Bah! This LAN-based multiplayer stuff is crap. There are now so many LAN games on the market that the chances of two people legally owning the same game is almost nil. That's if any two given friends even have PCs within an order of magnitude of power of each other. Give me multiple players on the one machine any day. Saturn Bomberman supports ten players on the one screen with the one deck. That means that only one of you needs to make the outlay and keep the equipment running. I paid over A$6,000 for my portable computer a couple of years back and I can almost participate in a LAN game of Quake II.
I can tell you where that VR game is, at least here in Perth. I took a picture through the window of a closed shop back in April. I sent it to Tycho, but I don't know if he'll do anything about it...
I wonder how much of the much hyped stuff of today will end up as a junk pile in an abandoned store.
I don't think the same as the people that write these "open-ended" immersive games, thus I quickly end up bored and/or trapped. However, when the game is simplified down to the odd bit of lateral thinking and some half-decent reflexes I really enjoy it.
I also really enjoy the technology that used to be thought up for console games. I've just bought myself a Sega 32X, which was an amazing peice of hardware totally crippled by petty in-fighting. I've just found out about the "Lock-on" feature of one Sega game that lets you replay older games with new characters. Now that's innovative and interesting.
These strategy/RPG/FPS/3D games are all too complicated. I'd rather whack a cart into an old console and screw around for 15 minutes, than have to spend hours trying to second-guess some programmer who thinks his game is "open-ended" even though the dozen or so perfectly legitmate solutions I come up with don't work.
To sum up; I bought an Atari 2600 today and I'm probably going to play "indy 500" with the padles longer this weekend than I've spent total time on all 3D PC games released after Quake 2. Computer games should be abstracted, not more complicated than life itself.
Re:This makes a twisted sort of sense
on
Bert Is Evil
·
· Score: 3, Funny
booboo and yogi were even sleeping in the same bed
Yeah, but which 88? If it's all engineers, support people and other tech-minded people then it's "everyone". If it's management and sales then it's "nobody".
A very interesting source of music if you like soundtrack stuff and/or electronica are old game CDs. The tracks can be quite short, and some of the first CD platforms out there used audio track for dialogue, but there are some seriously interesting bits of music hidden away on Game CDs.
Personally, I bought a Game Doctor (CD buffer) to repair scratched CDs so I can buy second hand stuff without worrying too much that it will skip. And I regularly visit the new electronica page on MP3.com.
550 Mail transport denied by rule. 554 5.0.0 <scottr@salon.com>... Service unavailable
Apparently he's not allowed to receive messages with a clue.
(Possibly also, messages are blocked if they contain; "stupid", "truly dreadful article", "suck", "say you're sorry" or "computer illiteracy is a pre-requisite for management positions".)
Sure, it's got some interesting specs, but there simply isn't room in the marketplace for this PDA. It's not a gaurantee of failure, but it's close enough -- this device would have to unseat MS' PocketPC or the Palm to really be worth bothering about. And by the sounds of it a colour Handera 330 would remove most of its market. (CF II and SD slots, QVGA.) The keyboard's cute, but it looks like it wastes a lot of space that coulb be better used for Flash RAM or battery life. If only it had Bluetooth built-in or some other particularly interesting technology. Just having a Linux core really isn't enough of a hook.
Anyway, this is not the time, economy wise, to be trying to introduce a completely new product in a genre of questionable usefulness. My TRGpro spends only about one in five days out of its drawer, and I really like it, I just can't find a use for it that justifies lugging it around. (Particularly now summer is on it's way.)
And next season on Junkyard Wars two teams will have 10 hours to build their own Rocket Racers! (While the American host wanders around mispronouncing "pumpkin".)
Re:Pocket PC to replace laptops?
on
Pocket PC 2002
·
· Score: 2
At one place I worked at there was one person who had purchased a WinCE PDA and despite the fact that when I borrowed it I was able to plug-in my Pretec CF modem, dial into the company network and query our database, he still only played with it for a few weeks before letting it rot in a drawer.
Whereas the three Palm owners used their Palms every day -- syncing off their desktops. Primarily they were used to make their PC diary portable. That was plenty to justify the cost of a Palm.
Re:Palm is just not exciting anymore
on
Pocket PC 2002
·
· Score: 2
The best reason for PDA turnover! However, there are more than enough people who play with their Palm for a few weeks then give up for eBay and your local pawnbroker to have a secondhand replacement that will work fine until you drop it. If I kill my TRGpro, I'll probably pickup a secondhand Palm IIIc -- because of all the III-style accessories I have.
Re:Colonel Mustard did it in the CompUSA
on
Pocket PC 2002
·
· Score: 2
What's really sad is that most of the mothballed Palm hardware is more than capable of providing everything the average PDA buyer needs -- that is to say that it works plenty well enough to realise that a PDA is yet another device that you can't use without reading the instruction manual, and that they hate computers. Seriously, I've had someone suggest that I should start a business to (and I'm paraphrasing here) learn how to use a PDA for people.
Palm should stop all production and clear their old inventory.
Re:It is the Palm killer. Here's why:
on
Pocket PC 2002
·
· Score: 2
Why would I drain the battery on my PDA just to play music, when I can use a dedicated hardware device that can last for 12 hours on a AA, or simply borrow a little power from a cell phone battery?
And I'll concern myself with a full-colour mobile browsing experience when I can get more than 6 minutes for a buck.
Sure, the hardware is nice, but the price is too high. It's why the Gameboy beat the Lynx and Game Gear. Small, simple, cheap and a long battery life -- that's what's important.
MP3 drains too much power on PDAs, and there's the problem of having headphones connected to something you use like a PDA. I have the MP3 add-on for the Ericsson T28 and it's a much better option. Hardly any batter drain, and when I get a phone call not only do I actually hear it, but it automatically pauses the music and answers the call, then when the call ends the music starts again.
Audio functionality together, visual functionality together (Like my TRGpro and Kodak Palmpix), Audio/Visual functionality apart. Then communicate with something like Bluetooth.
It's a bit of a cheek not to include 802.11 or Bluetooth in the unit, AND only have one PCMCIA slot and one CF slot. It means that you use up your most valuable expansion ports just adding in the wireless connectivity. As an owner of an Ultralight portable with no internal drives and only one PCMCIA slot, I can tell you that it's a pain having to choose between your CD drive and a 100Mb/s network. I'm sure there are plenty more examples like that...
What we do is we own hundreds and hundreds of CD players dating back to 1983 and forward. Before we release any copies of our MediaCloq product, our CDs are tested on all of those different CD players for playability, sound quality, everything. That's how we ensure that what we build today will work on CD players from 20 years ago.
That's actually pretty cool, but unlikely to cover everything people are going to want to play CDs on. For example, my current primary audio CD player hooked up to my hifi is a Sega Mega CD.
Is there anyone out there compiling a list of "copy protected" CDs and the more obscure, less popular systems they will and wont play on? I'd be happy to obtain the odd CD and run it through my collection of old CD players and CD-based gaming consoles. It's just a shame I sold my CDTV a number of years back...
I use the Zone Alarm personal firewall. Since streaming sucks, I've told Zone Alarm to not allow Media Player access to the network. No auto-updates for me.
I'll tell you what the problem is. Ads were effective when dot-coms were new and cool. People were clicking on the ads because they were interested in the place being advertised, not because the ad somehow magically gained their attention. When the novelty wore off people stopped following the ads. It was never about the ads, it was about the places being advertised. It doesn't matter how annoying the ads are, people are no longer interested in following them.
Of course, what happened was that the ad companies convinced the dot-coms that it was something about the ad itself that caused the click-throughs. And now that the click-throughs are drying up the ads companies are totally panicing, since they convinced themselves that they were responsible for them before, even though they actually had no idea what was going on. Now they're screwed, and they're pissing off everyone else as they go down the drain.
I use three techniques to nuke ads - a Filter, a hosts file that black-holes most ad servers and I've disabled animated gifs and flash. To me, the Internet is a quiet, subtle place with a lot of interesting content. Whenever I use someone else's computer it's like stock footage of Las Vegas, or that Futurama episode with the ads like the birds from Hitchcock's movie. I don't know how advertising executives sleep at night.
Help me find CD-single player (similar disc mount)
on
PlayStation Portable
·
· Score: 2
There were a couple of CD-single (8cm) players way back in the beginning of CDs. If you wanted to play a full sized CD it stuck out of the device much like the CD does on this PS project. Does anyone know any model numbers? I'd love to get hold of one.
BTW: "Innovation" has both a larger-than-Sony LCD screen for the PSone and a battery pack. I just can't find any links at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah! This LAN-based multiplayer stuff is crap. There are now so many LAN games on the market that the chances of two people legally owning the same game is almost nil. That's if any two given friends even have PCs within an order of magnitude of power of each other. Give me multiple players on the one machine any day. Saturn Bomberman supports ten players on the one screen with the one deck. That means that only one of you needs to make the outlay and keep the equipment running. I paid over A$6,000 for my portable computer a couple of years back and I can almost participate in a LAN game of Quake II.
I wonder how much of the much hyped stuff of today will end up as a junk pile in an abandoned store.
I also really enjoy the technology that used to be thought up for console games. I've just bought myself a Sega 32X, which was an amazing peice of hardware totally crippled by petty in-fighting. I've just found out about the "Lock-on" feature of one Sega game that lets you replay older games with new characters. Now that's innovative and interesting.
These strategy/RPG/FPS/3D games are all too complicated. I'd rather whack a cart into an old console and screw around for 15 minutes, than have to spend hours trying to second-guess some programmer who thinks his game is "open-ended" even though the dozen or so perfectly legitmate solutions I come up with don't work.
To sum up; I bought an Atari 2600 today and I'm probably going to play "indy 500" with the padles longer this weekend than I've spent total time on all 3D PC games released after Quake 2. Computer games should be abstracted, not more complicated than life itself.
Yeah, but which 88? If it's all engineers, support people and other tech-minded people then it's "everyone". If it's management and sales then it's "nobody".
"something that physically abrades the surface of the underside of the disc".
Web site here.
Personally, I bought a Game Doctor (CD buffer) to repair scratched CDs so I can buy second hand stuff without worrying too much that it will skip. And I regularly visit the new electronica page on MP3.com.
554 5.0.0 <scottr@salon.com>... Service unavailable
Apparently he's not allowed to receive messages with a clue.
(Possibly also, messages are blocked if they contain; "stupid", "truly dreadful article", "suck", "say you're sorry" or "computer illiteracy is a pre-requisite for management positions".)
"Sure buddy, I got this spleen in last week -- one careful owner, well, not careful enough obviously. Ha ha."
Anyway, this is not the time, economy wise, to be trying to introduce a completely new product in a genre of questionable usefulness. My TRGpro spends only about one in five days out of its drawer, and I really like it, I just can't find a use for it that justifies lugging it around. (Particularly now summer is on it's way.)
And next season on Junkyard Wars two teams will have 10 hours to build their own Rocket Racers! (While the American host wanders around mispronouncing "pumpkin".)
Whereas the three Palm owners used their Palms every day -- syncing off their desktops. Primarily they were used to make their PC diary portable. That was plenty to justify the cost of a Palm.
The best reason for PDA turnover! However, there are more than enough people who play with their Palm for a few weeks then give up for eBay and your local pawnbroker to have a secondhand replacement that will work fine until you drop it. If I kill my TRGpro, I'll probably pickup a secondhand Palm IIIc -- because of all the III-style accessories I have.
Palm should stop all production and clear their old inventory.
And I'll concern myself with a full-colour mobile browsing experience when I can get more than 6 minutes for a buck.
Sure, the hardware is nice, but the price is too high. It's why the Gameboy beat the Lynx and Game Gear. Small, simple, cheap and a long battery life -- that's what's important.
Audio functionality together, visual functionality together (Like my TRGpro and Kodak Palmpix), Audio/Visual functionality apart. Then communicate with something like Bluetooth.
It's a bit of a cheek not to include 802.11 or Bluetooth in the unit, AND only have one PCMCIA slot and one CF slot. It means that you use up your most valuable expansion ports just adding in the wireless connectivity. As an owner of an Ultralight portable with no internal drives and only one PCMCIA slot, I can tell you that it's a pain having to choose between your CD drive and a 100Mb/s network. I'm sure there are plenty more examples like that...
The more savvy stores/salescritters open the replacement in-store. Just keep returning it as defective, over and over and over...
Jeez, and I thought I was paranoid.
Is there anyone out there compiling a list of "copy protected" CDs and the more obscure, less popular systems they will and wont play on? I'd be happy to obtain the odd CD and run it through my collection of old CD players and CD-based gaming consoles. It's just a shame I sold my CDTV a number of years back...
I use the Zone Alarm personal firewall. Since streaming sucks, I've told Zone Alarm to not allow Media Player access to the network. No auto-updates for me.
Of course, what happened was that the ad companies convinced the dot-coms that it was something about the ad itself that caused the click-throughs. And now that the click-throughs are drying up the ads companies are totally panicing, since they convinced themselves that they were responsible for them before, even though they actually had no idea what was going on. Now they're screwed, and they're pissing off everyone else as they go down the drain.
I use three techniques to nuke ads - a Filter, a hosts file that black-holes most ad servers and I've disabled animated gifs and flash. To me, the Internet is a quiet, subtle place with a lot of interesting content. Whenever I use someone else's computer it's like stock footage of Las Vegas, or that Futurama episode with the ads like the birds from Hitchcock's movie. I don't know how advertising executives sleep at night.
BTW: "Innovation" has both a larger-than-Sony LCD screen for the PSone and a battery pack. I just can't find any links at the moment.