This is actually already implemented by Microsoft in their Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles. I like knowing that, while Microsoft can't do much about exploitable bugs in the games (the sword-flying in the first version of Halo 2, for example), they can easily boot people from the network if they know they've modified their hardware in any way to enable cheating. It would be interesting to know what their record is, and whether anybody's figured out how to bypass the system.
Oh yeah, Diablo II online was SOOO FUN. You have to install an anti-cheat hack to undo the cheat hack that someone installed to undo your last anti-cheat hack. Everyone spent more time hacking the damned game than playing, and nothing in the game was worth anything. Do not want.
I haven't done the research, but 150,000 climate change related deaths a year just triggers my bullshit sensor. It's like those anti-smoking ads which say that smoking causes asthma... uh, yeah, that explains why there are so many asthma cases now (when people don't smoke) as opposed to decades past (when many, many more people smoked.) I think my bullshit sensor is pretty well-tuned.
Censorship has nothing to do with this. They have a business relationship with an upstream provider in which they signed a contract which, most likely, has a phrase such as the following: "we reserve the right to terminate this relationship at any time at our discretion." The upstream provider decided they wanted to terminate the relationship... simple. No censorship involved.
Probably because of blatant half-truths in his earlier films. For instance, in Roger and Me where he claims a factory that dis-assembled ICBMs to re-use them to launch satellites was a "weapons factory." I suppose it's technically true, but come on! Or perhaps in (I think) in Farenheit 911 when he edited his film to make it appear as if he was yelling at Charlton Heston's back and Heston was ignoring him; in reality he was yelling at nobody and splicing in earlier film of Heston leaving the house. These things aren't the work of somebody interested in the truth.
Pharmaceutical propaganda runs 24/7 on our televisions.
The solution is wholly new and different propaganda in our movie theaters. Brilliant.
Look, I agree that our healthcare system needs a change, but propaganda is the perfect word to describe Moore's "documentaries." They're full of so many blatant lies and half-truths, it almost makes you want to support who he's against simply out of spite.
I'm sorry, I stopped listening to anything Moore had to say after he called a plant which worked every day to dismantle ICBMs and convert them to peaceful purposes launching satellites a "weapons factory." The guy's an absolute scumbag with no concern for telling the truth. His movies should be be considered documentaries.
2. USB1 is fine for external storage. People stream video across networks for Christ's sake!
The typical home network is 100mbit. USB 1 operates at 1.5mbit. It's designed for mice, keyboards, printers and scanners, not streaming video. USB2 is fine for streaming video, but saying that USB 1 is fine because people "stream video across networks!" is ridiculous.
I have a friend who lives in a house with terrible wiring. It has a habit of killing electronics rapidly... for instance, he has to replace his computer's power supply every few months because they blow out that quickly.
Tell you what, if you don't like it, you don't have to buy it. If a lot of people agree with you, and also don't like it, the game will fail and then there won't be any more of them. WOW! Capitalism in action!
Or, shorter: nobody's forcing you to buy it. If you don't like the idea, just skip this story and read the next one.
I said I was "not sure what Microsoft is doing, exactly." So thanks for clearing it up.
You said that, then immediately assumed that Microsoft was doing nothing. Look at the previous sentence:
Either way, the difference between what Nintendo is doing and what Sony and Microsoft are doing is that Nintendo encourages indies, provides a cheap dev kit, and will do QC for them. Not sure what Microsoft is doing, exactly, but Sony doesn't seem to go as far.
That's like me saying, "unlike Dodge, Ford and Chevy don't do any kind of safety testing so their cars are death traps that kill infants. I don't really know what Ford or Chevy are doing safety-wise, actually." (Obligatory car analogy.) You seriously don't think that's intellectually dishonest?
Game downloading existed as far back as the Megadrive/Genesis.
Ok, that covers Xbox Live Arcade, which is about a third of Xbox Live.
Either way, the difference between what Nintendo is doing and what Sony and Microsoft are doing is that Nintendo encourages indies, provides a cheap dev kit, and will do QC for them. Not sure what Microsoft is doing, exactly, but Sony doesn't seem to go as far.
Microsoft: 1) Encourages indies. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/aa937785.aspx 2) Provides a *free* dev kit. (Requires only a standard Windows PC, which virtually everybody already has.) http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/aa937795.aspx (Note: compiling to Xbox 360 does cost, but it's token cost; I believe it's $100 a year. You can do all the programming you need on the Windows PC.) 3) And will do QA for them. (If your game is chosen to be published.)
Nintendo just announced that they'll start to offer the same thing Microsoft has had for almost a full year now. It's seriously not news.
I know you probably hate Microsoft with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, but seriously, do at least a teeny bit of research before writing a post like this so I don't have to waste my time correcting it, k?
(I won't comment on Sony because I'm not familiar with Sony's service offerings.)
1) Those ads aren't aimed at you, they're aimed at executives who (generally) have a lot more purchasing power than grunts in the server room. Sorry but it's true. Phrases like "people-ready business" are designed to impress executive types, but they haven't nearly perfected the art of meaningless crap like IBM has.
2) Microsoft marketing has sucked for 12 years? Huh? Are you crazy? Microsoft has grown by leaps and bounds in the last 12 years. They're selling at least twice as much software now as then.
News Flash: Bloggers accept money to promote products and brands.
Another news flash: So do radio DJs, actors, video game companies, advice columnists and virtually everybody else who has a large number of readers/listeners. Hell, there's been some product placement in newspaper comics lately.
I usually don't put a lot of stock in anecdotal failures either, but when Crecente of Kotaku said he was on his sixth, I took notice.
1) For any product that is capable of breaking down and sells in the millions, statistically you're going to have X number of people who have numerous failures. Without knowing if that X is one customer, or 5% of customers, you can't draw any rational conclusion. That's true no matter how famous the individual whose console failed is. (Personally, I've never heard of him.)
2) You're making an assumption that Microsoft knew these particular consoles were going to a journalist at a game site. How would they know that? If they did know that, and purposefully gave him a special Xbox to ensure reliability, wouldn't you get upset that MS was 'buttering-up' the press?
3) For all I know, this Kotaku guy batter-fries his Xbox every sunday. Or he only plays Rainbow 6: Vegas while it's submerged in a swimming pool. Major game sites probably work their Xbox 360s 24 hours a day, playing pre-release or beta software on them. They abuse them a lot more than the average customer, so you'd expect their return rate to be higher. NASCAR teams also have a change tires a hell of a lot more often than I do; that doesn't say anything about the quality of their tires.
They did that to a submission of mine, also. I was linking to an article about a study, and they moved the link to make it look as if I was linking to the study itself. I can only assume the "editor" either didn't read my submission, or read it and didn't understand it. (Or, they just meddle and make random changes to justify getting paid for this.)
Web browser should have 'splittable' scroll bars like code editors and Excel have had for ages. Where you can split the window vertically into two panes, each with its own scrollbar. That would make reading a ton of websites, including Slashdot, much much more pleasant.
I've never seen an unbiased comparison of Xbox 360 reliability compared to other consoles. There's sure a lot of noise on the Internet about how often they fail, but I've never seen any actual data to form an opinion with.
And now the pointless anecdote which also isn't actual data:
My launch 360 hasn't had a single problem since I bought it, and I exercise it at least 10 hours a week. My launch original Xbox also hasn't had a single problem, and I played it about the same amount over its entire lifetime. I still boot it up occasionally.
Fair enough, you obviously know more about the law than I do. But the fact remains that the service this software provides is stupid and pointless, so if they get sued out of existence it doesn't really matter, does it?
The $50 a year fee is to keep the griefers away from the system. Making a new account every time one gets banned becomes expensive very quick for griefers. Meanwhile, $50 a year is hardly anything for anybody who can afford an Xbox and regular game purchases. They're not charging to cover the service, they're charging to keep the quality of the service up.
I guess so. The problem is that the Nintendo supporters on this site are so loud and overwhelming that it doesn't seem like the other consoles get their fair due. For instance, while you might see one or two fair and accurate Xbox posts modded up in a discussion, you'll see ten or twenty Nintendo posts modded up in the same discussion, even if the story has little to do with Nintendo.
The general rule with Microsoft is: Hardware good, software (mostly) bad.
Microsoft keyboards and mouses are very nice. Microsoft networking equipment (when they still made it) is great-- I have a MN-500 wifi router I hope never dies, because you can't replace them. The Xbox and Xbox 360 are both very good machines.
Some of their software is pretty good, like MS SQL Server or IIS, but the majority is pretty flakey IMO.
Xbox Live came out before Steam, for one. (Xbox Live: November 2002, Steam came with Half-Life 2, released November 2004.) That aside, I'm not familiar with the features of Steam, so I can't answer that well, but I would guess:
1) Universal voice chat, including the ability to send voice messages to friends who are offline, to attach voice messages to game invites, etc. If you like, you can use Xbox Live as an IP phone. 2) Player feedback system which lets you mark a player as a griefer in only a few button presses, and works across all Xbox Live games.
I was kind of under the impression that Steam was only a download service and didn't provide the community features that Xbox Live did. It certainly didn't at launch, when I played Half-Life 2 with it, but maybe it does now.
To be fair to Nintendo, though, this announcement seems closer to Microsoft's XNA than the first-gen Xbox Live Arcade games. What I worry about is dev kits... Microsoft lets you use a regular PC as a dev kit for indie Xbox games. If Nintendo requires you to buy thousands of dollars of hardware to be considered, I'm not sure how successful they'll be at getting support from indie developers. Still, more power to them.
Slashdot Mirror
This is actually already implemented by Microsoft in their Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles. I like knowing that, while Microsoft can't do much about exploitable bugs in the games (the sword-flying in the first version of Halo 2, for example), they can easily boot people from the network if they know they've modified their hardware in any way to enable cheating. It would be interesting to know what their record is, and whether anybody's figured out how to bypass the system.
Oh yeah, Diablo II online was SOOO FUN. You have to install an anti-cheat hack to undo the cheat hack that someone installed to undo your last anti-cheat hack. Everyone spent more time hacking the damned game than playing, and nothing in the game was worth anything. Do not want.
Oil Companies we depend upon are essentially public utilities
Oil companies are essentially public utilities? Elaborate please?
I haven't done the research, but 150,000 climate change related deaths a year just triggers my bullshit sensor. It's like those anti-smoking ads which say that smoking causes asthma... uh, yeah, that explains why there are so many asthma cases now (when people don't smoke) as opposed to decades past (when many, many more people smoked.) I think my bullshit sensor is pretty well-tuned.
Censorship has nothing to do with this. They have a business relationship with an upstream provider in which they signed a contract which, most likely, has a phrase such as the following: "we reserve the right to terminate this relationship at any time at our discretion." The upstream provider decided they wanted to terminate the relationship... simple. No censorship involved.
Probably because of blatant half-truths in his earlier films. For instance, in Roger and Me where he claims a factory that dis-assembled ICBMs to re-use them to launch satellites was a "weapons factory." I suppose it's technically true, but come on! Or perhaps in (I think) in Farenheit 911 when he edited his film to make it appear as if he was yelling at Charlton Heston's back and Heston was ignoring him; in reality he was yelling at nobody and splicing in earlier film of Heston leaving the house. These things aren't the work of somebody interested in the truth.
Pharmaceutical propaganda runs 24/7 on our televisions.
The solution is wholly new and different propaganda in our movie theaters. Brilliant.
Look, I agree that our healthcare system needs a change, but propaganda is the perfect word to describe Moore's "documentaries." They're full of so many blatant lies and half-truths, it almost makes you want to support who he's against simply out of spite.
I'm sorry, I stopped listening to anything Moore had to say after he called a plant which worked every day to dismantle ICBMs and convert them to peaceful purposes launching satellites a "weapons factory." The guy's an absolute scumbag with no concern for telling the truth. His movies should be be considered documentaries.
2. USB1 is fine for external storage. People stream video across networks for Christ's sake!
The typical home network is 100mbit. USB 1 operates at 1.5mbit. It's designed for mice, keyboards, printers and scanners, not streaming video. USB2 is fine for streaming video, but saying that USB 1 is fine because people "stream video across networks!" is ridiculous.
I have a friend who lives in a house with terrible wiring. It has a habit of killing electronics rapidly... for instance, he has to replace his computer's power supply every few months because they blow out that quickly.
Tell you what, if you don't like it, you don't have to buy it. If a lot of people agree with you, and also don't like it, the game will fail and then there won't be any more of them. WOW! Capitalism in action!
Or, shorter: nobody's forcing you to buy it. If you don't like the idea, just skip this story and read the next one.
I said I was "not sure what Microsoft is doing, exactly." So thanks for clearing it up.
You said that, then immediately assumed that Microsoft was doing nothing. Look at the previous sentence:
Either way, the difference between what Nintendo is doing and what Sony and Microsoft are doing is that Nintendo encourages indies, provides a cheap dev kit, and will do QC for them. Not sure what Microsoft is doing, exactly, but Sony doesn't seem to go as far.
That's like me saying, "unlike Dodge, Ford and Chevy don't do any kind of safety testing so their cars are death traps that kill infants. I don't really know what Ford or Chevy are doing safety-wise, actually." (Obligatory car analogy.) You seriously don't think that's intellectually dishonest?
Game downloading existed as far back as the Megadrive/Genesis.
x x (Note: compiling to Xbox 360 does cost, but it's token cost; I believe it's $100 a year. You can do all the programming you need on the Windows PC.)
Ok, that covers Xbox Live Arcade, which is about a third of Xbox Live.
Either way, the difference between what Nintendo is doing and what Sony and Microsoft are doing is that Nintendo encourages indies, provides a cheap dev kit, and will do QC for them. Not sure what Microsoft is doing, exactly, but Sony doesn't seem to go as far.
Microsoft:
1) Encourages indies. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/aa937785.asp
2) Provides a *free* dev kit. (Requires only a standard Windows PC, which virtually everybody already has.) http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/aa937795.asp
3) And will do QA for them. (If your game is chosen to be published.)
Nintendo just announced that they'll start to offer the same thing Microsoft has had for almost a full year now. It's seriously not news.
I know you probably hate Microsoft with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, but seriously, do at least a teeny bit of research before writing a post like this so I don't have to waste my time correcting it, k?
(I won't comment on Sony because I'm not familiar with Sony's service offerings.)
Two things:
1) Those ads aren't aimed at you, they're aimed at executives who (generally) have a lot more purchasing power than grunts in the server room. Sorry but it's true. Phrases like "people-ready business" are designed to impress executive types, but they haven't nearly perfected the art of meaningless crap like IBM has.
2) Microsoft marketing has sucked for 12 years? Huh? Are you crazy? Microsoft has grown by leaps and bounds in the last 12 years. They're selling at least twice as much software now as then.
News Flash: Bloggers accept money to promote products and brands.
Another news flash: So do radio DJs, actors, video game companies, advice columnists and virtually everybody else who has a large number of readers/listeners. Hell, there's been some product placement in newspaper comics lately.
Just FYI, except for the "newly-formed" part, you can do all that on Crackdown on Xbox 360. It also has crazy-ass physics.
I usually don't put a lot of stock in anecdotal failures either, but when Crecente of Kotaku said he was on his sixth, I took notice.
1) For any product that is capable of breaking down and sells in the millions, statistically you're going to have X number of people who have numerous failures. Without knowing if that X is one customer, or 5% of customers, you can't draw any rational conclusion. That's true no matter how famous the individual whose console failed is. (Personally, I've never heard of him.)
2) You're making an assumption that Microsoft knew these particular consoles were going to a journalist at a game site. How would they know that? If they did know that, and purposefully gave him a special Xbox to ensure reliability, wouldn't you get upset that MS was 'buttering-up' the press?
3) For all I know, this Kotaku guy batter-fries his Xbox every sunday. Or he only plays Rainbow 6: Vegas while it's submerged in a swimming pool. Major game sites probably work their Xbox 360s 24 hours a day, playing pre-release or beta software on them. They abuse them a lot more than the average customer, so you'd expect their return rate to be higher. NASCAR teams also have a change tires a hell of a lot more often than I do; that doesn't say anything about the quality of their tires.
They did that to a submission of mine, also. I was linking to an article about a study, and they moved the link to make it look as if I was linking to the study itself. I can only assume the "editor" either didn't read my submission, or read it and didn't understand it. (Or, they just meddle and make random changes to justify getting paid for this.)
Web browser should have 'splittable' scroll bars like code editors and Excel have had for ages. Where you can split the window vertically into two panes, each with its own scrollbar. That would make reading a ton of websites, including Slashdot, much much more pleasant.
The sample size is, what, 8? Prove it's a correlation and not coincidence with that sample size.
I've never seen an unbiased comparison of Xbox 360 reliability compared to other consoles. There's sure a lot of noise on the Internet about how often they fail, but I've never seen any actual data to form an opinion with.
And now the pointless anecdote which also isn't actual data:
My launch 360 hasn't had a single problem since I bought it, and I exercise it at least 10 hours a week. My launch original Xbox also hasn't had a single problem, and I played it about the same amount over its entire lifetime. I still boot it up occasionally.
Fair enough, you obviously know more about the law than I do. But the fact remains that the service this software provides is stupid and pointless, so if they get sued out of existence it doesn't really matter, does it?
The $50 a year fee is to keep the griefers away from the system. Making a new account every time one gets banned becomes expensive very quick for griefers. Meanwhile, $50 a year is hardly anything for anybody who can afford an Xbox and regular game purchases. They're not charging to cover the service, they're charging to keep the quality of the service up.
I guess so. The problem is that the Nintendo supporters on this site are so loud and overwhelming that it doesn't seem like the other consoles get their fair due. For instance, while you might see one or two fair and accurate Xbox posts modded up in a discussion, you'll see ten or twenty Nintendo posts modded up in the same discussion, even if the story has little to do with Nintendo.
The general rule with Microsoft is: Hardware good, software (mostly) bad.
Microsoft keyboards and mouses are very nice. Microsoft networking equipment (when they still made it) is great-- I have a MN-500 wifi router I hope never dies, because you can't replace them. The Xbox and Xbox 360 are both very good machines.
Some of their software is pretty good, like MS SQL Server or IIS, but the majority is pretty flakey IMO.
Xbox Live came out before Steam, for one. (Xbox Live: November 2002, Steam came with Half-Life 2, released November 2004.) That aside, I'm not familiar with the features of Steam, so I can't answer that well, but I would guess:
1) Universal voice chat, including the ability to send voice messages to friends who are offline, to attach voice messages to game invites, etc. If you like, you can use Xbox Live as an IP phone.
2) Player feedback system which lets you mark a player as a griefer in only a few button presses, and works across all Xbox Live games.
I was kind of under the impression that Steam was only a download service and didn't provide the community features that Xbox Live did. It certainly didn't at launch, when I played Half-Life 2 with it, but maybe it does now.
To be fair to Nintendo, though, this announcement seems closer to Microsoft's XNA than the first-gen Xbox Live Arcade games. What I worry about is dev kits... Microsoft lets you use a regular PC as a dev kit for indie Xbox games. If Nintendo requires you to buy thousands of dollars of hardware to be considered, I'm not sure how successful they'll be at getting support from indie developers. Still, more power to them.