Back in January, wxpnews reported that due in part to the push by some for "network neutrality," ISPs were likely to head back to the bad old days of charging for Internet access according to per-hour or per-megabyte/gigabyte usage. George Ou was warning us (wxpnews) about this unintended consequence of the net neutrality movement, and that warning has proven prophetic.
First Time Warner began "testing" the new pricing model in Beaumont, Texas. Time Warner reportedly has several tiers of plans, with the most expensive one ($50something per month) capping your usage at 40 GB. Go over that, and you pay a dollar per gig. Some pundits predicted that they would never get away with extending that to other markets, and it would die a quick death. Instead, this week AT&T announced that they, too, are considering a similar type of pricing...
...The big problem here is that what's considered "high bandwidth usage" today may well be just normal Internet usage tomorrow. The wave of the future is HDTV over IP - but will you be able to afford to download high quality movies and television programs with usage caps of 40 GB per month and less? One hour of HDTV equals about 7 GB of data, so if you downloaded four average movies (two hours) per month, you've already exceeded that 40 GB limit with another 16 GB in overage charges - and that doesn't count any of your web surfing, email, and other Internet applications. And it also doesn't count your spam - which, of course, counts against your bandwidth usage even though you don't want it
"Three days filled with specialist lectures delivered by almost 200 speakers, three thematic summits, and over 2600 guests from almost every corner of the world - the capital of Małopolska became the capital of the games industry for a few days.
Organized by the Krakow Technology Park, the Digital Dragons Conference once again showed that Poland is attracting more and more attention from the world's biggest industry tycoons for a reason." - Digital Dragons.
Atari has acquired Intellivision. The company announced today that it had acquired its long-time rival, ending one of the original console rivalries, dating back to the 1970s.
Wow.... two of my earliest gaming platforms. All they need is Coleco to round things out.
This is like Nintendo buying SEGA.
YES! Colecovision was my start! I came to know Mario there in Donkey Kong before the NES was even a thing. :)
Yes such fond memories. My first was the odyssey, but I really started gaming on my colecovision. Had atari and intelivision but coleco was by far the best of the bunch to me.
Good piece of history here.
edit: I wanted to read it but the cookies pop up is stopping me.
This was just before my time. I do remember my mom's friend having one all dusty in her apartment back in the day.
[R.I.P.} Ms. Irene
People forget that console wars are part of the history of this industry. The console wars were started by competitive companies all the way back then and continued through Sega vs Nintendo, Jaguar/3DO/NeonGeo, and PlayStation vs Nintendo and Xbox.
These companies are across oceans and competing for the same business. These companies created the console wars, not crazy fanboys.
Console wars are fun. It's fun to be a fanboy too. I don't get what's wrong with any of this as entertainment.
Young kid school yard banter was fun. 30-40+ year olds still doing it is just disturbing. Many my age (50+) grew out of that a long time ago. We may still have our preferences, but we also embrace a more central position because there is a lot to enjoy on a wide range of genres and systems.
You'll understand one day and then things will forever change.
The only thing back then was that the game would still appear on competing platforms.
Remember the Coleco Vision could play Atari2600 games via an Expansion modude.
I had both. Snafu on Intellivision was addicting as hell. Also had Colecovision which had Time Pilot. Combat was probably my favorite Atari game and both Atari and Intellivision had similar games like Pitfall and Jungle Hunt. It’s been so long I don’t really remember which game I liked bettter out of those but I did play my Intellivision a bit more than Atari though I’m not sure why besides Snafu. That was 40+ years ago damn I’m old lol
Ahh you're making me all nostalgic! Not old enough to have played these on original hardware but my first console was a bootleg console from Costco that had a bunch of intellivision and atari games. Then had a lot of fun with intellivision and atari collections on ps1 and 2.
Snafu was one of my favourite games and me and my partner still occasionally play it to this day
Many players find it easier to express themselves while playing games. Yet, over half of the surveyed gamers still play to relieve stress.
I wonder what place made this study, and it's Fandom, no wonder half of the people said that, I find it hilarious that Fandom of all places did manage to pull more than 50% for the argument of playing games for self expression
Honestly i don't believe this statistic. All we need is an executive to believe it and they'll focus more on how to "express" ourselves over good gameplay and further ruin gaming.
I actually just play to relax/have fun, get immersed in another world for a while and enjoy the story/characters, who the hell plays to "express themselves"? I can understand how that applies to say Minecraft, where you're actually making things, but I don't think you can apply this to most games.
as long as they want people to stop using the internet.