Recent Comments:
Unlikely rumor: Kingdom Hearts bundle includes GBA-capable DSi? {DS Fanboy}
Oct 14th 2008 12:00AM It should be kept in mind that there is nothing preventing a DSi from running GBA binaries. They just have to be loaded through the DS or SD slots. The 32 MB GBA game could simply be part of the DS card containing the main game.
Expect to see many classic GBA titles made avaialable as download purchases and compilation bundles on DS cards. You could put many GBA games on a single ROM without coming close to the 128 MB used by the largest games currently offered. Chain of Memories at 32 MB was masive compared to most GBA titles.
Bungie: Game companies should pocket money from used sales {Joystiq}
Sep 26th 2008 9:16PM Of course, this is one big reason many publishers would be completely happy to go entirely to sales by download. No costly excess inventory to discount and no easy means of transfer to a new owner.
Atleast until such a case goes before the Supreme Court.
Bungie: Game companies should pocket money from used sales {Joystiq}
Sep 26th 2008 9:12PM It's Game Dude! My favorite used game outlet in the universe, conveniently located at the corner of Laurel Cyn. and Sherman Way in scenic North Hollywood, CA.
I've spent a lot of money at the place but I believe they paid me a lot more for all of the games I brought them. It used to be very easy to find games being blown out by a clueless retailer for half of what Game Dude would pay for the game used. Ah, memories...
The decline of PSP software, in graph form {PSP Fanboy}
Sep 24th 2008 4:34PM The blame is entirely Sony's. If anything, XBLA is a potential source of ports for PSP. If a game is successful in that venue the developer can seek the capital to produce a PSP version with all of the costs that involves. Sony could easily step and provide the capital investment and score a win for themselves.
Provided, of course, that people who play the game paid for it. It looks mighty easy to download the whole PSP library after a casual glance at a few torrent sites.
Sony could also make the platform more atractive by pushing harder to make it a download purchase venue in the style of XBLA. They've done a little here but not nearly enough. One of the huge enticements XBLA offers a small developer is the reduction of investment before reaching consumers. In a conventional disc sale, the dev/publisher has to pay in advance for a large number of discs to be produced, as well as a royalty fee for each unit. The money is swallowed up by the console maker before any revenue comes back and regardless of how well or fast the game sells.
An XBLA game maker doesn't have those concerns. Microsoft only gets a piece of the action when a sale is made. There are no manufacturing or royalty costs before that sale. No manufacturing costs at all, unless the venue charges for the download bandwidth, although that would be more of a distribution expense.
If Sony wants the PSP to have XBLA games, it needs to provide an XBLA-like business model on the PSP.
Is HP building a custom Linux distro for home computers? {Download Squad}
Sep 12th 2008 6:44PM This is really dubious reasoning. If HP is going to brand their own Linux (A collaboration with Canonical would make sense in terms of maximizing investment value) it will be as an addition to selling Vista, not as a replacement. HP already sells plenty of Vista licenses on a daily basis. The online whinefest creates an illusion of a rebellion that simply doesn't exist. Vista adoption is moving along at a good pace among the clients I visit.
What is holding back using Vista on new systems in the majority of cases I've witnessed is the incompatibility of some horrible but mission critical apps. There are numerous fields where one vertical app has no real competition and so the vendor can get away with terrible coding standards and dragging their feet for years before fixing the problems. I have one client that would happily deploy Vista on new systems tomorrow if not for this kind of situation.
To give you an idea how badly this app is written, if you enter certain portions of it without a printer (even a virtual PDF printer will do the job) installed, the app blows up and dumps the user back at the desktop. I suppose we can be grateful it doesn't manage to take down the whole OS. In Vista, their problem is that they do stuff in the registry that Microsoft said should never be done back when XP first launched. Since so many companies did it anyways (Intuit is one of the biggest offenders) Microsoft made this recommendation an enforced law under Vista. So, no more registry trashing but a lot of stuff stops running until a new version ships.
Anyway, the idea that consumers are going to switch to an HP Linux and then switch back when Windows 7 arrives is just silly. For one, other than incorporating the performance upgrades that have already been released for Vista, there is nothing to suggest that Win7, which is building on the Vista base, is going to be radically different.
Second, customers whose mission critical app cannot be run under Vista are not going to be any better off under a Linux derivative. If anything, they'll lose access to yet more apps. A few things will run under WINE but we're talking about thousands of vertical market apps to get running to make this viable for mainstream desktop use. A big difference between rolling your dedicated app suite for a net book and replacing the immense infrastructure the corporate market relies upon.
The vertical app vendors will fix their Vista problems or find themselves against competition for the first time. The speed with they deliver their updated version will determine that.
Ubisoft sued by Yourself!Fitness dev for at least $26 million {Joystiq}
Aug 15th 2008 3:56AM Aren't these the same people who were sued by Roger Avary, the co-writer of 'Pulp Fiction', becuase he claimed to have had the idea first, despite variations on the theme going back to the 8-bit era? And didn't this series already tank on the previous generation of hardware?
Vista, OS X updates could bring significant SSD speed gains {Engadget}
Aug 11th 2008 3:41AM Actually, the problem here is not in any major OS or file system. They already have all they need to use setor and cluster arrangements to best accomodate SSD specs.
The real problem is that the current gen of SSD devices look like run of the mill SATA/PATA drives tot he systems. They were designed this way so they'd work with no special support required. The downside is that what works best for spining platter drives isn't the best use of flash memory.
The major newthing to arise from this is an industry standard for the recognition of SSD devices conencted where a hard drive or optical drive is currently expected. The OS support on the file system level will be a minor patch once the system knows about the difference.
Beijing National Stadium no longer just a stadium, now also a crappy MP3 player {Engadget}
Aug 11th 2008 3:26AM So, no warning in large letters on the box, saying: WARNING! Lark's Vomit!
Brando's SATA HDD Multimedia Dock includes video-out, media player {Engadget}
Jul 30th 2008 12:53PM Now it just needs another USB port for a game controller and some emulators...
Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling to keynote, predict future at Austin GDC {Joystiq}
Jul 23rd 2008 6:09AM Brodie, perhaps you aren't old enough to remember 1984 but I am. Word processors were the primary application driving PC sales. For someone still limping along on a typewriter to be seen as delivering a grand vision of the future is one of the great literary hoaxes of the era. (Harlan Ellison still uses a typewriter but he has never been a futurist either, outside of those Chevy Geo commericals.) The fact is, Gibson knew pretty much nothing about computers or networking. Thats why his version of the online world is so utterly removed from anything like reality, giving us endless moronic depictions of hacking in film and TV ever since. Gibson wasn't writing his deeply considered conception of the future. He was just making stuff up, which he has not been shy about admitting. He didn't have any insights about the internet that weren't covered better by others years earlier, such as John Brunner's 'Shockwave Rider.' ('Stand on Zanzibar' and 'The Sheep Look Up' are also very worth reading despite their age.) Although Brunner didn't see the rise of the cheap PC, he had a pretty good take on the ubiquitous network's effect on culture. This is the book in which the term worm, as in malware, was coined. Something that has had far more realization than the goofy metaphor of Gibson's cyberspace. 'Neuromancer' was a decent SF novel but given far more acclaim than it deserves. (It isn't even the first SF novel to use that title.)
Predicting the Internet in the 70s was a notable thing. Doing it in 1984, when much of it was already coming together, not so much.
I fail to see the wonder of 'Pattern Recognition.' By halfway through the book I wanted somebody in a Michelin Man costume to give the lead character a fatal heart attack and let the tedious exercise end.
Stephenson has a history as a coder and genuinely understands what he is writing about while still being a fine writer. That creates a big attraction for those of us in the audience who know the difference.
BTW, Stephenson's next novel, 'Anathem,' is coming out in September. It's a 900+ page doorstop of a book, so that is why it's been a long time coming.
