've lived in many countries and I've frequently had trouble with sockets that don't reliably make contact, wall warts that fall out of sockets and sockets that spark like July 4. The British plug doesn't have these problems. It just works. And you soon learn not to leave them lying about.
No argument here. the 2 pin US and Euro plugs seem to fall out if so much as a slight breeze hits them. A shame these plugs are so prevalent in Asia.
The Australian plug is the same, once it's in you know it'll take force to remove it, but a bit less deadly to tread on.
As my console friends remind me. There's a much greater simplicity and ease of use of the consoles versus the PCs in their eyes.
They will still buy consoles, for the same reason that your parents don't run virtualized environments to emulate other operating systems, and the same reason that most people I've met haven't cracked their Wii... it's all too complicated and frustrating for them. This doesn't preclude other people setting it up for them, but they often don't feel comfortable with it.
And this is exactly why Sony and Microsoft are barking up the wrong tree by going after the "hardcore" market. People who play console games are casual gamers. This is why the Wii won the last generation, even the PS2 owes its success to casual games like Guitar Hero and Buzz. The Wii was so successful because it was simple, casual fun. Games for average people not for gamers (nothing wrong with that, I have a Wii so I can play games with my non-gamer friends).
People who are serious about gaming still game on the PC. The shortness of most console games is evident of this, you breeze through the latest Call of Halo or whatever in 6 hours.
I'll be the first to admit the Wii U is nothing special and more than a bit gimmick-y, but Sony and Microsoft seem intent on making the same mistake they made in the last generation and handing this generation to Nintendo by default.
The real dark horse in this console generation with be the "mobile" consoles like Ouya. Ouya wont be a smashing success, but it will be enough of a success to make people take it seriously.