As I'm reading this, I'm wondering what lunatic at Sony would kill of the ability of over 116 million PS4 owners to purchase content when the PS5 is less than a year old and extremely difficult to buy still? I just managed to snag one directly from Sony a few days ago for a friend who'd given up trying. (We both got XBSeXes at launch, though.)
Then I read the linked story and see that it's the PS3, PSP, and Vita initially getting iced, NOT the PS4. That kinda moots most of the panic-mongering in this story, no?
None of these pieces discussing the scourge of password sharing define how many users is too many users? Are they talking about 10 or 20 college students in a dorm using a single HBO NOW login or a couple people patching together a quilt of services between themselves?
My in-laws mooch off my Prime, Netflix (I had to bump from 2 to 4 concurrent streams package when I went to watch something at home to find they'd hogged up the 2 streams there; also need it for 4K now, too), and Hulu subscriptions and I mooch their HBO GO, Showtime Anytime, and Starz access via their satellite package.
Due to the mobile nature of these services, they can't practically track IP addresses or devices to determine usage since people could be on their phones or web browsers at work and so on. You can't even go per-device because I have apps on all my consoles and streamers and will fire up Netflix after gaming on my XBOX or may have been watching my Apple TV.
I think its more likely the frat house scenario, but again, there is a lack of definition of terms.
What Netflix needs to do is make nice with AMERICAN theater chains and get over their insistence on day-and-date release in theaters and online. They need to mimic and improve on Amazon Studios method of releasing film theatrically for full runs before moving the titles to Amazon Prime exclusively as they did with the (overrated) Oscar-winning Manchester by the Sea.
MbtS premiered at Sundance in Jan. 2016 and was picked up for limited release in Nov. before going wide in Dec. 2016. Amazon offered it for (paid) streaming in early Feb. 2017 and it released on DVD two weeks later. In May 2017 it landed on Amazon Prime, almost six months after its first theatrical release and 2-1/2 months after home video.
Why doesn't Netflix compact that timeline and put their AAA movies into theaters exclusively for say four weeks - where all the big money is these days - and then simultaneous physical and streaming releases. When they're dropping $90M on Will Smith's next sci-fi flick and $100M on Scorsese's next joint, why not recoup some coin from those who want the theatrical experience, get eligible for awards, then reward subscribers or those who want the better quality and extras of physical media who wait a month. Being stubborn is dumb for Netflix.
I have a aphorism of advice for businesses: "It can cost a lot of money to get people to like you, but they will hate you for free. They may even spend money to take you down."
Any business operating in 2016 that doesn't understand the power of the Internet and social media deserves all the hurt they bring upon themselves. This isn't a matter of some old geezer making widgets in 1997 who hasn't noticed this newfangled AOL series of tubes thing the grandkids are talking about; it's a software company in the 21st Century.
Then again, look at what Microsoft did to themselves nearly four years ago in the run-up to the reveal of the Xbox One. From the tone-deaf sneering of Adam "Deal With It" Orth to the insanely anti-consumer DRM presented as a wonderful feature by people who seemed oblivious to the fact that their customers were wailing in warning for months that they'd better not do everything they ended up doing.
This left them at E3 with their pants around their ankles as Sony was able to come out later that day and win this console generation five months before putting anything on sale by simply announcing the PS4 would cost $100 less and you could lend or buy used games. They should teach about M$'s epic failure in business schools until the heat death of the Universe because it represents an entity that has no excuse to have not foreseen this cataclysmic result, yet ran full speed into doing every possible thing wrong and then act surprised it all blew up in their faces.
Contrast this stupidity to the deft manner with which Marvel Studios handled the accidental posting of the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer a week early with a simple, two-word tweet: "Dammit, Hydra."
No freakouts. No DMCA takedowns. Just rolled with it and came off super-chill as a result. Made a lot of money IIRC.
It's pointless to bother reading so many words when the hack typing them reveals themselves utterly clueless in the second sentence.
The pair first came to fame by circulating their animated short, The Spirit of Christmas, for free on the Internet.
No. Jeez-o-fricking-Pete, NO!!!! Anyone who knows anything about the history of Matt & Trey is laughing themselves silly with head-shaking pity at your self-beclownment and lack of knowledge of how The Spirit of Christmas (aka Jesus vs Santa) was made and bootlegged primarily on VHS tapes in 1995. It was those tapes floating around Hollywood that lead to their South Park deal.
Yeesh, the audio-only MP3 format was only invented in 1995; MPEG-2 didn't come until 1996; and most people were still on dial-up, so how exactly did Matt & Trey come "to fame by circulating their animated short...for free on the Internet"? A: They didn't.
I get that tech media is written and consumed by millennials who believe history began when Nevermind was released, but to those who are older and have actual experiential memories because WE LIVED IT, hack crap like stuff is inexcusable and harmful to knowledge in general.
I woke up Saturday to a notice from YouTube that I had a video taken down due to a claim by UMG and I had a strike on my account. Huh?
What had happened was waaaaaaaaaaaay back in 2008, I'd bought a Flip camera and shot footage in Toronto of dogs playing in a park. I cut a single 3-minute shot into a minute-long video called "Puppies Play In Toronto" on my new Dell laptop. It was the first video I'd ever made.
To have some music, I just grabbed a track that came with the computer. I think I even credited the artist, Karsh Kale (whoever that was), on my video. Uploaded it and forgot about it.
Jump ahead six months and I get a message through YT from Karsh Kale complaining that I'd used his music and take it down and wah wah wah. I apologized, explained where I'd gotten the music and (I thought) hid the video. I then recorded an original piece of EDM and laid it on the video, reuploading it as "Puppies Play In Toronto (F.U.K.K. Version)" So AFAIK the offending track is down, my music is up, life is good.
Many, many, MANY videos that use music are matched and tagged in the credits, but for some reason after all these years, UMG has dinged my account because gawd forbid the music they gave away with every fraking computer in 2008 ended up in a video, credited.
I was going to get the video by my YouTube page had a giant WARNING page I had to acknowledge and now I have to watch a video called Copyright School and take a quiz before I can watch anything. I can't post long videos and do annotations for six months, too. Jerks.
This is precisely the attitude that makes the current copyright system so broken. If they don't want to MAKE MONEY FOR NO EFFORT then Night Dive should be given the rights automatically OR Warner should lose it as they are clearly blocking access to something. Not available to the public? Lose your copyrights. Simple as that.
I've made this similar argument in connection to out-of-print music albums; if the label is refusing to make it available for sale, the master revert to the artist to sell as they see fit. There was a time when the first two albums from The Bears (Adrian Belew's side project) were unavailable because the label they were made for was defunct and for some reason that meant the records got sucked into the bankruptcy black hole with it. Some early Joe Jackson records were in the same void - the label simply let them go OOP and you couldn't legally get them. The advent of digital streaming/iToonz/whatever has allowed for many of these titles become available again because it doesn't require much expenditure to prep them for sale; it's not like they have to take the risk of pressing pieces of plastic.
Which leads me to my thought when I read this Kotaku piece a couple of weeks ago which you've hit upon: When someone is willing to take the risk and spend the money to prepare an abandoned title of yours for sale and hand you a cut of the proceeds and all you need to do is sign off on the project, why the f*cking f*ck wouldn't you do this, f*ckers?!? Warner isn't doing anything with the IP, but just as with the music industry who killed themselves with this mentality, they seem to rather have 100% of nothing than 30% of something. It's as if someone came to you and said, "Hey, I'm willing to rummage through your garage and attic, find the stuff you'd forgotten you even had, clean it up and put it on eBay and we'll split the money," and you rejecting the deal because reasons.
Truly, one more piece of evidence for the perverse incentives of lititgation.
Giant corporations have giant rooms filled with lawyers on retainer, so to have the monkeys filing threats and suits is just getting what you've paid for.
If a Republican administration meddled with the FCC to impose this exact same scheme to seize regulatory control of the Internet in the manner that people are jizzing in their Boba Fett Underoos with joy about, they would be hammering their tiny fists on their hipster-approved mechanical keyboards raging against "the ruthless power grab which will result in expanded corporate power and control, strangling the free and open Internet, leading to higher prices and diminished service while they reap obscene profits.
But because it's Obama's idea, it's automatically ASSumed to be a great idea because any idea coming from the liberal/progressive/statist/corporatist/fascist/Democrat side can't be anything but good, right? The same people who fap to photos of Edward Snowden (because he exposed Obama's spying) love the government takeover with the "net neutrality" Post-It note over the INGSOC letterhead because it gives them doubleplusgood bellyfeel and they can't recognize that the same Obama who spies on them will now control the Internet because Comcast sucks and this will supposedly hurt them.
I half-hope this illegal extra-Constitutional power grab goes through so that when progress is stifled, prices go up, service goes down and the little punks are crying about it and demanding that the same government that fucked things up in the first place will act again to "fix" things, I'll just laugh at their dumb asses and sneer, "What did you morons thing was going to happen? What you were promised? Bwahahahahahahahaha!!!!"
>"I get a feeling that CDPR in this case made it as a demonstrative gesture, to contrast the second case by making it free."
No, CDPR is legendary for treating customers well. About a year after the original The Witcher game was released, they put out the Enhanced Edition which included:
The significant changes featured in the enhanced version are over 200 new animations, additional NPC models and recolouring of generic NPC models as well as monsters, vastly expanded and corrected dialogues in translated versions, improved stability, and load times reduced by roughly 80%. In addition all bugs are said to be fixed and the game manual completely overhauled. A new option is to mix and match 8 different languages of voice and subtitles. For instance, players can now choose to play the game with Polish voices and English subtitles.
The Witcher: Enhanced Edition also contains a completely new and enhanced version the D'jinni Adventure Editor and two new official fully-voiced adventures: "The Price of Neutrality" and "Side Effects".
While pretty much every other publisher would've expected the customers to rebuy the game - "Definitive Editions" anyone? - CDPR allowed anyone who'd registered their copy to download the patch and content files for cheap like free. Sweet!
They also allow owners of the first two Witcher games to register their keys with GOG.com to get DRM-free copies as backups.
When I moved to my current job where I work alone in my office and ther I bought a 4-cup (20 oz) Mr. Coffee maker for $10. Package of 150 filters was $1. Big can of Maxwell House runs about $6 on sale. I drink a pot a day (very occasionally two) After 9 months, I've just gotten into my 2nd package of filters and am half-way through the 3rd can of coffee. Not counting flavored creamers, I've spent less than $30 for 390 10 oz. mugs of coffee so far, covering machine and coffee.
To make as much coffee with a Keurig would require a $120 machine and 780 coffee pods at ~55 cents a pop. That's $430, or $550 total to make as much K-offee as I make for $30. It may be "better" coffee, but there's no way in hell it's 18 times better.
Hoo boy, the paranoia is deep here. Funny thing is that I'm fairly certain everyone here with their tinfoil flags flying voted for Emperor Obama because they thought they were going to get free stuff and he was so cool and for history, etc.
Chumps.
And you re-elected him because you hated the rich guy and no way are Republicans gonna get your vote because mean racism uncool blah-blah-woof-woof.
Good job, twerps. Perhaps you should go beyond Jon Stewart for information.
I didn't even notice there's a printing thing in the settings because there isn't an actual app. You sound like someone who screams about spam being an corruption of his precious bodily fluids.
Where Microsoft has screwed the pooch with the XBone and Windows 8 is that they took a look at Apple's arrogant "You vill take zeese changes up your poopers and you will likes them!!!" attitude and decided they wanted in on that bully action, forgetting that Apple gets away with it because they're Apple and their customers are morons buying status toys.
Windows 8 has been stumbling around for 1-1/2 years because no one wants to allow a checkbox labeled "Use Classic interface." There is little wrong under the hood with Win8, but their intransigence insisting on Metro is killing them. Apple's craptacular Launch Pad - because I wanted the broken iOS UI jammed onto my MBP - sucks and there's no simple way to ditch it and Apple are dicks about it, but why does M$ need to emulate Apple's anti-user behavior. They'd probably look at Chris Brown and think, "We want to beat up Rihanna, too," not, "We need to free that poor girl from that brute and show her sweet love."
I have marveled at Microsoft's utter botching of every. Single. Step. of the XBone's rollout for the past year. From not understanding the backlash over Adam Orth's rude comments to staggering from one position to another regarding used games/sharing/DRM to having game dev after game dev put out titles which run slower, at lower resolution and quality, than the PS4 versions. Considering they're basically the same hardware - an x86 PC with 8GB RAM and a burly CPU/GPU core - the little differences in what Sony spec'ed are killing M$ as the PS4 is $100 cheaper and does games better. M$ basically adopted the stance that killed Sony for most of the past gen and are now wondering why they're trailing so badly.
As a proud member of the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race with an Xbox 360 and PS3 and a backlog of games so massive that I've joked that I wouldn't even be in the market for a new console until it's had two price cuts and a redesign, the next-gen holds almost zero interest for me. Most of the games being touted as showcases for next-gen like Watch Dogs will be on PC and thus really inexpensive within a few months of release. It's bizarre how the console makers want to sell us the One Box to bind our home theaters together and then gimp the snot out of them, whether it's demanding XBL Gold to stream Netflix or refusing to take feeds from DLNA devices. WTFF?!? (I thought the PS3 was bad in not being able to see video files on a disc unless they were literally in a folder called "Video.")
Now that Chromecast is open to outside devs, I'm able to use my phone to toss DLNA content from my NAS to the TV instead of having to fire up a console. If Amazon wasn't anti-Android with their Prime Video, I wouldn't even need to boot the PS3 to watch that.
I live within sight of a Trader Joe's. I am looking out my window at it now. So convenient to get Simple Times Lager/Pilsner which are 5.7% and 6.2% ABV (don't recall which is which) and sells for $3.50 per six-pack. Their Name Tag beer was $3 and Simple Times was $4 until some time ago when they went up/down to the same midway point, so obviously go for the higher octane hooch.
I'm also lucky to live 11 minutes away from a Micro Center; the next-closest one is three HOURS away.
Sony really needs to hire better trolls because even with the sketchy incomplete info we have on BOTH consoles, there is so much wrong in Wally's vomiting on his keyboard, it's pathetic.
FACT: Only the OG Xbox used an nVidia GPU. In fact, the whole chipset was developed by nVidia and was the basis of the Forceware motherboards which were so good because they could encode Dolby Digital internally and feed it via TOSlink to a receiver. Nice.
FACT: The XBone and PS4 will have DX11-complient GPUs with more RAM for graphics than their predecessors meaning Wally's lie about the graphics being the same is a lie from a liar. Or a moron. His pick.
FACT: The Xbox 360 used an ATi (now AMD) GPU. The Playstation 3 used an nVidia chip. Both the PS4 and XBone will use AMD GPUs because nVidia doesn't like being lowballed on parts - they had to sue M$ to get paid for the Xbox parts they delivered - and are concentrating on mobile.
FACT: The reason backwards compatibility is a problem is that both the PS4 and XBone are x86 architectures whereas the PS3 had the hard-to-code-for-only-good-on-paper Cell processor and X360 was a tri-core PowerPC chip. It's the same reason old OS X software made for pre-Intel Macs stopped working after Lion was because Apple stripped out the Rosetta emulation layer. The only reason the OG PS3s were BC was because Sony physically soldered a PS2 Emotion chip in to handle BC, which is why used "fat" PS3s command a higher price than new Slims. PS4s are BC with old games either, but the Sony shills are trying to make people forget that little fact.
FACT: The talking about about DDR3 being too slow is technical illiteracy and marketing BS in action. "Sony has DDR5 which is two more DDRs than LameBox. Sony wins! Derpa herp derp!" DDR5 has more bandwidth, but poor latency. The layman's explanation is that DDR5 is like a few burly guys unloading bricks in bulky loads while DDR3 is like a bunch of little guys grabbing two bricks each in a hurry. Specs are just marketing BS for trolls like Wally. The Cell processor was supposed to deliver better graphics and AI and did neither.
FACT: Wally Wrongo has the memory allocations totally backwards, not that facts matter to fanboys. The XBone has 5GB set aside for games and 3GB for system management. I don't agree with their not using all 8GB for games, but M$ wants people to be able to instantly switch to watch TV, TV, TVTVTVTVTVTVTV. Whatever. Wally's still wrong.
FACT: Wrong Wally is wrong and Sony needs better/smarter/faster fanboys.
Ummmm, PS4 support was NOT being killed.
As I'm reading this, I'm wondering what lunatic at Sony would kill of the ability of over 116 million PS4 owners to purchase content when the PS5 is less than a year old and extremely difficult to buy still? I just managed to snag one directly from Sony a few days ago for a friend who'd given up trying. (We both got XBSeXes at launch, though.)
Then I read the linked story and see that it's the PS3, PSP, and Vita initially getting iced, NOT the PS4. That kinda moots most of the panic-mongering in this story, no?
Re:
None of these pieces discussing the scourge of password sharing define how many users is too many users? Are they talking about 10 or 20 college students in a dorm using a single HBO NOW login or a couple people patching together a quilt of services between themselves?
My in-laws mooch off my Prime, Netflix (I had to bump from 2 to 4 concurrent streams package when I went to watch something at home to find they'd hogged up the 2 streams there; also need it for 4K now, too), and Hulu subscriptions and I mooch their HBO GO, Showtime Anytime, and Starz access via their satellite package.
Due to the mobile nature of these services, they can't practically track IP addresses or devices to determine usage since people could be on their phones or web browsers at work and so on. You can't even go per-device because I have apps on all my consoles and streamers and will fire up Netflix after gaming on my XBOX or may have been watching my Apple TV.
I think its more likely the frat house scenario, but again, there is a lack of definition of terms.
Forgot France
MbtS premiered at Sundance in Jan. 2016 and was picked up for limited release in Nov. before going wide in Dec. 2016. Amazon offered it for (paid) streaming in early Feb. 2017 and it released on DVD two weeks later. In May 2017 it landed on Amazon Prime, almost six months after its first theatrical release and 2-1/2 months after home video.
Why doesn't Netflix compact that timeline and put their AAA movies into theaters exclusively for say four weeks - where all the big money is these days - and then simultaneous physical and streaming releases. When they're dropping $90M on Will Smith's next sci-fi flick and $100M on Scorsese's next joint, why not recoup some coin from those who want the theatrical experience, get eligible for awards, then reward subscribers or those who want the better quality and extras of physical media who wait a month. Being stubborn is dumb for Netflix.
Re: Re:
I have a aphorism of advice for businesses: "It can cost a lot of money to get people to like you, but they will hate you for free. They may even spend money to take you down."
Any business operating in 2016 that doesn't understand the power of the Internet and social media deserves all the hurt they bring upon themselves. This isn't a matter of some old geezer making widgets in 1997 who hasn't noticed this newfangled AOL series of tubes thing the grandkids are talking about; it's a software company in the 21st Century.
Then again, look at what Microsoft did to themselves nearly four years ago in the run-up to the reveal of the Xbox One. From the tone-deaf sneering of Adam "Deal With It" Orth to the insanely anti-consumer DRM presented as a wonderful feature by people who seemed oblivious to the fact that their customers were wailing in warning for months that they'd better not do everything they ended up doing.
This left them at E3 with their pants around their ankles as Sony was able to come out later that day and win this console generation five months before putting anything on sale by simply announcing the PS4 would cost $100 less and you could lend or buy used games. They should teach about M$'s epic failure in business schools until the heat death of the Universe because it represents an entity that has no excuse to have not foreseen this cataclysmic result, yet ran full speed into doing every possible thing wrong and then act surprised it all blew up in their faces.
(untitled comment)
Contrast this stupidity to the deft manner with which Marvel Studios handled the accidental posting of the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer a week early with a simple, two-word tweet: "Dammit, Hydra."
No freakouts. No DMCA takedowns. Just rolled with it and came off super-chill as a result. Made a lot of money IIRC.
Hack Failure By 2nd Sentence
Yeesh, the audio-only MP3 format was only invented in 1995; MPEG-2 didn't come until 1996; and most people were still on dial-up, so how exactly did Matt & Trey come "to fame by circulating their animated short...for free on the Internet"? A: They didn't.
I get that tech media is written and consumed by millennials who believe history began when Nevermind was released, but to those who are older and have actual experiential memories because WE LIVED IT, hack crap like stuff is inexcusable and harmful to knowledge in general.
Re: Propaganda
Because laws prevent the bad things from happening. This is why we have no rape and murder and drug use and arson and fraud and...
Laws are magic!
Re: Re: UMG's robots dealt me a copyright strike last weekend. F*ckers!
UMG's robots dealt me a copyright strike last weekend. F*ckers!
What had happened was waaaaaaaaaaaay back in 2008, I'd bought a Flip camera and shot footage in Toronto of dogs playing in a park. I cut a single 3-minute shot into a minute-long video called "Puppies Play In Toronto" on my new Dell laptop. It was the first video I'd ever made.
To have some music, I just grabbed a track that came with the computer. I think I even credited the artist, Karsh Kale (whoever that was), on my video. Uploaded it and forgot about it.
Jump ahead six months and I get a message through YT from Karsh Kale complaining that I'd used his music and take it down and wah wah wah. I apologized, explained where I'd gotten the music and (I thought) hid the video. I then recorded an original piece of EDM and laid it on the video, reuploading it as "Puppies Play In Toronto (F.U.K.K. Version)" So AFAIK the offending track is down, my music is up, life is good.
Many, many, MANY videos that use music are matched and tagged in the credits, but for some reason after all these years, UMG has dinged my account because gawd forbid the music they gave away with every fraking computer in 2008 ended up in a video, credited.
I was going to get the video by my YouTube page had a giant WARNING page I had to acknowledge and now I have to watch a video called Copyright School and take a quiz before I can watch anything. I can't post long videos and do annotations for six months, too. Jerks.
Re: Re: It makes perfect sense.
Which leads me to my thought when I read this Kotaku piece a couple of weeks ago which you've hit upon: When someone is willing to take the risk and spend the money to prepare an abandoned title of yours for sale and hand you a cut of the proceeds and all you need to do is sign off on the project, why the f*cking f*ck wouldn't you do this, f*ckers?!? Warner isn't doing anything with the IP, but just as with the music industry who killed themselves with this mentality, they seem to rather have 100% of nothing than 30% of something. It's as if someone came to you and said, "Hey, I'm willing to rummage through your garage and attic, find the stuff you'd forgotten you even had, clean it up and put it on eBay and we'll split the money," and you rejecting the deal because reasons.
Re:
If Republicans Proposed This...
But because it's Obama's idea, it's automatically ASSumed to be a great idea because any idea coming from the liberal/progressive/statist/corporatist/fascist/Democrat side can't be anything but good, right? The same people who fap to photos of Edward Snowden (because he exposed Obama's spying) love the government takeover with the "net neutrality" Post-It note over the INGSOC letterhead because it gives them doubleplusgood bellyfeel and they can't recognize that the same Obama who spies on them will now control the Internet because Comcast sucks and this will supposedly hurt them.
I half-hope this illegal extra-Constitutional power grab goes through so that when progress is stifled, prices go up, service goes down and the little punks are crying about it and demanding that the same government that fucked things up in the first place will act again to "fix" things, I'll just laugh at their dumb asses and sneer, "What did you morons thing was going to happen? What you were promised? Bwahahahahahahahaha!!!!"
Re: Re: DLC?
No, CDPR is legendary for treating customers well. About a year after the original The Witcher game was released, they put out the Enhanced Edition which included:
The significant changes featured in the enhanced version are over 200 new animations, additional NPC models and recolouring of generic NPC models as well as monsters, vastly expanded and corrected dialogues in translated versions, improved stability, and load times reduced by roughly 80%. In addition all bugs are said to be fixed and the game manual completely overhauled. A new option is to mix and match 8 different languages of voice and subtitles. For instance, players can now choose to play the game with Polish voices and English subtitles.
The Witcher: Enhanced Edition also contains a completely new and enhanced version the D'jinni Adventure Editor and two new official fully-voiced adventures: "The Price of Neutrality" and "Side Effects".
While pretty much every other publisher would've expected the customers to rebuy the game - "Definitive Editions" anyone? - CDPR allowed anyone who'd registered their copy to download the patch and content files for cheap like free. Sweet!
They also allow owners of the first two Witcher games to register their keys with GOG.com to get DRM-free copies as backups.
Re: Re:
To make as much coffee with a Keurig would require a $120 machine and 780 coffee pods at ~55 cents a pop. That's $430, or $550 total to make as much K-offee as I make for $30. It may be "better" coffee, but there's no way in hell it's 18 times better.
Hanlon's Razor, anyone?
Chumps.
And you re-elected him because you hated the rich guy and no way are Republicans gonna get your vote because mean racism uncool blah-blah-woof-woof.
Good job, twerps. Perhaps you should go beyond Jon Stewart for information.
Re:
Re: Re:
(untitled comment)
Windows 8 has been stumbling around for 1-1/2 years because no one wants to allow a checkbox labeled "Use Classic interface." There is little wrong under the hood with Win8, but their intransigence insisting on Metro is killing them. Apple's craptacular Launch Pad - because I wanted the broken iOS UI jammed onto my MBP - sucks and there's no simple way to ditch it and Apple are dicks about it, but why does M$ need to emulate Apple's anti-user behavior. They'd probably look at Chris Brown and think, "We want to beat up Rihanna, too," not, "We need to free that poor girl from that brute and show her sweet love."
I have marveled at Microsoft's utter botching of every. Single. Step. of the XBone's rollout for the past year. From not understanding the backlash over Adam Orth's rude comments to staggering from one position to another regarding used games/sharing/DRM to having game dev after game dev put out titles which run slower, at lower resolution and quality, than the PS4 versions. Considering they're basically the same hardware - an x86 PC with 8GB RAM and a burly CPU/GPU core - the little differences in what Sony spec'ed are killing M$ as the PS4 is $100 cheaper and does games better. M$ basically adopted the stance that killed Sony for most of the past gen and are now wondering why they're trailing so badly.
As a proud member of the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race with an Xbox 360 and PS3 and a backlog of games so massive that I've joked that I wouldn't even be in the market for a new console until it's had two price cuts and a redesign, the next-gen holds almost zero interest for me. Most of the games being touted as showcases for next-gen like Watch Dogs will be on PC and thus really inexpensive within a few months of release. It's bizarre how the console makers want to sell us the One Box to bind our home theaters together and then gimp the snot out of them, whether it's demanding XBL Gold to stream Netflix or refusing to take feeds from DLNA devices. WTFF?!? (I thought the PS3 was bad in not being able to see video files on a disc unless they were literally in a folder called "Video.")
Now that Chromecast is open to outside devs, I'm able to use my phone to toss DLNA content from my NAS to the TV instead of having to fire up a console. If Amazon wasn't anti-Android with their Prime Video, I wouldn't even need to boot the PS3 to watch that.
Re:
I'm also lucky to live 11 minutes away from a Micro Center; the next-closest one is three HOURS away.
Hi, I'm Wally and I know NOTHING!!!
FACT: Only the OG Xbox used an nVidia GPU. In fact, the whole chipset was developed by nVidia and was the basis of the Forceware motherboards which were so good because they could encode Dolby Digital internally and feed it via TOSlink to a receiver. Nice.
FACT: The XBone and PS4 will have DX11-complient GPUs with more RAM for graphics than their predecessors meaning Wally's lie about the graphics being the same is a lie from a liar. Or a moron. His pick.
FACT: The Xbox 360 used an ATi (now AMD) GPU. The Playstation 3 used an nVidia chip. Both the PS4 and XBone will use AMD GPUs because nVidia doesn't like being lowballed on parts - they had to sue M$ to get paid for the Xbox parts they delivered - and are concentrating on mobile.
FACT: The reason backwards compatibility is a problem is that both the PS4 and XBone are x86 architectures whereas the PS3 had the hard-to-code-for-only-good-on-paper Cell processor and X360 was a tri-core PowerPC chip. It's the same reason old OS X software made for pre-Intel Macs stopped working after Lion was because Apple stripped out the Rosetta emulation layer. The only reason the OG PS3s were BC was because Sony physically soldered a PS2 Emotion chip in to handle BC, which is why used "fat" PS3s command a higher price than new Slims. PS4s are BC with old games either, but the Sony shills are trying to make people forget that little fact.
FACT: The talking about about DDR3 being too slow is technical illiteracy and marketing BS in action. "Sony has DDR5 which is two more DDRs than LameBox. Sony wins! Derpa herp derp!" DDR5 has more bandwidth, but poor latency. The layman's explanation is that DDR5 is like a few burly guys unloading bricks in bulky loads while DDR3 is like a bunch of little guys grabbing two bricks each in a hurry. Specs are just marketing BS for trolls like Wally. The Cell processor was supposed to deliver better graphics and AI and did neither.
FACT: Wally Wrongo has the memory allocations totally backwards, not that facts matter to fanboys. The XBone has 5GB set aside for games and 3GB for system management. I don't agree with their not using all 8GB for games, but M$ wants people to be able to instantly switch to watch TV, TV, TVTVTVTVTVTVTV. Whatever. Wally's still wrong.
FACT: Wrong Wally is wrong and Sony needs better/smarter/faster fanboys.
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