I don't think it's a joke, or if it is it's gonna backfire. Nintendo's biggest software partners didn't find out about the name any earlier than the rest of us (I know this for a fact). They are all in the middle of finalizing their E3 stands and promotional materials and now all of a sudden they have to change all the names to Wii. If Nintendo stand up on day one and change the name again, they will be VERY pissed off.
I'm not a "hardcore" gamer (though I play a decent number of games). I think the name is dumb. My older brother IS a hardcore gamer, he works for Sega, and he thinks the name is dumb. My fiance is not a gamer. She likes Paper Mario and Bejewelled and that's about it. She thinks the name is dumb.
Everyone I've spoken to (IRL) about this thinks the name is dumb, be they male or female, gay or straight. I don't need an edgy name, I think GameCube was a pretty good name - simple but descriptive. But Wii looks stupid on paper, and sounds even worse when actually pronounced.
There are dozens, and your experience with the issues you described would be completely different with each one.
And I think that's part of the problem right there:)
I admit that I am biased against Windows; I run dozens of remote Linux servers, under spectacularly heavy and varying use, running everything from 2.4.18 to 2.6.16 kernels, for months at a time -- I have only rarely used a Windows machine that has been able to stay up for over a day, and then under very light use. I've used every version of windows since the one before the 3.x series (did they call it 2.0? I don't remember). My current XP machine, "professionally" managed and maintained by a battalion of Windows maintenance guys, with the very latest patches and virus scanners, must be rebooted daily -- and I use it to read email. Go figure...
As we all know one person's experiences don't match everyone else's. My XP machine at work is rebooted automatically every Sunday. I can't recall it ever crashing or locking up. Ever. Granted, that's with a very expensive support operation behind it - but we also have a very expensive support operation to keep our Sun and Redhat servers running. Case in point - my extremely expensive PRODUCTION Solaris servers get way more downtime than my cheap Dell desktop. Go figure...
My home network (1 XP server, 2 XP desktops, 1 XP laptop and an iBook) is managed by basically no-one. I mean I do what needs doing but that isn't much. The server just sits there, working. It reboots every so often for updates (every couple of weeks I'd guess) but that's automatic and happens in the middle of the night so I don't care. The desktops are pretty much self maintaining too - my personal XP install seems a little flaky since the latest nVidia drivers went in but it still goes a week at a time without problems. Strangely the only machine I have regular problems with is the iBook - a bit ago it just suddenly decided not to connect to the wireless network. Nothing and no-one (called Apple) could fix it short of a reinstall of OSX. Still no idea what caused that but it's OK again now.
The point of all this? I have good experiences with Windows so I don't have any inclination to use anything else on the desktop. I still wouldn't even consider it for a real server (I just don't trust MS on a security basis), but you stick with what works. If you have good experiences with Linux, great. That doesn't mean everyone's having the same tough time with Windows you did. Not everyone gets virii (none here in 20 years), not everyone has tons of malware (firefox & a firewall seem to stop it all). Use what works for you:)
There may be no PR value in making it public, but you can bet your bottom dollar those devs building your custom systems are doing so with a ton of OSS code. I know they do, that's exactly the field I work in. There is no "open source banking system" but there's an open source webserver, and an open source app server, and an open source unit test framework, and an open source rendering framework, and...you get the picture.
Crap. I work for one of the big investment banks. We use a lot of OSS, and yes, we contribute back in some cases. There are a number of projects which I know you've heard of that we have contributed significantly to. However, we almost always do it under another name. Why? Because if something goes horribly wrong with some application in the future we don't want our name all over it.
We also contribute financially to companies who provide support (e.g. RedHat, JBoss etc).
Poppycock. The GPL provides certain rights (such as modifying and distributing the source to an app) and also forbids some activities (such as lifting chunks of code into a non-GPL app) - it's not "protecting your freedom" in any real sense. I think maybe you're confusing the GPL with something like the BSD license.
I don't use it because of the 7z compression format. I use it because 7-zip opens pretty much any archive I throw at it (unlike most of it's competitors) and it's free (also unlike most of it's competitors).
Oh please - obselete? That's BS. Most of the people I interact with on a daily basis only just grasp email - none of them would have any clue what RSS even was. Hell, I've written RSS clients and even I don't actually use RSS - I just don't find it useful. Plus, it's utterly useless if you're sending out customized content - you'd need a seperate feed URL/params for each user and so you'd also need auth - something which RSS is basically hopeless at.
People (normal people, not people like you) actually LIKE email, when it's appropriate and they asked for it. I LIKE getting emails once a week about concerts I might want to go to, and special offers from the stores I frequently buy from, and automated updates on order status. That's not spam, it's useful information being provided to me because I asked for it. Any "solution" to spam which reduces the usefulness of email as a whole is not a solution.
If it's a straightforward "what's my balance" question I won't even call - that's what the website is for (if they don't have a decent website, I don't do business with them). The _only_ time I call companies (I'm a geek, real human-human conversation scares me!) is when there's something wrong I need to speak with someone about. Thus, any system which hinders that is a PITA.
I don't have any problem with the estate having that view. However, I don't believe the law affords protection for an artists "style" (remember, there's no actual copyright infringment here - Miro never painted a Google logo) and I don't believe it should.
Look at music - you can't sue someone for sounding like you, otherwise the Beatles estate could have made a fortune out of Oasis and every Britney-alike pop princess would be busy sueing all the others. You CAN sue for specific infringment of specific works (e.g. stealing a hook, or sampling a vocal). If Google had done this - if they'd taken actual parts of Miro works and used them, then I would agree with the estate. But they didn't, they made a new - ORIGINAL - work which just happened to remind people of Miro.
I think you're misunderstanding me, I don't have an ipod or itunes:) And that's one of the reasons. My lossless library is FLAC, and the lossy Vorbis, playback is via Squeezeboxes and a couple of Rio Karmas.
1) The fullsize ipods do video now. That needs a whole lot more space. The nano doesn't do video (does it?) and so the nano almost fits the "music only" category, which tops out around 20-40GB for most people. The HD based ipods then become more and more targetted at video customers.
2) Lossless. I listen to my music at home via Squeezeboxes, and lots of people are starting to use HTPCs, Airport, etc to listen to the same rips at home as on the go. I know I sure as hell don't want to listen to AAC or MP3 on my nice hifi, so it's lossless all the way. Now I could (and in fact, do) keep two copies of everything - one for portable and one for home. But that's a pain to maintain. Would be easier if I didn't have to worry about space and could store all those huge files on a portable player too. My CD rips are currently around 200GB, and most of it is still lossy. When it's all reripped as lossless we'll be looking at over 0.5TB. Bring on the big portable players:)
Meh...my music library is around 200GB (all legal, I might add). My portable player is only 20 so there's a lot not on it - the larger the better as far as I'm concerned.
Oh and I don't say this to boast, I'm music obsessed and realise I'm not "normal" in that sense, but it's the old slashdot adage - just because it's not useful for you doesn't mean it's not useful.
Actually the USPS do offer a service where they scan return envelopes at your local Post Office. It's used by a number of companies including Netflix to speed up return times.
There's still a shortage in many areas, and a good supply in others. Hopefully we'll see that sorting itself out over the next few weeks. Having your product actually on the shelves can only help sales!
I'll just ignore the whole backwards compatibility and some games not running on it until you upgrade thing. Probably wise, since the N64 wasn't BC at all and didn't offer any bugfix mechanism (and don't tell me none of the games had bugs). I'm not aware of any games which need the HD to run, patches or no patches. But I'll agree that you need some kind of storage to get the most out of the console (much like the PS/PS2/NGC, etc).
According to wikipedia (and I have no idea if this is accurate) the SNES in the US launched with a whopping 3 titles: Super Mario, F-Zero & Pilotwings. I never played Pilotwings but the other two certainly stand out as great games of their time. Even assuming Pilotwings was just as good, we're looking at 3 great games - the 360 easily provides that, plus considerably more variety.
This isn't crazy MS fanboysim - I'm sure the PS3 and Rev will also have great launch lineups - but some people seem to have a rather blinkered memory when it comes to previous consoles. Whilst they may have gone onto great things, many had pretty small (and/or crappy) choices at launch. What I find particularly amusing with the current trend for bashing the 360 and PS3 for having too many sequels is that the launch lineup for the N64 was Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64! I guess F-Zero 64 was behind schedule...
If we're talking "launch window" then I believe Sim City, Populus, Lemmings, Contra, and several other high profile games qualify as well. To which I offer GRAW, DOA4, Tomb Raider, Oblivion, etc. We can argue over which games we prefer for ever (though I have no intention of doing so!) but my point remains - the original assertion that the 360's launch lineup was "crap" is BS.
No, I mean $299. That's the price of the 360 Core. The $399 price gets you some extra accessories, none of which are essential - or included with previous consoles.
Sounds like you're buying the wrong games. Burnout is great, GTA is great, Wipeout is great, Hot Shots Golf is insanely great and I heard excellent things about the XMen game (not my scene). There are plenty of good games on the PSP, in fact, if you look at metacritic the numbers are very similar to the DS library, which gets huge praise around most parts.
I've seen the crap titles that launched with the 360 Pardon? There were 19 launch titles, that's pretty good in itself. That list included one of the best racing games ever (PGR3), a pretty fine WW2 shooter (CoD2), and a decent survival horror game (Condemned). All those titles have over 80% average review scores. In my world that's not "crap". I also happened to really like Kameo, Quake 4 and Amped 3, but the praise was slightly less universal for those. I challenge you to compare the 360's launch line up with that of ANY other console, and we'll see how crap it looks then.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, but as I see Firefox crash many times more often than IE should the same hold? Should the Firefox "quality agent" advise me to try Opera?
I don't think it's a joke, or if it is it's gonna backfire. Nintendo's biggest software partners didn't find out about the name any earlier than the rest of us (I know this for a fact). They are all in the middle of finalizing their E3 stands and promotional materials and now all of a sudden they have to change all the names to Wii. If Nintendo stand up on day one and change the name again, they will be VERY pissed off.
I'm not a "hardcore" gamer (though I play a decent number of games). I think the name is dumb. My older brother IS a hardcore gamer, he works for Sega, and he thinks the name is dumb. My fiance is not a gamer. She likes Paper Mario and Bejewelled and that's about it. She thinks the name is dumb.
Everyone I've spoken to (IRL) about this thinks the name is dumb, be they male or female, gay or straight. I don't need an edgy name, I think GameCube was a pretty good name - simple but descriptive. But Wii looks stupid on paper, and sounds even worse when actually pronounced.
There are dozens, and your experience with the issues you described would be completely different with each one.
:)
:)
And I think that's part of the problem right there
I admit that I am biased against Windows; I run dozens of remote Linux servers, under spectacularly heavy and varying use, running everything from 2.4.18 to 2.6.16 kernels, for months at a time -- I have only rarely used a Windows machine that has been able to stay up for over a day, and then under very light use. I've used every version of windows since the one before the 3.x series (did they call it 2.0? I don't remember). My current XP machine, "professionally" managed and maintained by a battalion of Windows maintenance guys, with the very latest patches and virus scanners, must be rebooted daily -- and I use it to read email. Go figure...
As we all know one person's experiences don't match everyone else's. My XP machine at work is rebooted automatically every Sunday. I can't recall it ever crashing or locking up. Ever. Granted, that's with a very expensive support operation behind it - but we also have a very expensive support operation to keep our Sun and Redhat servers running. Case in point - my extremely expensive PRODUCTION Solaris servers get way more downtime than my cheap Dell desktop. Go figure...
My home network (1 XP server, 2 XP desktops, 1 XP laptop and an iBook) is managed by basically no-one. I mean I do what needs doing but that isn't much. The server just sits there, working. It reboots every so often for updates (every couple of weeks I'd guess) but that's automatic and happens in the middle of the night so I don't care. The desktops are pretty much self maintaining too - my personal XP install seems a little flaky since the latest nVidia drivers went in but it still goes a week at a time without problems. Strangely the only machine I have regular problems with is the iBook - a bit ago it just suddenly decided not to connect to the wireless network. Nothing and no-one (called Apple) could fix it short of a reinstall of OSX. Still no idea what caused that but it's OK again now.
The point of all this? I have good experiences with Windows so I don't have any inclination to use anything else on the desktop. I still wouldn't even consider it for a real server (I just don't trust MS on a security basis), but you stick with what works. If you have good experiences with Linux, great. That doesn't mean everyone's having the same tough time with Windows you did. Not everyone gets virii (none here in 20 years), not everyone has tons of malware (firefox & a firewall seem to stop it all). Use what works for you
There may be no PR value in making it public, but you can bet your bottom dollar those devs building your custom systems are doing so with a ton of OSS code. I know they do, that's exactly the field I work in. There is no "open source banking system" but there's an open source webserver, and an open source app server, and an open source unit test framework, and an open source rendering framework, and...you get the picture.
Crap. I work for one of the big investment banks. We use a lot of OSS, and yes, we contribute back in some cases. There are a number of projects which I know you've heard of that we have contributed significantly to. However, we almost always do it under another name. Why? Because if something goes horribly wrong with some application in the future we don't want our name all over it.
We also contribute financially to companies who provide support (e.g. RedHat, JBoss etc).
Poppycock. The GPL provides certain rights (such as modifying and distributing the source to an app) and also forbids some activities (such as lifting chunks of code into a non-GPL app) - it's not "protecting your freedom" in any real sense. I think maybe you're confusing the GPL with something like the BSD license.
I don't use it because of the 7z compression format. I use it because 7-zip opens pretty much any archive I throw at it (unlike most of it's competitors) and it's free (also unlike most of it's competitors).
Oh please - obselete? That's BS. Most of the people I interact with on a daily basis only just grasp email - none of them would have any clue what RSS even was. Hell, I've written RSS clients and even I don't actually use RSS - I just don't find it useful. Plus, it's utterly useless if you're sending out customized content - you'd need a seperate feed URL/params for each user and so you'd also need auth - something which RSS is basically hopeless at.
People (normal people, not people like you) actually LIKE email, when it's appropriate and they asked for it. I LIKE getting emails once a week about concerts I might want to go to, and special offers from the stores I frequently buy from, and automated updates on order status. That's not spam, it's useful information being provided to me because I asked for it. Any "solution" to spam which reduces the usefulness of email as a whole is not a solution.
If it's a straightforward "what's my balance" question I won't even call - that's what the website is for (if they don't have a decent website, I don't do business with them). The _only_ time I call companies (I'm a geek, real human-human conversation scares me!) is when there's something wrong I need to speak with someone about. Thus, any system which hinders that is a PITA.
I don't have any problem with the estate having that view. However, I don't believe the law affords protection for an artists "style" (remember, there's no actual copyright infringment here - Miro never painted a Google logo) and I don't believe it should.
Look at music - you can't sue someone for sounding like you, otherwise the Beatles estate could have made a fortune out of Oasis and every Britney-alike pop princess would be busy sueing all the others. You CAN sue for specific infringment of specific works (e.g. stealing a hook, or sampling a vocal). If Google had done this - if they'd taken actual parts of Miro works and used them, then I would agree with the estate. But they didn't, they made a new - ORIGINAL - work which just happened to remind people of Miro.
I think you're misunderstanding me, I don't have an ipod or itunes :) And that's one of the reasons. My lossless library is FLAC, and the lossy Vorbis, playback is via Squeezeboxes and a couple of Rio Karmas.
Right, but you forget two major factors.
:)
1) The fullsize ipods do video now. That needs a whole lot more space. The nano doesn't do video (does it?) and so the nano almost fits the "music only" category, which tops out around 20-40GB for most people. The HD based ipods then become more and more targetted at video customers.
2) Lossless. I listen to my music at home via Squeezeboxes, and lots of people are starting to use HTPCs, Airport, etc to listen to the same rips at home as on the go. I know I sure as hell don't want to listen to AAC or MP3 on my nice hifi, so it's lossless all the way. Now I could (and in fact, do) keep two copies of everything - one for portable and one for home. But that's a pain to maintain. Would be easier if I didn't have to worry about space and could store all those huge files on a portable player too. My CD rips are currently around 200GB, and most of it is still lossy. When it's all reripped as lossless we'll be looking at over 0.5TB. Bring on the big portable players
Meh...my music library is around 200GB (all legal, I might add). My portable player is only 20 so there's a lot not on it - the larger the better as far as I'm concerned.
Oh and I don't say this to boast, I'm music obsessed and realise I'm not "normal" in that sense, but it's the old slashdot adage - just because it's not useful for you doesn't mean it's not useful.
Actually the USPS do offer a service where they scan return envelopes at your local Post Office. It's used by a number of companies including Netflix to speed up return times.
Tivo can do that, at least it could 3 years ago when I last had one.
I don't think it's that bad to expect Java to be available to install WebSphere, seeing as you need Java to be available to run the damn thing.
Actually there were 19 games at launch, and there are in the region of 30-35 out right now. And it's less than 5 months since launch (Nov 22), not 6.
There's still a shortage in many areas, and a good supply in others. Hopefully we'll see that sorting itself out over the next few weeks. Having your product actually on the shelves can only help sales!
I'll just ignore the whole backwards compatibility and some games not running on it until you upgrade thing.
Probably wise, since the N64 wasn't BC at all and didn't offer any bugfix mechanism (and don't tell me none of the games had bugs). I'm not aware of any games which need the HD to run, patches or no patches. But I'll agree that you need some kind of storage to get the most out of the console (much like the PS/PS2/NGC, etc).
According to wikipedia (and I have no idea if this is accurate) the SNES in the US launched with a whopping 3 titles: Super Mario, F-Zero & Pilotwings. I never played Pilotwings but the other two certainly stand out as great games of their time. Even assuming Pilotwings was just as good, we're looking at 3 great games - the 360 easily provides that, plus considerably more variety.
This isn't crazy MS fanboysim - I'm sure the PS3 and Rev will also have great launch lineups - but some people seem to have a rather blinkered memory when it comes to previous consoles. Whilst they may have gone onto great things, many had pretty small (and/or crappy) choices at launch. What I find particularly amusing with the current trend for bashing the 360 and PS3 for having too many sequels is that the launch lineup for the N64 was Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64! I guess F-Zero 64 was behind schedule...
If we're talking "launch window" then I believe Sim City, Populus, Lemmings, Contra, and several other high profile games qualify as well.
To which I offer GRAW, DOA4, Tomb Raider, Oblivion, etc. We can argue over which games we prefer for ever (though I have no intention of doing so!) but my point remains - the original assertion that the 360's launch lineup was "crap" is BS.
No, I mean $299. That's the price of the 360 Core. The $399 price gets you some extra accessories, none of which are essential - or included with previous consoles.
Sounds like you're buying the wrong games. Burnout is great, GTA is great, Wipeout is great, Hot Shots Golf is insanely great and I heard excellent things about the XMen game (not my scene). There are plenty of good games on the PSP, in fact, if you look at metacritic the numbers are very similar to the DS library, which gets huge praise around most parts.
I've seen the crap titles that launched with the 360
Pardon? There were 19 launch titles, that's pretty good in itself. That list included one of the best racing games ever (PGR3), a pretty fine WW2 shooter (CoD2), and a decent survival horror game (Condemned). All those titles have over 80% average review scores. In my world that's not "crap". I also happened to really like Kameo, Quake 4 and Amped 3, but the praise was slightly less universal for those. I challenge you to compare the 360's launch line up with that of ANY other console, and we'll see how crap it looks then.
Actually the N64 was $199 at launch in the US, that's about $250 in today's money. By comparison, that's not much less than the 360 ($299).