Are you nuts? You can say what you want, with one restriction: our laws are mandatory over the ground rule that you can say what you want. So you can't insult someone because it's your opinion or discriminate one.

If I look at the 'Telegraaf' (the biggest newspaper) which is more and more moving towards PVV-level rightwing, I don't see how free speech is limited to the left side, on the contrary.

Your other remarks are also not true in the way you stated them. I agree with the PVV being anti-islam but I don't think they'll be the next government nor that they'll sent people back to morocco, simply because it's against the law (european law) and they're is no 'back', these people are born here so are legal dutch citizens

The Dutch government didn't state it wants any of this thing. The minister of education and culture asked a committee (with non parliament members!) how newspapers could be supported so they don't go bankrupt but at the same time the government isn't messing with how the papers run their company. He has 8 million euros for that. The committee calculated that that's not enough and advised to tax internet usage a bit so the total sum is larger.

That's it. It's an advice of a committee to a minister who then has to think about what to do with it. As the minister is a well known scientist and well aware of what internet etc. is, I don't think this advice will be made law.

Because Microsoft says they are? PS2 + ps3 combined still outsells the 360, month over month in the US. The Ps3 alone doesn't, but they still sell the Ps2 and there are still games coming out for the Ps2.

Across the globe, Sony isn't doing bad at all. Sure, I think they really would have liked to be outselling the 360 with the PS3 alone at this moment, but alas, it didn't happen. Big deal, they keep on selling the ps2 and look, it still works. Not everyone looks at the US as the center of the world: the rest of the world also counts, hell, in south america for example, all next-gen consoles are simply too expensive for the majority of the people.

Sony makes money for activision, so why should activision drop sony? It makes them money. So dropping the platform would LOSE them money, so they won't do that. Sony also knows that and I'm pretty sure they don't even pay attention to this nonsense.

The problem is more, like your comment, that a certain group of people think sony is in a tough spot and really on the brim to keel over and keep on repeating that whenever they can. That's the real problem for sony at the moment. Not activision's CEO whining about some licenses he has to pay for (which prices he knew up front).

Though Sony has the solution for this in-house: their own large group of 1st and 2nd party studios. The games they're creating and will create in the coming 2 years are going to make Sony enough money and will sell enough consoles that people who keep on repeating that they're in a tough spot and ready to keel over are not believed anymore.

In that light, MS has bigger problems. But that's an umpopular statement in gaming world with the large group of very vocal 360 followers online. ;)

Windows 7 doesn't seem to have an upgrade mechanism from XP, so you're kindly asked to repave your disks and install Windows 7 on it. Or upgrade to Vista first of course.

So Gartner, how are all these business suppose to forget about Vista if they're then stuck with a situation where no upgrading is possible?

(yes I know about images, and centralized software installation management, but think about all those smaller businesses with 4-5 computers for example... )

i.o.w.: josh isn't payed to go hold your hand, share funny stories or go to the mall with you and your kids, he's payed to get the job done, whatever it takes.

If that makes life hell for his co-workers, the company should make a decision: what are we: an organization which purpose is to keep some group of people off the streets or a business? If it's the former, Josh has to go, as he'll force the rest of his coworkers to go back to the streets, however if it's the latter, the rest should either shutup or do their work as well, as they too aren't payed to babble for hours at the watercooler.

I think a story in a shooter in particular is really necessary because otherwise the game will become boring pretty quickly and the player will start wondering why s/he has to go there and click button X, why object O is at spot Y etc. A story gives meaning to all that, and the player thus is able to accept why things happen the way they did and why the environments/objects are the way they are. If you for example played Gears of war 1, there are numerous moments where you simply wonder why you're there, why you have to go there and why things happen the way they happen. Sure the shooting the crap out of every enemy is fun, but a story which gives meaning to the events makes a good experience a great experience (IMHO)

Reading the Edge Magazine review of KZ2, I get the feeling it is written by a person who clearly doesn't like FPS shooters, PS3's or both. Considering the fact that similar games on the 360 received high acclaim from Edge, it looks like Edge wasn't entirely fair with the review. At least, that's what the review tells me. KZ2 arrives a couple of months after GeOW2, it can't be that in those couple of months the requirements to be an entertaining shooter has become that much higher. The review has similarities with the Eurogamer review of Fear2 which was rewarded a 5/10, also completely off the mark.

Oh well... the rest of the reviews on metacritic are pretty positive.

It might look like that, but don't forget that MS has spend billions on R&D for years already, and if you closely look at what their successful products are, the ones which make them money, they're all me-too products. This means that R&D wasn't the base of the success nor the product, but marketing was.

In that light, it's a true waste to spend billions of dollars on research while in fact very little is really delivered. Sure, here and there products pop up with things which started in R&D, but as a whole, the influence of R&D on what MS release is really pretty minor.

So I can fully understand why shareholders get pissed off: the company makes billions in profit each year, but as a shareholder you don't see a lot of that in return.

I agree with you, that line was stupid: it automatically assumes that whoever is killed by a USA soldier is a bad person and should be killed no matter what.

Well the idea of sony was to advance the PS2 design further, in my opinion a broken design having two SIMD Vector processors doing everything

It's not broken, it's just an advanced system so a developer who wants to write really fast code has to know how it works. If you look at God of war 2 for example, what the engine can do on a system with 32MB of ram and a pretty slow CPU, it really shows that a skilled developer who knows what s/he's doing can get the results desired.

I.o.w.: a 'lamer' can't get the performance desired. Well, what a shame, ain't it? If one really understands what it takes to write 3D engine code, it shouldn't be hard to understand that what the PS3 offers is in theory not really broken, but an opportunity to really get results which are beyond what one could imagine.

Sure it's hard to write that code, but that's no different from writing solid, performing, scalable data-access code for example. It doesn't require thousands of developers to write that code: only a few are required, they can write the hard part, the rest of the developers can build on top of that. After all, a game is often mostly written in a script-like language of the engine or C/C++ utilizing engine libraries, not a lot of people developing games are really writing engine cores.

It also means that the Cell can't fiddle with video RAM directly. It's power could perhaps be better used if it could directly do operations at full speed on data in VRAM but it can't.

Everyone who has written assembler code for an Amiga 500 knows that this isn't true: if you have multiple processors fiddling with data in videomemory, they also share a bus, and that sharing is precisely why it makes it slow. At least compared to memory which is only for 1 processor.

Microsoft's 512MB memory runs at a very slow speed compared to the 3ghz frequency the PS3 cpu memory runs on. It's not a surprise why this is: the bus is shared: display hardware, video chip, main cpu, all have to utilize a bus to the same memory. To schedule all these requests, you have to use even/odd cycle schemes or similar, you can't use the bus all for one chip. 'DMA' only helps you if you own the bus to the memory, which is what the PS3 hardware gives you: very fast data crunchers in the CPU space and a videochip which can do whatever it wants in videomemory.

That the PS3 runs out of texture memory is not really an argument as well: one can easily generate /unpack textures in cpu memory for usage in video memory, as the speed difference is significant. Though what happens is that multi-platform engines in general tend to write most stuff in shaders and want to use a big main memory block for texture memory as that's easier and 'it works on xbox'. Porting it over to ps3 works, unless you have a need for more than a given threshold of texture memory, which gives problems which aren't easy to solve.

It's partly lazyness really: you've to solve it once and you can re-use the engine for multiple games on the multi-platforms you want to support. The question is: do you want to write that special SPU using optimization code or not? More and more studios are willing to do so. Not because they want to, but because they have to: once Sony starts releasing more and more games exclusively for PS3 developed using their maturing engines (e.g. KZ2, uncharted 2 etc.), keeping up with that for a multi-platform game really requires that PS3 optimizations are in place, otherwise the multi-platform game will suck in comparison with the ps3 exclusives. As Sony owns more studios than MS and nintendo combined, this is a matter of time.

"Big government: bad!"...

Right? Ok, so next time one of your banks keels over due to greedy fingers of their 'managers', don't beg for government intervention. Let's see what you'll say after the economy collapses big time, eh?