Seriously, dude, you need to move house. I actually like living in a place I don't fear for my life or that of my family. You should try it, or do you not care what happens to them?
When you were a kid and out tackling other kids or hitting baseballs through the neighbor's window, what was your kid sister doing? Playing with dolls! That should tell you something!
I'm sorry, that's sexist crap. I'm a guy and as a kid I hated being outside. I never played sports, I much preferred staying at home and playing with my He Man and Transformers figures. You know, dolls for boys. Later I progressed to computers, and we all know where it went from there. On the flip side, my girlfriend was the opposite. From what I hear she was quite the tomboy, always getting in trouble, playing every outdoor game she could (t ball, lacrosse, whatever) and ending up as a cheerleader. These days I like GTA, she likes Paper Mario, and we both like Lego Star Wars.
last time i was in europe i didnt see any 12 year old girls wearing 'porn *' shirts.
Exactly. Because there's less taboo, it's less desirable. Kids (particularly teenagers) love to do things that shock adults, it's what lets them figure out the boundaries of what's acceptable. No taboo, not interested.
My mother played some serious mind games on me as a kid - she'd offer to sign me off sick from school whenever I wanted. So of course I rebelled by studying hard...hmm...easily manipulable;)
That's a personal preference. You have the right to not look at naked people, and to not let your kids look at naked people. You do not, however, have any right to dictate whether I can.
Compare the sport of car racing vs. car simulators, where physical exertion levels are near identical
I take it by "car simulators" you mean Gran Turismo and the like? In which case, I say, WTF??!!?!?
F1 drivers (as a good example) are extremely fit, as the physical exertion of a race is huge. Think about being cramped into a small, hot, metal box for 2 hours, experiencing constant 5G swings in all directions, while keeping your head pointed in the right direction to see where you're going and maintaining a delicate touch on brake, gas, steering, etc. As well as all around fitness (particularly heat training), they have special exercise machines for strengthening neck muscles. A regular person would not survive a race, never mind a crash.
This just proves that Nintendo and Sony were both right for shying away from the online market during the current generation. 10% doesn't seem enough to justify the associated costs and difficulties with setting up an infrastructure that will work
Assuming that all those 2 million players subscribe for just one year at $50, that's $100 million. The "assocaiated costs" would be, maybe, $5 million. You're telling me that Sony and Nintendo were right for not even trying to get a part of that $95 million pot?
Amen. I swear I'm never giving another cent to a traditional phone company, they all suck (and overcharge to boot). Vonage has been 100% for me for nearly 2 years now...love it.
Can you tolerate the loss of your phone for 52.6 hours? 99.4% uptime == 52.6 hours of downtime per year.
When it costs less than one third of a landline whilst offering more features, and I have a cellphone as a backup? Sure. Next question?
I will probably maintain a POTS line for as long as I live because no amount of IP or virtual this-and-that will ever be as good as solid copper to the handset!
Sure, the copper goes from the handset about...ohh...1 mile or so. Then it goes switched. You guys talk like POTS is some magic network where every phone is hard wired to every other one and nothing ever goes wrong. That's crap. POTS fails plenty, it's happened to me a number of times. I went through months of having a dodgy phone connection a few years ago with BT, and more recently several days of outages with Verizon. When your POTS goes out what are you going to do? Cry? Or just use another phone?
On 9/11 I couldn't get a phone line to work from downtown Manhattan all day (or most of the next). However, my email (and thus VoIP, if I had had it then) was fine throughout.
No technology is 100% reliable, they all have their weakpoints. It is the users responsibility to ensure that they have adequate understanding of what the weaknesses are and have backup plans. Personally, I have VoIP at home. My backup plan is either of the 2 cellphones in the apartment, or one of our 200 neighbours in the building, or the building doorman. I think that just about covers it... Of course, YMMV, and that's why choice is a good thing.
I had more outages with my Verizon line (almost 3 days total) in 1 year than I've had with Vonage (0 days) in 2 years. Of course individual experiences aren't statistically important, but the common assertion that POTS is uber-reliable is far from accurate in my opinion.
People who are chinese and exist in the game for the sole purpose of collecting gold and selling it are chinese gold farmers
Indeed. And farmers with blonde hair are "blonde gold farmers", and farmers who ride bikes are "bicycling gold farmers", and farmers who eat pizza are "pizza eating gold farmers". Do you make those distinctions also? Or only the ones based on ethnicity or nationality? I suspect I know the answer.
You just need to look beyond Apple. My Fujitsu is 4lbs, probably closer to 3 if you take out the optical drive. It's got a 13" screen, 4+ hours battery life and cost $1400 or thereabouts.
Unlike in the UK where on calling the emergency services you have to give them your address, in the US there is this thing called E911 where the address is given to the call center automatically (from phone company records). That obviously doesn't work with VoIP as they have no way of knowing where your handset is plugged in at any one time. Personally, having lived in the UK for 28 years and survived to tell the tail (despite having to call 999 a number of times) I don't see what the big deal is, but it does seem to be a big deal to a lot of people.
They shipped the Dawn demo with their cards and it was a simple config file change for her to lose some clothes - all the *ahem* "textures" were there in photoreal quality. What if some kid bought a new graphics card to play UT2K4 - their enjoyment of mindless violence and killing could have been tainted!
Indeed, because of the violence. I think it SHOULD be rated AO/18/whatever, but the fact that it was OK to be Mature rated until they discovered the sex scenes is the crazy bit. If the game had the sex but not the violence, I'd vote for a 15 rating (in the UK, Teen I guess in the US).
All of the above mean that current public transport is a dreadfully slow and expensive method of travel. Is it any wonder at all that people don't like current public transport and would rather sit in a congested traffic jam?
Rubbish. Actual real world example - travelling from London to Sheffield for the weekend, something I have done many, many times. For those of you outside the UK, this is a journey of about 170 miles or so, but along some of the countries busiest roads (more so on a friday night).
When driving, the journey time varied between 3.5 and 7 hours (yes, 7) door to door. By train, it's a touch over 2 hours on the Midland Mainline, plus the time taken to get to the station (depends on where you are in London, for me it was about 30 mins). So a reliable 2.5 hours vs a possible 7 hours. I think that explains why the trains were very popular and almost always booked solid.
Just for completeness, let's include cost. I paid roughly 40-50UKP for the train ticket (return). Compares fairly well to about 1.5 tanks of fuel for the car at 25-30UKP each, plus maintenance costs, depreciation of car value, etc. These numbers are a couple of years old, so might not be accurate now.
So whilst I agree with the general premise that public transport is not always as attractive as it could be, saying that it is in all cases slow and expensive is complete rubbish. Also, the road system is subsidied (the building of roads, the policing of roads, the cleanup of the environment, etc) and I'd be willing to bet it's a lot more than 4 billion. Public transport needs to be subsidised to make it cost effective, but in the end it works out cheaper for everyone.
I don't see it as crippled. It's advertised and sold as a device for playing games, watching movies and listening to music. I can do all those things on mine, whether it be watching DVD rips, listening to mp3s, or playing (paid for) games. All this is from built in, Sony approved functionality. In addition, with a suitable proxy and a copy of Wipeout I can browse the web via wifi, although I'm not sure why I'd want to given the lack of keyboard.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that no, it's not easy to load your own apps on this device, but that doesn't make it "crippled". If you want some general purpose device go buy an ipaq or one of those Sharp linux things.
Call me in a year, when it's $100 cheaper and the hacking community has made it easy for me, the casual user, to enjoy the full potential of such a machine
If the hacking community continue their quest to make pirating games easier I doubt it will drop $100 in price, they may not even be being sold anymore. And besides, I really don't think you fit into the normal definition of "casual user".
In the UK we had Quazar and Laser Quest. I played both a LOT, I represented my city on the national Quazar league and played for our local Lazer Quest team. The two games were quite different, the LQ equipment was heavier and much more accurate - it was way to easy to score a hit with Quazar (which was mainly aimed at kids). LQ was more like paintball, larger arenas, more "rough", and lots of crazy game variants played after hours. As for n00b fragging, yes it happend (a lot). I would go down to practise and typically there would be one or two other good players there. The marshalls knew us all and would put us on opposing teams, but still everyone else out for a fun sunday afternoon game was in for the slaughter. Ahh...fun times...about my only foray into team sports, being a geek and all:)
What does baseball/football/basketball et al. have to do with higher education?
Speaking as someone who went to University in the UK (where college sports teams are strictly amateur and are lucky to attract 20 spectators to a match) I see the whole obsession with sports as seriously detrimental to the education system over here in the US. My GF works at a technical school near NYC and even though they're really not a big sports school they still have these little primadonna assholes running around doing whatever they please just because they're good at basketball. They disrupt lessons, distract the other kids (who are actually there to learn something) and generally make a nuisance of themselves, yet the academic staff are powerless to expel them because Admissions want the publicity of winning the odd game of football or something. Totally fucking absurd. If you want to train people to be football players have football schools - Universities are for people who want to actually study for a degree. Of course I have no problem with people playing sports on the side - but there are too many people majoring in dicking around and taking classes on the side.
Slashdot Mirror
Current monthly spend on video games & related products/services: $100-200
Predicted monthly spend on video games which use this "service": $0
Do the math.
Who cares about banks? I know my needs are being looked after. Check out positions 32, 36, 37, and 50. :)
Seriously, dude, you need to move house. I actually like living in a place I don't fear for my life or that of my family. You should try it, or do you not care what happens to them?
/me drops his head and goes back to school....
you're right, of course.
When you were a kid and out tackling other kids or hitting baseballs through the neighbor's window, what was your kid sister doing? Playing with dolls! That should tell you something!
I'm sorry, that's sexist crap. I'm a guy and as a kid I hated being outside. I never played sports, I much preferred staying at home and playing with my He Man and Transformers figures. You know, dolls for boys. Later I progressed to computers, and we all know where it went from there. On the flip side, my girlfriend was the opposite. From what I hear she was quite the tomboy, always getting in trouble, playing every outdoor game she could (t ball, lacrosse, whatever) and ending up as a cheerleader. These days I like GTA, she likes Paper Mario, and we both like Lego Star Wars.
last time i was in europe i didnt see any 12 year old girls wearing 'porn *' shirts.
;)
Exactly. Because there's less taboo, it's less desirable. Kids (particularly teenagers) love to do things that shock adults, it's what lets them figure out the boundaries of what's acceptable. No taboo, not interested.
My mother played some serious mind games on me as a kid - she'd offer to sign me off sick from school whenever I wanted. So of course I rebelled by studying hard...hmm...easily manipulable
You know what they say about averages - half earn more than that.
That's a personal preference. You have the right to not look at naked people, and to not let your kids look at naked people. You do not, however, have any right to dictate whether I can.
Compare the sport of car racing vs. car simulators, where physical exertion levels are near identical
I take it by "car simulators" you mean Gran Turismo and the like? In which case, I say, WTF??!!?!?
F1 drivers (as a good example) are extremely fit, as the physical exertion of a race is huge. Think about being cramped into a small, hot, metal box for 2 hours, experiencing constant 5G swings in all directions, while keeping your head pointed in the right direction to see where you're going and maintaining a delicate touch on brake, gas, steering, etc. As well as all around fitness (particularly heat training), they have special exercise machines for strengthening neck muscles. A regular person would not survive a race, never mind a crash.
This just proves that Nintendo and Sony were both right for shying away from the online market during the current generation. 10% doesn't seem enough to justify the associated costs and difficulties with setting up an infrastructure that will work
Assuming that all those 2 million players subscribe for just one year at $50, that's $100 million. The "assocaiated costs" would be, maybe, $5 million. You're telling me that Sony and Nintendo were right for not even trying to get a part of that $95 million pot?
PS2 + memory card: $180
PSP (inc memory card) : $250
Being able to put it in your pocket: Priceless
Amen. I swear I'm never giving another cent to a traditional phone company, they all suck (and overcharge to boot). Vonage has been 100% for me for nearly 2 years now...love it.
Can you tolerate the loss of your phone for 52.6 hours?
99.4% uptime == 52.6 hours of downtime per year.
When it costs less than one third of a landline whilst offering more features, and I have a cellphone as a backup? Sure. Next question?
I will probably maintain a POTS line for as long as I live because no amount of IP or virtual this-and-that will ever be as good as solid copper to the handset!
Sure, the copper goes from the handset about...ohh...1 mile or so. Then it goes switched. You guys talk like POTS is some magic network where every phone is hard wired to every other one and nothing ever goes wrong. That's crap. POTS fails plenty, it's happened to me a number of times. I went through months of having a dodgy phone connection a few years ago with BT, and more recently several days of outages with Verizon. When your POTS goes out what are you going to do? Cry? Or just use another phone?
On 9/11 I couldn't get a phone line to work from downtown Manhattan all day (or most of the next). However, my email (and thus VoIP, if I had had it then) was fine throughout.
No technology is 100% reliable, they all have their weakpoints. It is the users responsibility to ensure that they have adequate understanding of what the weaknesses are and have backup plans. Personally, I have VoIP at home. My backup plan is either of the 2 cellphones in the apartment, or one of our 200 neighbours in the building, or the building doorman. I think that just about covers it... Of course, YMMV, and that's why choice is a good thing.
I had more outages with my Verizon line (almost 3 days total) in 1 year than I've had with Vonage (0 days) in 2 years. Of course individual experiences aren't statistically important, but the common assertion that POTS is uber-reliable is far from accurate in my opinion.
People who are chinese and exist in the game for the sole purpose of collecting gold and selling it are chinese gold farmers
Indeed. And farmers with blonde hair are "blonde gold farmers", and farmers who ride bikes are "bicycling gold farmers", and farmers who eat pizza are "pizza eating gold farmers". Do you make those distinctions also? Or only the ones based on ethnicity or nationality? I suspect I know the answer.
You just need to look beyond Apple. My Fujitsu is 4lbs, probably closer to 3 if you take out the optical drive. It's got a 13" screen, 4+ hours battery life and cost $1400 or thereabouts.
Unlike in the UK where on calling the emergency services you have to give them your address, in the US there is this thing called E911 where the address is given to the call center automatically (from phone company records). That obviously doesn't work with VoIP as they have no way of knowing where your handset is plugged in at any one time. Personally, having lived in the UK for 28 years and survived to tell the tail (despite having to call 999 a number of times) I don't see what the big deal is, but it does seem to be a big deal to a lot of people.
They shipped the Dawn demo with their cards and it was a simple config file change for her to lose some clothes - all the *ahem* "textures" were there in photoreal quality. What if some kid bought a new graphics card to play UT2K4 - their enjoyment of mindless violence and killing could have been tainted!
Indeed, because of the violence. I think it SHOULD be rated AO/18/whatever, but the fact that it was OK to be Mature rated until they discovered the sex scenes is the crazy bit. If the game had the sex but not the violence, I'd vote for a 15 rating (in the UK, Teen I guess in the US).
All of the above mean that current public transport is a dreadfully slow and expensive method of travel. Is it any wonder at all that people don't like current public transport and would rather sit in a congested traffic jam?
Rubbish. Actual real world example - travelling from London to Sheffield for the weekend, something I have done many, many times. For those of you outside the UK, this is a journey of about 170 miles or so, but along some of the countries busiest roads (more so on a friday night).
When driving, the journey time varied between 3.5 and 7 hours (yes, 7) door to door. By train, it's a touch over 2 hours on the Midland Mainline, plus the time taken to get to the station (depends on where you are in London, for me it was about 30 mins). So a reliable 2.5 hours vs a possible 7 hours. I think that explains why the trains were very popular and almost always booked solid.
Just for completeness, let's include cost. I paid roughly 40-50UKP for the train ticket (return). Compares fairly well to about 1.5 tanks of fuel for the car at 25-30UKP each, plus maintenance costs, depreciation of car value, etc. These numbers are a couple of years old, so might not be accurate now.
So whilst I agree with the general premise that public transport is not always as attractive as it could be, saying that it is in all cases slow and expensive is complete rubbish. Also, the road system is subsidied (the building of roads, the policing of roads, the cleanup of the environment, etc) and I'd be willing to bet it's a lot more than 4 billion. Public transport needs to be subsidised to make it cost effective, but in the end it works out cheaper for everyone.
He could just wait a couple of months and buy a keyboard DESIGNED for the psp...
Linky
I don't see it as crippled. It's advertised and sold as a device for playing games, watching movies and listening to music. I can do all those things on mine, whether it be watching DVD rips, listening to mp3s, or playing (paid for) games. All this is from built in, Sony approved functionality. In addition, with a suitable proxy and a copy of Wipeout I can browse the web via wifi, although I'm not sure why I'd want to given the lack of keyboard.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that no, it's not easy to load your own apps on this device, but that doesn't make it "crippled". If you want some general purpose device go buy an ipaq or one of those Sharp linux things.
Call me in a year, when it's $100 cheaper and the hacking community has made it easy for me, the casual user, to enjoy the full potential of such a machine
If the hacking community continue their quest to make pirating games easier I doubt it will drop $100 in price, they may not even be being sold anymore. And besides, I really don't think you fit into the normal definition of "casual user".
In the UK we had Quazar and Laser Quest. I played both a LOT, I represented my city on the national Quazar league and played for our local Lazer Quest team. The two games were quite different, the LQ equipment was heavier and much more accurate - it was way to easy to score a hit with Quazar (which was mainly aimed at kids). LQ was more like paintball, larger arenas, more "rough", and lots of crazy game variants played after hours. As for n00b fragging, yes it happend (a lot). I would go down to practise and typically there would be one or two other good players there. The marshalls knew us all and would put us on opposing teams, but still everyone else out for a fun sunday afternoon game was in for the slaughter. Ahh...fun times...about my only foray into team sports, being a geek and all :)
What does baseball/football/basketball et al. have to do with higher education?
Speaking as someone who went to University in the UK (where college sports teams are strictly amateur and are lucky to attract 20 spectators to a match) I see the whole obsession with sports as seriously detrimental to the education system over here in the US. My GF works at a technical school near NYC and even though they're really not a big sports school they still have these little primadonna assholes running around doing whatever they please just because they're good at basketball. They disrupt lessons, distract the other kids (who are actually there to learn something) and generally make a nuisance of themselves, yet the academic staff are powerless to expel them because Admissions want the publicity of winning the odd game of football or something. Totally fucking absurd. If you want to train people to be football players have football schools - Universities are for people who want to actually study for a degree. Of course I have no problem with people playing sports on the side - but there are too many people majoring in dicking around and taking classes on the side.