You're deluding yourself if you think that Slashdot isn't 80% pro-Nintendo bias. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but by pointing it out I just hope to let people know that it's there, so maybe they can think more critically about the comments.
Yes, the articles might be very even-handed, but most of the +5 posts on EVERY ONE of those articles was "well, despite the topic of this article, let's talk up the Nintendo console and never get modded off-topic!"
Ok, while I'm sure your post applies accurately to yourself, I'm not sure it applies to anybody else ever. How many people are going to use a PS3 as a desktop computer? How many people even know it's possible to do so? Maybe 0.1% of the market, and I'm being generous there.
Oh wait. Microsoft has a community that you must pay a monthly fee to belong to!
$50 a year. Not a month. It's not a monthly fee. It's $50 a year. And you can belong to the community without paying a cent, to download movies, game demos, buy Xbox Live Arcade games.
For your $50, you get free VOIP and voicemail service, the assurance that there are a lot of people working hard to prevent any players from cheating and assuring that griefers are kicked from the service. I think it's worth it.
Sony's system, on the other hand... well... it's barely even a system. It's the same thing we've had with PC games for decades; every company has their own, separate, servers, none of which can talk to each other. There's no uniformity in user names or interface.
and a HUGE, OPEN community.
If by HUGE, OPEN you mean "a few Linux nuts," then yes.
That may be so, but the original Xbox was the first console since the SNES (I'm pretty sure...) to get actual Adventure games. And the first console since the SNES to get American-style RPGs. I think that's pretty significant.
You're also missing out on games like Viva Pinata, sports and racing games on your list. You seem to have dismissed Oblivion out-of-hand, which is fine, but you can't claim that RPGs don't exist on the system when your list includes two of them.
For the record, Rainbow 6: Vegas may be a sequel but it's a damn fine game.
Of course this is Slashdot, and so you have to talk-up Nintendo at every chance, but I think there's something important people miss about the entire Wii/Xbox 360 thing:
It's very very easy for Microsoft to add a motion sensing wand/controller to the Xbox 360. It's very very difficult for Nintendo to add the graphics power and multimedia capability to the Wii.
*If* the Wii really starts kicking ass (and I'm not convinced yet, it's still far too new... all consoles sell out in the first month, even crappy ones), then you'll see Microsoft and Sony rushing to replicate Nintendo's advantage leaving Nintendo as an also-ran without any unique features to compete, except their first-party games. The controller is a great way for them to distinguish their product from the pack, but it's very easy for the pack to add to their consoles. I hope Nintendo has a plan B.
It's a two-edged sword. If I'm not a savvy consumer, yes I can be ripped-off... I entirely understand that, which is why I don't have a credit card, I don't live above my means, and I don't buy crappy products that I know will break. Yes, there's a lot of dumb people. I don't think the government should come in every time some dumb person does something dumb and save them... as a responsible person, I don't want my tax money going towards that. I want my tax money going towards preventing crime, national defense, basic services (power, roads), and education.
If we're dumb voters and we destroy what we have, well, then at least we gave it a go and lasted longer than most governments do. But saying that people should lose rights because they're dumb voters is basically promoting a style of government fundamentally different from everything the USA has ever stood for.
We tend to believe in such things as "freedom" here. If you want a longer warranty, you're free to buy from a manufacturer who offers one. Government mandated *anything* is stupid, at least anything beyond criminal acts, education, and defense-- and education is debatable.
That said, the way things are going, the US will be the same as Europe in another ten years anyway. Considering that New York recently removed the right to eat certain kinds of foods, Seattle (and other cities) have removed the right to smoke, etc.
90 days is pretty standard for electronics in the US.
Of course, I don't know why I'm replying matter-of-factly to this post since it's basically just a "my country is better than your country" flamebait, but I guess I'm just a sucker.
(There's one from Norway a few posts up that's even worse. What do you guys expect us to say to that? 'Oh! 5 year warranty! I'll move immediately!')
To be fair, there are a couple circumstances when an extended warranty makes sense:
1) When the warranty is offered by the same company that makes the product. 2) When the cost of the warranty is less than the cheapest repair cost.
I've very thankful I bought the extended warranty on my G3 iBook from Apple, since it happened to be one of those with defective motherboards... the warranty allowed me to have it repaired for free (several times-- god that thing sucked!) and then get a new laptop once it was obvious Apple really had no working G3 iBook motherboards and I could invoke the "lemon clause" or whatever they call it. In that one particular case, the extended warranty saved me money.
So can gNuisance actually *do* anything? I already can't use my iBook wireless card because of Ubuntu's ridiculous copyright-related rules, and it sounds like this FSF stuff is even more restrictive.
Corporate heads *might* care once Linux/Open Source products offer all the same productivity benefits of Microsoft's current offerings. OpenOffice is maybe 10 years behind Microsoft Office. I've yet to see an open source email program that combines email, calendaring, and address book functionality as easily as Outlook/Exchange. (Or Lotus Notes for that matter, which is really sad because Notes is a piece of crap.)
Show them a Linux-based product that can do everything for their business that Windows can, THEN explain to them how proprietary software will cause their milk to curdle, etc.
I've yet to see any compelling evidence that Microsoft (or the RIAA or anybody else) has EVER paid somebody to post pro-Microsoft posts on this forum, or any other forum. The whole thing is a ridiculous urban legend that should die.
be happy that the people who are organizing the campaign can still work at the level of natural-language codes, and don't depend on visual development tools to organize their campaign by point-and-click methodology. After all you should be happy, whatever OS you like best, that the people coding that still can handle linear uses of complex languages. Same thing.
With apologies to the parent, WHAT THE HOLY FLYING FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!?
please, care to tell me where the FSF fails to tell the truth with such nifty things as "signed drivers only", "protected audio path" an the like coming after consumers, which are being promised an overall richer and safer experience in casual computing, but are being entirely stripped of their fair use rights by these "added features" instead?
Wait... let's slow down and think about this.
Signed drivers *does* give consumers a richer and safer experience in casual computing. Since the vast majority of (OS-level) computer crashes are caused either by faulty hardware or faulty drivers, this will do much to reduce a consumer losing data, having to reboot quickly, for a problem that they simply can't understand. It also improves by security by reducing the change of some malicious driver being included on a hardware support CD for some knockoff webcam from China. Having an organization with a deep knowledge of the OS to ensure that drivers are compatible and safe is a great idea, and should have been done years ago.
Now, arguably, that organization should not be Microsoft themselves, but that's just the way we happened to get it.
The only users negatively affected by required signed drivers are hardware developers. The users interested in casual computing (whose experience you seem interested in improving) don't know what a driver is or what it does-- and that's exactly how it should be.
I admittedly don't know anything about "protected audio path" so I won't speak to that. But that little blurb about signed drivers is almost a textbook case of double-think.
Yes, an Xbox 360 or PS3 won't PREVENT you from writing a 3D game.
Is it feasible in a business sense?
No, nobody's going to buy the damned thing. The last 2D game I saw on a home (non-portable) console was Metal Slug 3. I don't know how well it sold, but I only saw it in stores for a couple of months... and of course it was like 80% a port from another platform anyway. Writing a 2D game from scratch is not feasible from a business perspective.
Their voice quality is certainly much worse than a good SIP connection, or MSN, or Ventrilo and it's probably even worse than Teamspeak.
Ok, I can't speak to SIP, but Spyke's voice quality worse then Ventrilo or MSN? Have you actually *used* Skype? It has much better voice quality, and lower latency, then Ventrilo by far. Plus it's cross-platform, it's easy-to-use, it includes landline calls, it includes instant messenging, it doesn't freak out if I keep it running longer than a few hours (like Ventrilo clients for OS X do.)
In general, Skype is just a damned good product. Amazing that it came from the same people who made Kazaa.
Oh thanks. I'm always confused by that symbol that looks like an S with a line through it... I could have sworn it stood for "miles-per-hour", but this article submitter has made it clear!
I enjoy your justification that it runs on Macintosh. All I have to do is spend $2000 to replace my perfectly good PowerMac G5 and spend another $100 on Parallels (or whatever it costs) and it runs on Macintosh! Wow I can really see the cost savings from Photoshop coming my way now! (When did everyone on the Internet become a pedantic asshole? I think it was obvious when I said it doesn't run on Macintosh that I meant it wasn't Mac-native.)
It also strikes me that a truly great art tool would run on Macintosh, since a large proportion of the graphics market uses that OS. Would be kind of like making swords the soldiers could wield, but specifically designing them so that the officers can't. Or something, that analogy sucks.
You compare your product to Photoshop in your sig, that's all I was doing. Unfortunately, since I can't even *download* your product, the comparison doesn't come out too good... thus the criticism of your website. I'll be glad to reply to the features and UI of your application the instant I can run it without investing thousands of dollars into new hardware. (Or I guess from your perspective, my dual-core 2.2 ghz G5 is an outdated piece of crap and I'm an idiot for not buying a new computer every 3 months.)
If you're not interested in marketing your product and actually selling it, that's fine... but then why advertise here? It's a little contradictory. What would be better is realizing, regardless of how "right" it is, that marketing DOES sell product and investing a bit in that. Hell, at the very least come up with some sample screenshots that don't show demonic devil-people. Surely your program can be used on pleasant images too?
There's the bad PR from all of the Linux fanboys crying out "embrace and extend! Embrace and extend!" And don't pretend that nobody here would be yelling that if Apple or Microsoft made any attempt whatsoever to change the file format.
Yes, but Unix was ONLY a server OS at the time. Comparing apples-to-apples, desktop OS to desktop OS, Windows was far ahead of most other OSes at the time in connecting to the Internet.
Sure, if you compare the CLIENT version of Windows with the SERVER version of Unix, then it looks back... but that's not a valid comparison. Compare Windows with Macintosh, or with Amiga, and now you have a valid comparison... and it looks like Microsoft was either on-par or ahead of its competition. Saying otherwise is just revisionism FUD.
If you're going to be in the world of artists, you gotta impress artists. Your website isn't impressing anybody. It's basic marketing. Just saying. Do what the hell you want.
Slashdot Mirror
You're deluding yourself if you think that Slashdot isn't 80% pro-Nintendo bias. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but by pointing it out I just hope to let people know that it's there, so maybe they can think more critically about the comments.
Yes, the articles might be very even-handed, but most of the +5 posts on EVERY ONE of those articles was "well, despite the topic of this article, let's talk up the Nintendo console and never get modded off-topic!"
Ok, while I'm sure your post applies accurately to yourself, I'm not sure it applies to anybody else ever. How many people are going to use a PS3 as a desktop computer? How many people even know it's possible to do so? Maybe 0.1% of the market, and I'm being generous there.
Oh wait. Microsoft has a community that you must pay a monthly fee to belong to!
$50 a year. Not a month. It's not a monthly fee. It's $50 a year. And you can belong to the community without paying a cent, to download movies, game demos, buy Xbox Live Arcade games.
For your $50, you get free VOIP and voicemail service, the assurance that there are a lot of people working hard to prevent any players from cheating and assuring that griefers are kicked from the service. I think it's worth it.
Sony's system, on the other hand... well... it's barely even a system. It's the same thing we've had with PC games for decades; every company has their own, separate, servers, none of which can talk to each other. There's no uniformity in user names or interface.
and a HUGE, OPEN community.
If by HUGE, OPEN you mean "a few Linux nuts," then yes.
That may be so, but the original Xbox was the first console since the SNES (I'm pretty sure...) to get actual Adventure games. And the first console since the SNES to get American-style RPGs. I think that's pretty significant.
You're also missing out on games like Viva Pinata, sports and racing games on your list. You seem to have dismissed Oblivion out-of-hand, which is fine, but you can't claim that RPGs don't exist on the system when your list includes two of them.
For the record, Rainbow 6: Vegas may be a sequel but it's a damn fine game.
Of course this is Slashdot, and so you have to talk-up Nintendo at every chance, but I think there's something important people miss about the entire Wii/Xbox 360 thing:
It's very very easy for Microsoft to add a motion sensing wand/controller to the Xbox 360. It's very very difficult for Nintendo to add the graphics power and multimedia capability to the Wii.
*If* the Wii really starts kicking ass (and I'm not convinced yet, it's still far too new... all consoles sell out in the first month, even crappy ones), then you'll see Microsoft and Sony rushing to replicate Nintendo's advantage leaving Nintendo as an also-ran without any unique features to compete, except their first-party games. The controller is a great way for them to distinguish their product from the pack, but it's very easy for the pack to add to their consoles. I hope Nintendo has a plan B.
It's a two-edged sword. If I'm not a savvy consumer, yes I can be ripped-off... I entirely understand that, which is why I don't have a credit card, I don't live above my means, and I don't buy crappy products that I know will break. Yes, there's a lot of dumb people. I don't think the government should come in every time some dumb person does something dumb and save them... as a responsible person, I don't want my tax money going towards that. I want my tax money going towards preventing crime, national defense, basic services (power, roads), and education.
If we're dumb voters and we destroy what we have, well, then at least we gave it a go and lasted longer than most governments do. But saying that people should lose rights because they're dumb voters is basically promoting a style of government fundamentally different from everything the USA has ever stood for.
We tend to believe in such things as "freedom" here. If you want a longer warranty, you're free to buy from a manufacturer who offers one. Government mandated *anything* is stupid, at least anything beyond criminal acts, education, and defense-- and education is debatable.
That said, the way things are going, the US will be the same as Europe in another ten years anyway. Considering that New York recently removed the right to eat certain kinds of foods, Seattle (and other cities) have removed the right to smoke, etc.
90 days is pretty standard for electronics in the US.
Of course, I don't know why I'm replying matter-of-factly to this post since it's basically just a "my country is better than your country" flamebait, but I guess I'm just a sucker.
(There's one from Norway a few posts up that's even worse. What do you guys expect us to say to that? 'Oh! 5 year warranty! I'll move immediately!')
To be fair, there are a couple circumstances when an extended warranty makes sense:
1) When the warranty is offered by the same company that makes the product.
2) When the cost of the warranty is less than the cheapest repair cost.
I've very thankful I bought the extended warranty on my G3 iBook from Apple, since it happened to be one of those with defective motherboards... the warranty allowed me to have it repaired for free (several times-- god that thing sucked!) and then get a new laptop once it was obvious Apple really had no working G3 iBook motherboards and I could invoke the "lemon clause" or whatever they call it. In that one particular case, the extended warranty saved me money.
nt
So can gNuisance actually *do* anything? I already can't use my iBook wireless card because of Ubuntu's ridiculous copyright-related rules, and it sounds like this FSF stuff is even more restrictive.
Corporate heads *might* care once Linux/Open Source products offer all the same productivity benefits of Microsoft's current offerings. OpenOffice is maybe 10 years behind Microsoft Office. I've yet to see an open source email program that combines email, calendaring, and address book functionality as easily as Outlook/Exchange. (Or Lotus Notes for that matter, which is really sad because Notes is a piece of crap.)
Show them a Linux-based product that can do everything for their business that Windows can, THEN explain to them how proprietary software will cause their milk to curdle, etc.
I don't care if Stalin programmed it and titled it "3D Studio Max for the advancement of the Social Utopia and down fall of Democracy." It works.
I hope you don't mind, I'm stealing that for my sig.
I've yet to see any compelling evidence that Microsoft (or the RIAA or anybody else) has EVER paid somebody to post pro-Microsoft posts on this forum, or any other forum. The whole thing is a ridiculous urban legend that should die.
Kind of reminds me of the jews that ran to the USSR in WWII..
While it's not technically complete, I think that should count as a Godwin. Sorry buddy.
be happy that the people who are organizing the campaign can still work at the level of natural-language codes, and don't depend on visual development tools to organize their campaign by point-and-click methodology. After all you should be happy, whatever OS you like best, that the people coding that still can handle linear uses of complex languages. Same thing.
With apologies to the parent, WHAT THE HOLY FLYING FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!?
please, care to tell me where the FSF fails to tell the truth with such nifty things as "signed drivers only", "protected audio path" an the like coming after consumers, which are being promised an overall richer and safer experience in casual computing, but are being entirely stripped of their fair use rights by these "added features" instead?
Wait... let's slow down and think about this.
Signed drivers *does* give consumers a richer and safer experience in casual computing. Since the vast majority of (OS-level) computer crashes are caused either by faulty hardware or faulty drivers, this will do much to reduce a consumer losing data, having to reboot quickly, for a problem that they simply can't understand. It also improves by security by reducing the change of some malicious driver being included on a hardware support CD for some knockoff webcam from China. Having an organization with a deep knowledge of the OS to ensure that drivers are compatible and safe is a great idea, and should have been done years ago.
Now, arguably, that organization should not be Microsoft themselves, but that's just the way we happened to get it.
The only users negatively affected by required signed drivers are hardware developers. The users interested in casual computing (whose experience you seem interested in improving) don't know what a driver is or what it does-- and that's exactly how it should be.
I admittedly don't know anything about "protected audio path" so I won't speak to that. But that little blurb about signed drivers is almost a textbook case of double-think.
The headline might as well read: "FSF Launches 'God How Clueless Are We' Campaign.
Seriously, have these guys EVER left their parents basement? To make things worse, the article summary is entirely contradictory.
Obviously MS Windows is already proprietary and very restrictive, and well worth rejecting.
Obvious to whom? It's not obvious to me... why *should* I reject proprietary software?
We'll be focusing attention on detailing how they work, how to resist them, and why people should care.
Wait, isn't it "obvious?" The correct answer is, BTW, "people shouldn't care."
AOL Instant Messenger used this technique for file transfers and "Direct IM" since like 1998. It really isn't even close to new.
Is it technically feasible?
Yes, an Xbox 360 or PS3 won't PREVENT you from writing a 3D game.
Is it feasible in a business sense?
No, nobody's going to buy the damned thing. The last 2D game I saw on a home (non-portable) console was Metal Slug 3. I don't know how well it sold, but I only saw it in stores for a couple of months... and of course it was like 80% a port from another platform anyway. Writing a 2D game from scratch is not feasible from a business perspective.
Their voice quality is certainly much worse than a good SIP connection, or MSN, or Ventrilo and it's probably even worse than Teamspeak.
Ok, I can't speak to SIP, but Spyke's voice quality worse then Ventrilo or MSN? Have you actually *used* Skype? It has much better voice quality, and lower latency, then Ventrilo by far. Plus it's cross-platform, it's easy-to-use, it includes landline calls, it includes instant messenging, it doesn't freak out if I keep it running longer than a few hours (like Ventrilo clients for OS X do.)
In general, Skype is just a damned good product. Amazing that it came from the same people who made Kazaa.
$75 Million (dollars!)
Oh thanks. I'm always confused by that symbol that looks like an S with a line through it... I could have sworn it stood for "miles-per-hour", but this article submitter has made it clear!
Sorry, you got me riled up.
I enjoy your justification that it runs on Macintosh. All I have to do is spend $2000 to replace my perfectly good PowerMac G5 and spend another $100 on Parallels (or whatever it costs) and it runs on Macintosh! Wow I can really see the cost savings from Photoshop coming my way now! (When did everyone on the Internet become a pedantic asshole? I think it was obvious when I said it doesn't run on Macintosh that I meant it wasn't Mac-native.)
It also strikes me that a truly great art tool would run on Macintosh, since a large proportion of the graphics market uses that OS. Would be kind of like making swords the soldiers could wield, but specifically designing them so that the officers can't. Or something, that analogy sucks.
You compare your product to Photoshop in your sig, that's all I was doing. Unfortunately, since I can't even *download* your product, the comparison doesn't come out too good... thus the criticism of your website. I'll be glad to reply to the features and UI of your application the instant I can run it without investing thousands of dollars into new hardware. (Or I guess from your perspective, my dual-core 2.2 ghz G5 is an outdated piece of crap and I'm an idiot for not buying a new computer every 3 months.)
If you're not interested in marketing your product and actually selling it, that's fine... but then why advertise here? It's a little contradictory. What would be better is realizing, regardless of how "right" it is, that marketing DOES sell product and investing a bit in that. Hell, at the very least come up with some sample screenshots that don't show demonic devil-people. Surely your program can be used on pleasant images too?
There's the bad PR from all of the Linux fanboys crying out "embrace and extend! Embrace and extend!" And don't pretend that nobody here would be yelling that if Apple or Microsoft made any attempt whatsoever to change the file format.
Yes, but Unix was ONLY a server OS at the time. Comparing apples-to-apples, desktop OS to desktop OS, Windows was far ahead of most other OSes at the time in connecting to the Internet.
Sure, if you compare the CLIENT version of Windows with the SERVER version of Unix, then it looks back... but that's not a valid comparison. Compare Windows with Macintosh, or with Amiga, and now you have a valid comparison... and it looks like Microsoft was either on-par or ahead of its competition. Saying otherwise is just revisionism FUD.
If you're going to be in the world of artists, you gotta impress artists. Your website isn't impressing anybody. It's basic marketing. Just saying. Do what the hell you want.