Slashdot Mirror

I haven't gotten to play Black & White yet, (I'd be surprised if it worked under Wine) but it sounds like an old concept. Actually, it reminds me a lot of Populous.

What I'd really like to see is a good remake of Masters of Magic. Now *there* was an innovative game. What a wonderful magic system!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Serious question:

The link doesn't work, and the description is confusing and vague, as usual.

So someone tell me just *who* Spindl3top is (besides, perhaps, yet another l33t h@x0r group), where we might have heard of them before, and why we should care.

It sounds like they're selling cool computers at low prices because people donated parts, and now they can spend their time doing cool stuff? Oh, and something about the FSF? And a Blackbird? Which, of course, we have all somehow heard about before right now?

A little more information, please.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Go to lng.sourceforge.net

Get LUNIX! (I'm not making this up. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Just watch "Independence Day" again!

It's all there, man. The appz. The aliens. All of it. Right in front of you, man...

(And if you believe that, you probably thought this was a real slashdot story too!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

A Body Count only counts when you can Count the Bodies.

Otherwise, something like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would win, because they go forward through time, when everyone is already dead...

Incidentally, some friends of mine tried to count bodies (literally) in Bubblegum Crisis. I think they came up with a number that was over one hundred, which is pretty impressive. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

You wouldn't be, say, taking someone else's writings, sticking a disclaimer at the top, and calling them your own, would you?

Because if you were, that might be considered unethical, even if you do call yourself an Editor. People might get mad, and demand what is due to them.

But heck, you guys never listened to us before; why start now?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heck, it wasn't SlashNet.

Wait, that's the NEXT story, right?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

"Slashdot is the single most important english site on the internet"?

You're kidding, right?

I admit that slashdot has been my homepage for a very long time, but it is not, was not, has never been, and never will be "the single most important english site on the internet".

For starters, I could make the argument that sites like Freshmeat or Linux Today are at least as important as Slashdot, and perhaps moreso.

Then, we could go from there to actual sites in The Real World(tm) that cover topics such as: Current Weather, World Events, and... heck, even Technology.

And then we have the Meta Sites, such as Google: the duct tape of the Internet, without which we could find very little.

And then, you go on to say that the stories that are picked on Slashdot are redundant or boring. Gosh, I guess that rules out the rest of the Internet, then!

...except for this "Kuro5hin" site, which somehow isn't "the single most important english site on the internet", despite being possibly more diverse or colorful than slashdot?

However, even if you can't make an argument, at least someone found you Insightful. I just hope *they* aren't planning on posting, and enlightening us all with *their* newfound insight, TOO...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

nope. :)

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Why don't you ask Tim?

He's still alive.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What it means is that all geeks will be banned from the flight, because they use up too much bandwidth. :)

"We've got to call Mission Control about..."

"No way dude, I just got another frag; yes!"
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The *new* Mac-OSish interface?

Gosh, where have I been?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yes, DivX is a good distribution format, just like mp3 is a good distribution format.

The technology is here, the tools are here, the performance gains are substantial, people like it, and people are using it...

the only thing that hasn't caught up yet are the legal implications of using this technology, because of the restrictions that companies and our legal system place on it. Just like mp3.

Therefore, I predict much controversy, and widespread use, and no one getting killed.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Didn't we already reverse-engineer the darn thing?

Oh well, I guess we'll just do it again...

Someone needs to teach AOL what "Free" means, too; *my* IM client doesn't have BANNER ADS on it...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

In this case, you do as follows:

a) examine the relevant source code
b) tell the compiler to compile it into assembler
c) tell the compiler to produce an object file
d) disassemble the object file / assemble the assembler yourself
e) compare the results

Obviously, if you see any extra or changed code, the compiler can't be trusted, as it is rigged to add NSA back doors.

However, if it does this in the assembler, it should be fairly easy to see the discrepancy between that and the original C source code listing.

I would gain a lot of respect for Microsoft, though, if they did anything that clever; I'd definitely suspect the NSA first.

P.S. anyone using a binary distribution of NSA Linux? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Of course the source is buildable; what the hell else do you think the companies that buy it do with it?

That's what IBM does with it, as does MainWin... The only thing I'd worry about is if there *was* a back-door, and those same companies had to sign an NDA. But that would be suspicious, and we'd hear about it eventually.

Which we are...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I remember this from a while back, but it's nice to see other people asking these questions.

My question is, why doesn't someone with a Source License check this out? And if they have, are they allowed to tell us?

Windows source code isn't available to the general public, but a lot of people out there can get their hands on it. Anyone with access to it wanna pipe up and tell us?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Given the sheer amount of electronic information resources out there, portals make it possible to navigate the web. However, the question is becoming who provides the service and what are their motivations to do so. Yahoo made a ton of money by creating valuable real estate, but there's a recession that's driving the value down--not to mention a shift in marketing philosophy. Meanwhile, ogranizations are making their own portals custom suited for their purposes. Infact, that's what I'm working on. My employer, a large university has a library that subscribes to an awesome array of electronic publications and services. Prior to installing and customizing, MyLibrary, no one on the user end had any idea what we had. With the portal, any student can get online and have access to primary resources, and invaluable tool for students at all levels. However, the university library regards this as valuable service for students, staff, and faculty. The revenue we generate from running a portal is, in essence, the increased productivity resulting from the portal.

Let's take this a little further: Let's say that the banner ad market completely collapses and no new market for advertising revenue takes it place. Yahoo goes bye-bye. Suddenly, large organizations are going to need for their members, be they employees or whatever, to be able to find things on the Internet. That means each one will want to run their own search engine and indexing service. Or, given the current trend away from 'vertical integration' in buisiness, most organizations are going to want to outsource their portal work to avoid having to support an a web services infrastructure. That means, by default we will have a subscription base model for portals. Maybe Yahoo can survive this paradigm shift, but someone will almost certainly move into this service vacuum. To be sure, the bigger corps will want to create portals that only allow their members to see what the leadership wants them to see, but there is a need for totally open portals, especially in adcademia. I could even see a consortium of universities and colleges coming together to provide comprehensive and uncensored portal services for academics.

NSA Linux: "We could tell you about it, but then we'd have to kill you."

Um... I'm not clicking on that link. Anyone want to cache the page and live to tell about it first? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I completely agree, and posted something to the same effect. However, you kept your cool a lot better than I did, even in the face of such "moon language" comments.

Also, I'd like to say "thank you" a few times, because my Linux box is running a Software RAID configuration, and, well, I couldn't have done it without the HOWTO. :)

I Speak Moon Language; bah weep grah na weep ni ni bong?

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It's funny you should mention that.

IIRC, the reason the government still uses WordPerfect is because Word wasn't flexible enough to do the sort of word-counting they needed in the first place. Also, they were pretty comfortable with it already.

I haven't used PerfectOffice, but I've used a few flavors of WordPerfect. Weren't the other ports, and the two versions before this one native? Try those, too. Also, I have used Wine; it has seriously gotten a lot better.

For that matter, if you're going to try using Wine, try running Word as well. I'm not much for word processing software in the first place, but I know Wine runs some other Windows word processors decently.

Oh, and yes, once you start adding things like ".DOC" format as a requirement, your list of potential word processor candidates shrinks somewhat. That's because Microsoft wasn't kind enough to let anyone else know how it really works.

However, if you had requirements like, say, "exports to a .RTF document that other word processors can correctly read/parse", well, Office would be gone instantly. The last time I tried to export an .RTF file from Word to anything else, it ended up blank. And, of course, their HTML is worse; I've seen IE choke on HTML generated by Word...

Someone seriously needs to smack the Office team around a bit, and explain to them about "Standard File Formats" and "Compatibility" and "Standards" for a while. I mean, like, some amount of time equal to the man-hours and money lost because of such tactics. Or they could just give each of us baseball bats, and like 5 minutes alone with them...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's actually really funny.

I bought a copy of "Bureaucracy" years ago, because I love Infocom games, and I never knew that was his until now. It's great, but I never did finish it, because it's hard, like HHGTTG (the Infocom game) is hard.

I also have a copy of those tapes as .MP3 that I got from a friend, and I've never managed to pay attention to it long enough to listen to it. I've seen the movie a couple of times, and I bought the first few books (and read the first two a few times; I lose interest in the middle of book 3) but I'm not a big fan of the whole "books on tape" concept, and generally can't pay attention to it for long enough.

So if I ever manage to listen to the radio show for a substantial amount of time, (like, more than 5 minutes) I'll buy a copy, now that I know that I can. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I had the exact same thing happen to me years ago in DOS; I assumed that 'fdisk' was like 'format', which is what I was looking for to format a disk...

Yes, reading documentation is essential. I guess understanding it is, too. And that first time it happens to you, it's always a learning experience.

By the way, my Linux distribution has nothing like a format command, except maybe the various mkfs.* commands, like mke2fs.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Does RedHat do RPM updates over Gopher?

Is their only server in Madagascar?

Does RedHat expect a user to know what Gopher IS?

Is it even INSTALLED in the DISTRIBUTION?

Oh no, that's not the problem at all; according to her article, she successfully installed Slackware from floppies.

She just isn't aware that Linux distributions have made any progress since then.

Either that, or I want some of her crack. Or both.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

WTF is this article? Is Emily writing this in 1994 and posting it now??

Ok, I tried to stick to a reasoned response, here, but she got increasingly weird.

---pb attempts to understand the Journalist---

Almost every time I see a journalist writing about Linux, it's because they think it's too hard to use. That's also because they think it consists entirely of software that would frighten almost any journalist, like Emacs and Vi. Now, to her credit, she also talks about StarOffice, which in my mind is basically a Linux port of Microsoft Office, and certainly enough to frighten any hacker. But her problem is the same.

If she doesn't want her word processor dumping core, then she shouldn't use Word 2000. There are *tons* of word processor programs for Linux, including Word Perfect. It isn't Linux's fault that she can't seem to find them all. For that matter, Windows '98 doesn't come with a decent word processor either. :)

Speaking of annoyances, it's painfully obvious that she *did* write this in Word, or something from Microsoft-land. That's because when she writes this sentence, "That's" looks like "That?s" on this Solaris box. Microsoft is evil, Emily; don't give in. They will make you look like a fool to your audience.

Many Linux distributions do install rather quickly, and with a simple interface. They do indeed have big buttons that say "Workstation" and "Server", but thank god they have one that says "Custom" as well. And most users shouldn't have to install it anyhow; after all, Windows comes pre-installed, and if Linux distros didn't have to worry about *that* taking up space on the computer, there wouldn't be a problem (Windows doesn't; it just silently overwrites your MBR for you; how nice!).

---pb cracks and starts to want some of her drugs---

Download patches from an obscure server in Madagascar using GOPHER?

The HOW-TO files are written in some strange moon language?

Should my mother attempt to change her shell to CSH when she probably doesn't know how to get to one from the default Desktop environment?

My god, woman; who taught you how to troll?

Ok, EMILY. Listen. Find a copy of COREL's Linux Distro. Or MANDRAKE 7.1. Or REDHAT 7.0. NOT Redhat 3.0.3; not Slackware on disks. Then, get an empty hard-drive just for linux, and push the big red "Workstation" button. Then be amazed, and PLEASE shut the fuck up in the future. Did someone actually *pay* you to write this, because I wouldn't!

Here's some friendly advice. Try sending this same article to a linux newsgroup and see what advice they give you. In fact, please DO THAT FIRST before you even THINK about "publishing" anything else. PLEASE.

Also, yes, Linux has a set of technical standards. It does not dictate GUI policies, though, and that's a good thing. Individual environments like GNOME do, and you can find those, pre-installed, as your desktop, from big mainstream Linux distros like those you claim to have tried. Now please try them.

However out of all this, I think we did find what Linux desperately does need: a JOURNALIST-NEWBIE FAQ. We'll make that a big button on startup, and burn them a special CD. Maybe then they'll click the WORKSTATION button and get the special JOURNALIST packages that magically detects which ONE software program they wanted. Even the standard RedHat GNOME stuff would probably do, and definitely XMMS instead of mpg123 for them. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I printed out Flatland once, for a class; that's because printing was free, and I had already read the book.

Still, I didn't read my copy much, because it was really not formatted correctly, and didn't have any of the pictures (don't laugh--they make Flatland a much more readable book!) in the e-text.

However, I have searched through e-texts for my Literature classes before, and they make it much easier to pull out references and find passages. It isn't even too hard to find page numbers, since you know about where you are in the file.

Now, if you had a book in a format like TeX, and printed it out sideways, in two columns, maybe you could get something in close to book form, but that's more work than most people are probably going to put into it, especially when printing it can cost them as much or more than buying it in the store does; at that point, it really makes no sense.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I did read the article, but my point is simple. Having text in an electronic form can be far more useful than having it trapped in a book.

Just because I have the book doesn't grant me an electronic copy; either the author would have to make it available, or someone would have to type it in.

Now, I agree, if someone doesn't pay you for it at some time in the first place, that's wrong, and I'm against that too. But it's much nicer if an author can make it available in more than one form, and most stuff by Ellison I can find in used bookstores--do you know how much money he gets for *that*?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Harlan Ellison is well known for spitting venom. I see why he's mad, but would understand it better if, say, people were printing copies of his books and selling them. As it is, I doubt he's being harmed any more than a music artist is harmed by bootleg tapes.

Having a searchable text is quite different from having a paper copy of the book. I massively prefer the former for quoting passages and doing research, and similarly prefer the latter for just sitting down and reading a book.

Therefore, I doubt this will effect Ellison's book sales in the slightest. And as he doesn't offer an electronic version of his books, it isn't really competing with anything, but rather providing a service to his fans that wasn't there before.

But it's his property, and he can do with it what he wants. However, until then I'll much prefer the enlightened perspective of authors like Bruce Sterling. I first read "The Hacker Crackdown" from the library, and then I downloaded the electronic version. Later, I bought the paperback. I greatly appreciate it when an author provides a reference like that to his fans; otherwise, I have to go back home and search through my books whenever I want to find a quote, and that's really troublesome.

Similarly, I have seen a lot of Douglas Adams stuff online, but I don't know if he knows about it. However, I hope he approves. (should have asked him when Slashdot had the interview) In the future, I hope more authors embrace, or at least examine, the potentials of the new media before lambasting and taking legal action against their present fan base. Ellison, are you out there? You listening?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Excellent. We Are Nerds. :)

I'm guessing that, as much as I love them, Google will eventually sell out too, once all the original people are gone, and the corporate schmucks have paid them off for the name. The same thing happened with Mosaic -> Netscape -> Mozilla, and AOL is responsible for being the Corporate Schmuck in a few cases so far.

I have no idea why SunSite keeps changing their name; however, the ftp site remains essentially the same, and I can still go to 'sunsite.unc.edu', port 21, so I don't care what *they* call it. :)

But I'm very thankful for that, because they're the closest and biggest linux archive around. (it's at UNC, I'm at NCSU... thank us for UUCP and USENET, too. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Obviously not you. In the future, please do not read my posts.

I would have reserved an extra-long boring comment for you, but sadly you did not provide me with enough information to write about.

In the future please provide Your Real Name, Your E-Mail Address, Your Home Phone Number, Your Credit Card Number, and a one-hundred word essay about Why I'm Such An Asshole On Slashdot.

Thank you.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I remember Yahoo fondly from the early days of the web. Back then, it had a well-structured directory of links that was maintained by hand. It was a quality site, and had links the vast majority of useful sites for a given area. It was a lot easier to go to Yahoo to find something than it was to click your way down whatever path you were used to, going through maybe six sites instead of one.

However, times have changed. Now Yahoo is yet another Cheesy Portal Site, and you'll notice that the article is entirely about their stock price, their public perception, their CEO, blah, blah, blah... And nothing about their customers, their technology, and the useful service they provide.

That's because they don't provide a useful service anymore. Instead, they're partners with people who do provide a useful service. After the web started getting too large for Yahoo to handle, AltaVista became popular. It was a showcase for DEC's Alpha computers, showing how powerful they were by how they efficiently searched and indexed millions of web pages, and found your queries. The best part about altavista.digital.com, though, was the query structure, for instance being able to say "+host:slashdot" and search for posts...

So, for a while, when Yahoo needed a real search engine, they used AltaVista's, I believe. I'm not sure because by then I had switched over to AltaVista anyhow. But that too eventually turned into a cheesy portal site, although it looks better recently. However, now Yahoo uses Google for their searching, as well as having their own tree of links that people submit.

Google, however, actually *does* have innovative technology, and hasn't sold out quite yet. They also use the Open Directory project as the basis for their web directory, and have a high quality tree of links reminiscent of how Yahoo used to. But the really useful features are their "PageRank" technology, which takes links into account when indexing, and their Cache, which often is the only way to find things that have been taken off the web.

So, sadly, new useful web sites will often give into the money, and their quality will go downhill. (not mentioning any names here ;) But that seems to be the way the world works, and all we can do is cultivate the young upstarts to bring us the technology of tomorrow, so we can enjoy today again.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heh, many ports of Japanese games *are* dumbed down for Americans, like FF2 and FF3.

But I heard that there wasn't interest in another Mario game so soon after the release of the first one. Not that, as a gamer, I ever believed THAT. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, Mario Allstars was awesome, and that was an SNES title, too.

Mario 2 was dumb, though; Nintendo needed a new US Mario game, so they bought some silly Arabian game and changed the sprites and whatnot. Hence, the preponderance of deserts and carpets.

But you probably were reading Nintendo Power back then too, so I'll assume you knew that. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Shouldn't someone tell them that Super Mario Bros. 3 has been out for years already, and was a classic NES title? I also see no reference to it in the article.

Also, Super Mario Advance looks more like a Mario 2 remake, at least by judging from the screenshots.

Now, a handheld NES... THAT would be worthwhile.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

They are not going to change anything. The FCC already refused to changed the VSB format to the better CODFM transmission system.

There is no way in hell they are going to change the bandwidth allocations at this point.

Oh, but how history could repeat itself!

If one takes a look at the history of NTSC, you'll note that a quite similar thing happened before with the introduction of color TV. To summarize:

CBS developed an incompatible standard. They pushed the FCC to take it. RCA at the last minute reveals their standard - compatable with the (at that time) current standard.

FCC takes CBS's standard. Broadcasts are done in both standards, and due to a number of circumstances, it isn't catching on. It's scrapped after 4 months.

After a long unfriendly story, the FCC takes RCA's standard over CBS's. It worked with existing sets, and only one broadcast was needed.

Yeah, I was messing with Cygwin last night. After I got X up and running, I tried compiling stuff for it.

With (very) minor tweaking, I got glib, gtk+, and xchat compiled on it. With a little more work, I compiled everybuddy as well. I would have tried for Mozilla, but I was running out of space on that partition, so I just called it a night.

I'm pretty impressed with Cygwin; in fact, with a different X-Server, I'm sure I could get my roommate hooked on it. He wants something like Everybuddy for Windows, but they don't offer a Windows version. Little do they know that it compiles on Cygwin! :)

Anyhow, this LINE project sounds like a much simpler solution, except that "LINE requires Cygwin". And the page was still somewhat slashdotted when I got to it. But it'd be interesting to compare performance against Cygwin compiled binaries, or DJGPP...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I did read the article, actually.

But I still don't believe it.

Remember, it isn't like Bill Gates wasn't born into a priviledged family.

And, FWIW, I think the Estate Tax is currently too high, but obviously there are ways to get around it anyhow. That's what gifts and trusts are for.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What does that mean when the *rich* fight against getting a tax cut?

That's seriously bizarre. Oh well, I guess they can afford it. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Web standards are for *both*. If web browsers didn't render incorrect HTML, then web pages would stay clean.

However, I'd be happy if browsers even had the *option* to enforce compliance.

For instance, if browsers could actually obey the </HTML> tag, then the fascist disclaimer that is automatically appended to all of my pages at NCSU wouldn't show up. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I didn't know at first if this referred to "Buggy" web pages, or "Bugging" web pages.

Microsoft is surely responsible for more buggy web pages, such as any HTML generated by Word or FrontPage, and the creation of their own Windows-only character set that often render what should be simple ASCII punctuation into question marks, or worse. Also, their webpage fonts are incredibly small on any system that doesn't support *their* fonts.

Doubleclick also is responsible for buggy code, specifically something known *as* a "web bug" or a "GIF bug", but that's also used to track people, so that would count as "bugging" as well.

The short answer for that would be to simply install JunkBuster. As for fixing Microsoft's sloppy HTML, I bet a proxy server like Junkbuster could detect a "GENERATOR" tag or maybe an undefined character code and just run the page through the Demoronizer.

But I wish people actually implemented the web standards we had originally, or put such compliance in the web browsers we have now. Netscape and IE are much prettier than Amaya, but they still read past a closing HTML tag...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Comparing mathematics to computer science is laughable?

Have you taken a course in Automata, or even Discrete Math? Do you know who Alan Turing is?

No, computer science is very much rooted in math. In fact, we still haven't gotten past some of the boundaries that the original math has set up for us.

For instance, no computer on Earth can compute more than a Turing Machine can, strictly speaking, and NP-complete problems still haven't been found to take a polynomial amount of time.

No, real Computer Science problems require a large mathematics background. Therefore, I would say that it is you who are uninformed, for I am not about to hurriedly level base accusations of trolling. Please be more polite to your fellow slashdotters in the future, if that isn't too difficult to do.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, the wheel has been patented many times over, and in many forms. Look it up sometime.

It is the nature of patents to allow the extension of existing ideas. So even if "The Wheel" (the concept of a circular object that rolls) isn't patented, there are always "Wagon Wheels", "Spoked Wheels", "Bicycle Wheels", "Motorcycle Wheels", "Tires", "Aquatread Tires"...

So, yes, the wheel is indeed patented, in many forms. And if you can think of a few more, you can patent them too.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'd rather they read the Moderation Guidelines first.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What about the fact that Newtonian Mechanics don't work in the real world?

I mean, I'm not that good at pool, but in the future I want to be able to break *really* fast. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

And I'm glad you did post something; this is one of the best responses I've gotten so far. I should probably tell you now that I'm prone to understatement.

For Understatement #1, yes, I think the SNES is awesome. Maybe not as awesome as the NES was, but still very cool.

For Understatement #2, no, I couldn't justify buying a Console system for just a few games. Even for four or five. Maybe that's why the last one I owned (and still own; I got another one! :) is the original NES.

Believe me, if Nintendo still had games like that on their system, I'd own an N64. As it is, I really don't feel like I'm missing that much. But that's just my opinion. :)

And no, the fact that they make money does not mean that suddenly I like their games, or that their games are somehow better. I guess someone is buying them, namely Pokemon for the Gameboy; that still doesn't say much for the N64.

Cheers.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I wasn't talking about sales, and neither are you; I'm talking about gameplay. I was expecting more, especially after the sheer amount of time Nintendo expected everyone to wait.

And yes, gameplay is much more important than graphics. That's why it made no sense for Nintendo to piss Square off. Incidentally, there's no way Square could have made the Final Fantasy games as cool as they are without a CD-ROM drive, and they've done some really impressive stuff with the Playstation!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Is there still a shortage?

You can tell I don't own a console system anymore. :(

Awesome handle, by the way!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, and they owe it all to Pokemon.

Don't get me wrong; I know they make money. I don't like Microsoft either, and they make even more money. But yes, I don't like their games. I'm not complaining that *they* don't have money; I'm complaining that *we* don't get quality. Also, Nintendo was *so* paranoid about this stuff that they released a cartridge system and further crippled their games and their development--and people still dumped the ROMs...

And could you guys cut it out with the PSX2 statistics? It was stupid the first time. The PSX2 will sell a lot once there is a really popular game released for it, just like the N64 did when Zelda was released. Which, BTW, was *years* after the original release of the N64. Just wait for the next Square game... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No, I'm complaining that there haven't been any good remakes of Mario, and the planned remake of Metroid doesn't look anything like Metroid, either.

What I heard about the two Zelda games were that if you played the original Zelda game, you didn't miss much, but that they were too short. Zelda on the SNES, however, didn't have either of those problems. I only played the first Zelda for N64 once, mind you, so this is just what I've heard.

Also, it took Nintendo *way* too long to even release that.

Nintendo *has* made a ton of money on the Gameboy, but I think they've stopped producing the quality games that they used to. Granted, I haven't messed with N64 for a bit, but when it came out, they had only crappy games on the system for *years*, with the possible exception of Mario 64.

The next decent game was Zelda 64, which many people bought the entire system for, because they hadn't seen a *reason* to buy it earlier. That alone should tell you something.

After that, I have no idea what they've done. Mario Kart 64 looked amusing, but that's about it. The other games I haven't seen, because I already gave up on the N64 as an aging console platform with a lot of crappy games that I'm not about to pay for...

But the Mega Man games do rule, although the later ones get pretty hard. It's sad that they have to be backported now, though.
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