Except that it never works. That's what Sega Game Channel was, that's what Intro Distro was, that's what the eReader is. People won't buy it if it has a limited life, and people think of things they download as impermanent. For some reason, media matters at one level or another.
Granted, Sega had bigger infrastructure costs than you'd have these days, and the nostalgia is stronger now than it ever has been before. But really, for just how long do you think people will extoll the virtues of Dragon Warrior 1 after they actually start playing it again? I found a copy and a working NES at funco land for $8 together, and I shugged and what-the-helled it.
I got into the first dungeon, and opened the locked trunk that had the key to get me through to the other side. As my inventory was full I could not take the key. I dropped an item, looked in the box again, and it was gone. I fought my way back to ground and then back down; still gone. I'd have to recreate 6 hours of gameplay over that I didn't know there was an inventory limit, much less that trunk contents were a one-time-only grab.
Granted, many games do hold up to the test of time - crysalis, koei games, et cetera - but the market is still too slim.
$10 "greatest hits" discs will always win. Besides, that's $2/rom, and you can take it to friends' houses. Good enough?
Ever tried to find a decent flight simulator on a console?
Many of us believe that PilotWings is the greatest flight simulator ever. You're right, though: much like the non-realtime strategy and the non-plot adventure game, vehicle simulators are woefully underrepresented on consoles.
Why? They don't sell. At least, not unless they ship with 414 new missiles! 328 new enemies! 3d phong shaded goraud mapped mip-texelled quincunx vertex eliminating z-ordered hyperclipping asiosphere specular rendering! and 8 new hidden levels!
(even the exclamation points are nessecary.)
Some of us older gamers can remember the time when consoles couldn't even save games unless the cartridge came with built-in storage (ie, almost anything that came before the PS1)
It's amusing that you've said that, given that the second most popular console on earth still works this way, and that the one to which you're probably referring didn't, originally.
and it's only recently that online multiplayer gaming has become possible on the latest generation of consoles.
The Genesis, Dreamcast, TurboGrafx 16, and NeoGeo are all now very angry at you.
A console can still not achieve the versatility of a PC when it comes to gaming.
Whereas this is true, the amount by which it is true shrinks daily. The PC has four big benefits in my mind: ubiquitous keyboards, ubiquitous mice, ubiquitous network connections, and a much higher resolution average screen. All of these benefits will be gone (well, the keyboard and mouse maybe not, but they're $25 each, and cheaper if you use PC parts with the PS/2) within a console generation and a half.
The processing power issue isn't as much of an issue as we've been bred to believe. The Arm7 in the GameBoy Advance is honestly enough to push most non-3d games.
Only the Xbox has truly brought full-fledged online gaming to the console masses (local storage, patches, large centralized gaming network, etc - basically everything that makes online PC gaming so good).
Whereas this is true, it *really* pisses me off. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 worked over the internet with commodity hardware a year before the XBox even came out. Sony hosed this one *badly*.
The problem with this, is that Microsoft has been using its endless bags of cash and an unfair monopoly status to swing this much weight into a new market. If they weren't able to lose hundreds of millions of dollars to do this, it would have never happened.
How quickly they forget that this is exactly the method by which the Colorado Leather Company, Sega, Namco, Bandai, and Sony entered the game. In fact, the only remaining big name that didn't get in this way was the playing card manufacturer Nintendo; they got in through the far more insidious method about concealing the nature of their products during a massive customer disinterest.
Robbie the robot saved videogames! If you don't understand why I said that, read your history before returning to complaining re: Microsoft's entry methods.
Online console gaming would still be largely non-existent.
In America. The Japanese were chuchu-rocket addicts online in early Dreamcast years. We're just way behind. Perpetually.
Just something to think about: is Microsoft good in this case, or are they bad?
Do they have to be either? They're a corporate giant warring with other corporate giants for megacash. They can't do the bullying we so hate with Sony and Nintendo, both of whom are experienced and wealthy bullies in their own right. The only reason I hate the XBox is that it's, er, a laughing stock.
STOP MAKING COMPUTERS OUT OF CANDY. YOU ARE NOT APPLE.
I bought the kit for pushing component video out of an x-box and took it over to a friend's house who has a 56" Sony HDTV projection screen. I cranked it up to 1080i and pretty much the only thing I saw was that it slowed down.
To be fair, very few games for the XBox make much use of HDTV. Worse yet, the ones that do generally do 720p, not 1080i. DragonSlayer 3D does 1080i, but it's not exactly impressive. Syberia also does 1080i, but I've never seen it.
Beware that most sales goons don't know half of what they're talking about. DS3D, Syberia, and The Matrix are the *only* 1080i games for the XBox. That's/it/. I'm a PS2 fan; this is from my coworker. Still, ask the TV if it's getting a 1080i signal, etc, etc, etc. Act like it's some dufus friend's badly set up DVD player; assume it's broken in at least half a dozen ways.
Because whereas neither The Matrix nor DS3D are really graphically impressive, I was able to see the difference quite clearly - the detail with which their mediocre graphics was rendered was quite a difference.
I think it's insane that a friend of mine just spent $500 to upgrade his PC to get Halo playable, when he could have bought an Xbox for about 100 bucks used.
Of course, there's a pretty big difference in the graphics quality between halo/pc and halo/hidef TV, and if you don't have hidef, it's gonna cost you well more than $500 to catch up to being behind.
There's also that, well, really, who wants an XBox? They're uglier than sin, they take up lots of space, and the controllers have to be lashed to the top of my car because they won't fit in the back seat.
Let's not forget that the $500 upgrade to the PC affects all of our other PC games (such as Civ3, the only game I've played for like 6 months now.)
No one is going to see anything odd about me pressing buttons on a calculator in a large lecture hall.
Of course, this depends a little bit on how large the "big" lecture hall classes are at your school. At rutgers, you could set up a PS/2 on a big screen TV, come in butt naked with the frat, and give the professor a map to your location, and they still wouldn't notice.
Then again, at OSU, you could probably bring Cleveland.
Yeah, everyone in the AGB development community is up in arms about the Tapwave.
I think it's going to fail, for the same reason that the GP32, the Cybiko, the Wonderswan, and the other parade of near misses have. Or, rather, for the list of reasons:
1) Nobody's ever heard of the damn thing. You're on slashdot and people are all "the what?"
2) Tapwave can't undersell the hardware like Nintendo can. $300 for a portable gaming machine has never gone over well, and it never will.
3) This thing isn't getting a game library of any real size.
4) I can buy a tapwave at:
Toys R Us? No.
Babbages? No.
The Mall? No.
Walmart? No.... anywhere other than mail order? Sorry.
See, being able to sell to kids is kind of important for something like a game platform. The Cybiko had long distance wireless! That should have won them the war! Except it was ugly. I mean, shit, you could get those things in stores that exist in middle America. They had the Cybiko at Walmart for $50. And it still lost.
Why? Because they tried to brag that they had games like stuntcar, klondike, skiing, snake, and checkers.
OMG! Checkers! King me, random person a mile away! I am the master of Draughts! ALL PHEER MY MORRIS SKIZZNILLZ! (don't have much of a ring to it, do it?)
I am happy that this device got off the ground. I am impressed that it can play all dozen of the PalmPilot games in a ridiculous quarter-screen box. Wow, it's even got a graphing calculator, which is clearly the first thing I look for in a system that costs me over four times what the industry leader with all the games wants.
And there is nothing, I say nothing, about Zelda which is anywhere near as cool as Acid Solitaire. Without Acid Solitaire, I'll have no idea what the kids at school are talking about, with Marjora's Mask, which allows you to peek at *two* cards from the top of your draw pile.
The company's too small to court real developers and without real developers its market is too small to attract them on its own. GP32 had the right idea shipping an emulator, but you couldn't buy one without living in Korea, and besides, the GP32 is ugly enough to get you beat up every day.
Adults don't remember how a kid's life works. This thing is doomed. The AGB has only one thing to fear, and that thing is the PSP.
If all you want is portable games, buy a portable game device (GBA, NeoGeoPocket, etc)// If you want other functionality, buy a PDA.// Period.// Why is this an issue?
Apparently you've never looked at the PPC's game lineup.
sigh. might as well get it out of the way.
on
Build Your Own Saturn V
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
During the North East Blackout were more people listening to their car/battery powered radio or surfing the internet?
I was in Erie, PA on a visit with friends at the time. Verizon kept the phone network up (apparently this wasn't the case in most places,) and my laptop worked just fine. The radio station, however, had lost power; I was using my walkman to pull radio off of a borrowed iPod, because the primary waves were all static.
But with radio you don't have to worry about infrastructure in between source and destination.
Whereas this is certainly true, almost everything which will affect the phone and data network on anything other than a local scale will also take out radio (power loss being the primary contender here; the only exception I can think of is a direct attack on all of the telco hubs at once, but that's kind of unfair.) In a very large nonelectrical storm such as a hurricane, where phone lines are torn in bulk, radio has a significant advantage; if the station is isolated from earthquakes, then too. Otherwise, I'm not sure I agree that it weathers natural disasters particuarly better.
Remember, *lots* of us get our IP by satellite, microwave, or other wireless mechanisms these days. As community 802.11 and the suchlike proliferate, it is my unfounded speculation that community distributed IP will prove to be the most resilient network so far in human history.
Let us all have a moment of silence for John Postel. Thank you, John.
" The mass media was ridiculously behind, incorrect, and self-argumentative"
Yet, Fox News, part of the mass media, was the first to point out who caused the disaster.
Mmm hmm. It was also the fourth group that they identified as a possible source. Reporting speculation is reprehensible, and that they eventually guessed right is not something to be proud of.
"Slashdot was the only thing carrying more than one viewpoint,"
I thought you said that the mass media were self-argumentative. Now you say that they carried only one viewpoint. Make up your mind!
Admittedly, that was badly worded. Each individual news source was reporting one strongly biased viewpoint (or, in the case of Fox News, apparently the outcome of their hyperconservative magic 8-ball); the media as a whole was a contradictory cacophony. I relied on you carrying the plural, which is bad form. The basic observation I was trying to make, which I failed to sufficiently elucidate, is that it is generally held that a media source should provide multiple viewpoints whenever facts can uphold each scenario; when a reporter takes a stance of personal belief, they are supposed to call it editorial. Unfortunately, as of late, this practice is largely being forgotten.
I was correctly chastized in email as regards the grandparent posting; NPR, the Christian Science Monitor, and the BBC America (some argue C-Span, though I disagree) all did a reasonably strong job of providing balanced coverage. However, having fallen out of the habit of listening to radio and not having cable, I tend to forget that there are still a few reasonably responsible news agencies in this country.
Also, Jon Stewart made me cry when he came back. But whatever.
The facts all came out on the mass media, in reality.
Whose reality are you referring to? For months Fox News tried to imply that Saddam was behind Osama, which is horse shit. CNN is the only organization to have even mentioned the Bin Laden construction empire in anything more than cursory detail. The rest of the world's media is in outcry over just how thick the wool over our eyes supposedly is.
What a surprise - Fox tells you that they've given you the whole story, and you believe them. This of course is the same media conglomerate which is owned by Murdoch, one of the Bush's strongest campaign contributors, a man which dozens of respected newspapers - the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post among them - suggested was using his media power to strongly influence the American viewpoint of the democratic candidate. Of course, the front page article regarding a campaign of character assasination probably slipped quite under your radar, because any news station which is so biased that they need a byline "fair and balanced coverage" surely is trustable as a sole source of information.
Naw, they couldn't be sweeping anything under the rug. The rest of the world must just be wrong.
C'mon out of the cave allegory, bub. There's more to life than a republican shiff rag. This would turn Ben Franklin green, and if you have half a clue about history, you'll realize just how big an insult that is.
On Slashdot, I was able to learn only about how Bill Gates and Goatse were involved in the tragecy.
Yeah, and on Fox, you got to learn how it was Iraq's fault. The nice thing about Slashdot is that the bullshit is easy to identify.
Pardon me. The mass media was ridiculously behind, incorrect, and self-argumentative during 9/11. Slashdot was the only thing carrying more than one viewpoint, and it weathered the storm quite well.
As far as vulnerable to backhoes, radio is far more susceptible to damage, being that a single broadcast point is quickly silenced. I'd be hard pressed to find a network more resistant to damage than IP.
I'm looking forward to low-cal fat now. But I fear it will be a while.
Up and until this post, I was going to ignore that transchiral food additives have been on the market for almost a decade. However, in light of this almost-observant post, I remind you that Olestra has been teaching us for quite some time.
Sugar in my foeces probably won't be nearly as bad as oil, thankfully. What we need is an oil that degrades in our stomach to two other things that a) don't get ingested and b) don't leave me feeling like i just left a porn stage.
Whereas Mozilla will be moving to Firebird sooner-or-later, it's waiting until Firebird is ready; 1.6a, which is almost frozen, is still Moz suite, and it looks like 1.7 might be too.
This seems about as problematic as an Arab nomad behing hydrophobic. Hint: patting yourself on the back doesn't make you seem right.
I though I illustrated it pretty clearly by what I chose to quote.
Oh, sure. And if what you chose to quote didn't significantly alter the meaning of what was being said by inference of context, you might have half a point.
Or perhaps you consider belittling "dorks" to be a valid social skill.
No, but I'm more than happy to sound off about the holier-than-thou tech jock that read two Compaq manuals and thinks he's Wozniak.
You seem to take cause to imply responsibility. I don't.
Bullshit. If it weren't about responsibility, the quote would pack no weight. That's like saying "you're the kind of guy that sets off avalanches sneezing."
The implication that you're now pretending that you didn't make is that I'm some sort of overbearing bully. What you cartoonishly fail to realize is that the converse is true: you IT dorks lord your competence over other people's heads as if it is the very definition of being a tool using mammal to know how to take a macro virus out of MS Word. If the user cannot merely upgrade a video driver to fix a bug, they are the simplest of buffons, not fit to spit shine the shoes you won't wear because they're too old. If the user can't do something ostensibly as simple as running their virus updater, they are beneath the contempt of the species, not fit to pity, surely encoded in a lesser genome made of tar, filth, potted meat product and caffeine-free rc cola.
Anything the user doesn't know how to weild is blamed on the inability to handle simple tool use, something a different IT orangutan in a different branch of this thread is being his chest about at this very moment.
What you aspergers rejects don't seem to fully grasp is that that's not simple tool use. When I have to call AAA because my car started making a horrible sound while I was driving, does the tow truck guy make fun of me for not recognizing the sound of a pebble stuck under my brake pad? No. When my garbage disposal overflows, and the plumber has it fixed in under five minutes with a drain snake after I flooded my apartment for two days being certain of my ability to handle it myself, do I get an earlashing about how I should learn to use a wrench and a flashlight? No. When the neighbor kids hear you can burn letters into someone's lawn with fertilizer, does the grounds guy harass me for not knowing you can't just wash it away because it'll be permanent? Nope.
The problem isn't that people can't handle simple tool use. The canonical example, my mother, which by rote cannot set either her VCR clock or her car stereo presets, is quite adept at moving between MS Word and IE. This is all a user should need to know how to do, other than turning the damned thing on and off, and maybe how to start pinball. It's a tool! It's a multiple thousand dollar tool! Why can't it just be made to fucking work right?
Granted, that's voiced as Joe Average User; like every slashdot relic, i yearn for the days when the subpar BBS loser knew his IRQ and DMA/HDMA list by heart, and could probably whistle his init strings. Big scary microsoft word doesn't scare me any more than you, and like you, I find it somewhat disappointing that there's so much confusion over a tool which generally works without fuss.
Unlike you, I still have ties to my mortal soul. I remember what it was like to be befuddled by the literally hundreds of similarly (badly) named menu items, grotesque lists of impenetrable options arranged in a fashion familiar only to those familiar with the underpinnings of software and the generic OS metaphor.
Of course, you seem to have missed in both of your points that I was doing something other than to belittle IT jocks. For one, I'm only belittling those which have the attitudes; I for one didn't, back when
I know, as I also frequent usenet, and have my paws in a fair number of GotWs. That said, don't fool yourself: there is a tremendous amount of work involved in just writing that approachably. The authors of math textbooks are no less authors even though the problems are just nubmers and the answers derivable with a calculator; it's the explanation in which the real effort lies.
Calling Meyers a novice in the face of Sutter is like calling Stroustrup a novice in the face of Knuth. IE: true, *barely*. Watch it: that sort of talk angers the Ghods.
You certainly have. I find nothing more frustrating than MS' seeming inability to get their shit together and write a tutorial that doesn't assume that the user is experienced or stupid. It seems MS doesn't see them as seperable concerns.
"This is a mouse. If you can't hook your printer up, you've obviously missed the last 20 years of pop culture. Even Scotty from Star Trek figured this out when it was 400 years obsolete, so you must be a putz. First, put your hand down. No, the one on your arm. Good: you may have a grape."
I'm sure you can't see the inconsistancy in your own thinking.
Perhaps you would point it out? I see no inconsistency in "you have a drastically overinflated self image, and need to be knocked down a notch and stop acting as if you were to efeete to mingle with us lowly peasants."
I'm really just responding to let you know that you are the kind of asshole that gets high schools shot up.
Spoken like a shooter. "It's your fault I pulled the trigger!"
I don't see the point -- as long as I do my job and get my stuff done, whats the point and the problem?
Because the rest of us can't fucking stand working with you. Contemptuous IT people act as if their five years of experience in a limited domain somehow makes them better than people with 30, 40, 50 years' experience in alternate domains.
Frankly, I don't care if you're the nobel laureate that single-handedly ironed out our disputes with martians over trade rights while solving world hunger with three nine volt batteries and two VHS tapes of MacGuyver. You're in public. Act like a big boy.
The problem with fields which are in demand is that the practicioners often don't see anything whatsoever wrong with their primadonna attitudes. You're just the computer dork. Get over it. And before you whine about how twenty minutes could save these people so much this and that and the other, let me remind you that each one of those people almost certainly also has some common skill set that you don't - simple home maintenance, car maintenance, farming, writing, et cetera. It's not that hard to stick up for someone else. Maybe spend less time sticking up for yourself and be a social person instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that it never works. That's what Sega Game Channel was, that's what Intro Distro was, that's what the eReader is. People won't buy it if it has a limited life, and people think of things they download as impermanent. For some reason, media matters at one level or another.
Granted, Sega had bigger infrastructure costs than you'd have these days, and the nostalgia is stronger now than it ever has been before. But really, for just how long do you think people will extoll the virtues of Dragon Warrior 1 after they actually start playing it again? I found a copy and a working NES at funco land for $8 together, and I shugged and what-the-helled it.
I got into the first dungeon, and opened the locked trunk that had the key to get me through to the other side. As my inventory was full I could not take the key. I dropped an item, looked in the box again, and it was gone. I fought my way back to ground and then back down; still gone. I'd have to recreate 6 hours of gameplay over that I didn't know there was an inventory limit, much less that trunk contents were a one-time-only grab.
Granted, many games do hold up to the test of time - crysalis, koei games, et cetera - but the market is still too slim.
$10 "greatest hits" discs will always win. Besides, that's $2/rom, and you can take it to friends' houses. Good enough?
Ever tried to find a decent flight simulator on a console?
Many of us believe that PilotWings is the greatest flight simulator ever. You're right, though: much like the non-realtime strategy and the non-plot adventure game, vehicle simulators are woefully underrepresented on consoles.
Why? They don't sell. At least, not unless they ship with 414 new missiles! 328 new enemies! 3d phong shaded goraud mapped mip-texelled quincunx vertex eliminating z-ordered hyperclipping asiosphere specular rendering! and 8 new hidden levels!
(even the exclamation points are nessecary.)
Some of us older gamers can remember the time when consoles couldn't even save games unless the cartridge came with built-in storage (ie, almost anything that came before the PS1)
It's amusing that you've said that, given that the second most popular console on earth still works this way, and that the one to which you're probably referring didn't, originally.
and it's only recently that online multiplayer gaming has become possible on the latest generation of consoles.
The Genesis, Dreamcast, TurboGrafx 16, and NeoGeo are all now very angry at you.
Still, try finding a real equivalent of Everquest
How about Everquest?
or even Warcraft III
Er. Granted.
A console can still not achieve the versatility of a PC when it comes to gaming.
Whereas this is true, the amount by which it is true shrinks daily. The PC has four big benefits in my mind: ubiquitous keyboards, ubiquitous mice, ubiquitous network connections, and a much higher resolution average screen. All of these benefits will be gone (well, the keyboard and mouse maybe not, but they're $25 each, and cheaper if you use PC parts with the PS/2) within a console generation and a half.
The processing power issue isn't as much of an issue as we've been bred to believe. The Arm7 in the GameBoy Advance is honestly enough to push most non-3d games.
Only the Xbox has truly brought full-fledged online gaming to the console masses (local storage, patches, large centralized gaming network, etc - basically everything that makes online PC gaming so good).
Whereas this is true, it *really* pisses me off. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 worked over the internet with commodity hardware a year before the XBox even came out. Sony hosed this one *badly*.
The problem with this, is that Microsoft has been using its endless bags of cash and an unfair monopoly status to swing this much weight into a new market. If they weren't able to lose hundreds of millions of dollars to do this, it would have never happened.
How quickly they forget that this is exactly the method by which the Colorado Leather Company, Sega, Namco, Bandai, and Sony entered the game. In fact, the only remaining big name that didn't get in this way was the playing card manufacturer Nintendo; they got in through the far more insidious method about concealing the nature of their products during a massive customer disinterest.
Robbie the robot saved videogames! If you don't understand why I said that, read your history before returning to complaining re: Microsoft's entry methods.
Online console gaming would still be largely non-existent.
In America. The Japanese were chuchu-rocket addicts online in early Dreamcast years. We're just way behind. Perpetually.
Just something to think about: is Microsoft good in this case, or are they bad?
Do they have to be either? They're a corporate giant warring with other corporate giants for megacash. They can't do the bullying we so hate with Sony and Nintendo, both of whom are experienced and wealthy bullies in their own right. The only reason I hate the XBox is that it's, er, a laughing stock.
STOP MAKING COMPUTERS OUT OF CANDY. YOU ARE NOT APPLE.
somewhat less than a 60-inch 16:9 monitor.
I bought the kit for pushing component video out of an x-box and took it over to a friend's house who has a 56" Sony HDTV projection screen. I cranked it up to 1080i and pretty much the only thing I saw was that it slowed down.
/it/. I'm a PS2 fan; this is from my coworker. Still, ask the TV if it's getting a 1080i signal, etc, etc, etc. Act like it's some dufus friend's badly set up DVD player; assume it's broken in at least half a dozen ways.
To be fair, very few games for the XBox make much use of HDTV. Worse yet, the ones that do generally do 720p, not 1080i. DragonSlayer 3D does 1080i, but it's not exactly impressive. Syberia also does 1080i, but I've never seen it.
Beware that most sales goons don't know half of what they're talking about. DS3D, Syberia, and The Matrix are the *only* 1080i games for the XBox. That's
Because whereas neither The Matrix nor DS3D are really graphically impressive, I was able to see the difference quite clearly - the detail with which their mediocre graphics was rendered was quite a difference.
YMMV.
I think it's insane that a friend of mine just spent $500 to upgrade his PC to get Halo playable, when he could have bought an Xbox for about 100 bucks used.
Of course, there's a pretty big difference in the graphics quality between halo/pc and halo/hidef TV, and if you don't have hidef, it's gonna cost you well more than $500 to catch up to being behind.
There's also that, well, really, who wants an XBox? They're uglier than sin, they take up lots of space, and the controllers have to be lashed to the top of my car because they won't fit in the back seat.
Let's not forget that the $500 upgrade to the PC affects all of our other PC games (such as Civ3, the only game I've played for like 6 months now.)
I'll take my PC any day. Sorry, charlie.
why has not anyone tried GBA + PDA?
Because we remember the WorkBoy. There has been much talk of a WorkBoy Advance. I'm pretty happy that it never happened.
You might want to stop short of Pneumonia.
No one is going to see anything odd about me pressing buttons on a calculator in a large lecture hall.
Of course, this depends a little bit on how large the "big" lecture hall classes are at your school. At rutgers, you could set up a PS/2 on a big screen TV, come in butt naked with the frat, and give the professor a map to your location, and they still wouldn't notice.
Then again, at OSU, you could probably bring Cleveland.
A few wetnaps and a clean pair of underwear, by the sound of it.
Yeah, everyone in the AGB development community is up in arms about the Tapwave.
... anywhere other than mail order? Sorry.
I think it's going to fail, for the same reason that the GP32, the Cybiko, the Wonderswan, and the other parade of near misses have. Or, rather, for the list of reasons:
1) Nobody's ever heard of the damn thing. You're on slashdot and people are all "the what?"
2) Tapwave can't undersell the hardware like Nintendo can. $300 for a portable gaming machine has never gone over well, and it never will.
3) This thing isn't getting a game library of any real size.
4) I can buy a tapwave at:
Toys R Us? No.
Babbages? No.
The Mall? No.
Walmart? No.
See, being able to sell to kids is kind of important for something like a game platform. The Cybiko had long distance wireless! That should have won them the war! Except it was ugly. I mean, shit, you could get those things in stores that exist in middle America. They had the Cybiko at Walmart for $50. And it still lost.
Why? Because they tried to brag that they had games like stuntcar, klondike, skiing, snake, and checkers.
OMG! Checkers! King me, random person a mile away! I am the master of Draughts! ALL PHEER MY MORRIS SKIZZNILLZ! (don't have much of a ring to it, do it?)
I am happy that this device got off the ground. I am impressed that it can play all dozen of the PalmPilot games in a ridiculous quarter-screen box. Wow, it's even got a graphing calculator, which is clearly the first thing I look for in a system that costs me over four times what the industry leader with all the games wants.
And there is nothing, I say nothing, about Zelda which is anywhere near as cool as Acid Solitaire. Without Acid Solitaire, I'll have no idea what the kids at school are talking about, with Marjora's Mask, which allows you to peek at *two* cards from the top of your draw pile.
The company's too small to court real developers and without real developers its market is too small to attract them on its own. GP32 had the right idea shipping an emulator, but you couldn't buy one without living in Korea, and besides, the GP32 is ugly enough to get you beat up every day.
Adults don't remember how a kid's life works. This thing is doomed. The AGB has only one thing to fear, and that thing is the PSP.
If all you want is portable games, buy a portable game device (GBA, NeoGeoPocket, etc) // If you want other functionality, buy a PDA. // Period. // Why is this an issue?
Apparently you've never looked at the PPC's game lineup.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of (-1, Redundant)
During the North East Blackout were more people listening to their car/battery powered radio or surfing the internet?
I was in Erie, PA on a visit with friends at the time. Verizon kept the phone network up (apparently this wasn't the case in most places,) and my laptop worked just fine. The radio station, however, had lost power; I was using my walkman to pull radio off of a borrowed iPod, because the primary waves were all static.
But with radio you don't have to worry about infrastructure in between source and destination.
Whereas this is certainly true, almost everything which will affect the phone and data network on anything other than a local scale will also take out radio (power loss being the primary contender here; the only exception I can think of is a direct attack on all of the telco hubs at once, but that's kind of unfair.) In a very large nonelectrical storm such as a hurricane, where phone lines are torn in bulk, radio has a significant advantage; if the station is isolated from earthquakes, then too. Otherwise, I'm not sure I agree that it weathers natural disasters particuarly better.
Remember, *lots* of us get our IP by satellite, microwave, or other wireless mechanisms these days. As community 802.11 and the suchlike proliferate, it is my unfounded speculation that community distributed IP will prove to be the most resilient network so far in human history.
Let us all have a moment of silence for John Postel. Thank you, John.
" The mass media was ridiculously behind, incorrect, and self-argumentative"
Yet, Fox News, part of the mass media, was the first to point out who caused the disaster.
Mmm hmm. It was also the fourth group that they identified as a possible source. Reporting speculation is reprehensible, and that they eventually guessed right is not something to be proud of.
"Slashdot was the only thing carrying more than one viewpoint,"
I thought you said that the mass media were self-argumentative. Now you say that they carried only one viewpoint. Make up your mind!
Admittedly, that was badly worded. Each individual news source was reporting one strongly biased viewpoint (or, in the case of Fox News, apparently the outcome of their hyperconservative magic 8-ball); the media as a whole was a contradictory cacophony. I relied on you carrying the plural, which is bad form. The basic observation I was trying to make, which I failed to sufficiently elucidate, is that it is generally held that a media source should provide multiple viewpoints whenever facts can uphold each scenario; when a reporter takes a stance of personal belief, they are supposed to call it editorial. Unfortunately, as of late, this practice is largely being forgotten.
I was correctly chastized in email as regards the grandparent posting; NPR, the Christian Science Monitor, and the BBC America (some argue C-Span, though I disagree) all did a reasonably strong job of providing balanced coverage. However, having fallen out of the habit of listening to radio and not having cable, I tend to forget that there are still a few reasonably responsible news agencies in this country.
Also, Jon Stewart made me cry when he came back. But whatever.
The facts all came out on the mass media, in reality.
Whose reality are you referring to? For months Fox News tried to imply that Saddam was behind Osama, which is horse shit. CNN is the only organization to have even mentioned the Bin Laden construction empire in anything more than cursory detail. The rest of the world's media is in outcry over just how thick the wool over our eyes supposedly is.
What a surprise - Fox tells you that they've given you the whole story, and you believe them. This of course is the same media conglomerate which is owned by Murdoch, one of the Bush's strongest campaign contributors, a man which dozens of respected newspapers - the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post among them - suggested was using his media power to strongly influence the American viewpoint of the democratic candidate. Of course, the front page article regarding a campaign of character assasination probably slipped quite under your radar, because any news station which is so biased that they need a byline "fair and balanced coverage" surely is trustable as a sole source of information.
Naw, they couldn't be sweeping anything under the rug. The rest of the world must just be wrong.
C'mon out of the cave allegory, bub. There's more to life than a republican shiff rag. This would turn Ben Franklin green, and if you have half a clue about history, you'll realize just how big an insult that is.
On Slashdot, I was able to learn only about how Bill Gates and Goatse were involved in the tragecy.
Yeah, and on Fox, you got to learn how it was Iraq's fault. The nice thing about Slashdot is that the bullshit is easy to identify.
Oh, wait. That's Block 0: the rational individual block.
Two people do not a block make.
Pardon me. The mass media was ridiculously behind, incorrect, and self-argumentative during 9/11. Slashdot was the only thing carrying more than one viewpoint, and it weathered the storm quite well.
As far as vulnerable to backhoes, radio is far more susceptible to damage, being that a single broadcast point is quickly silenced. I'd be hard pressed to find a network more resistant to damage than IP.
I'm looking forward to low-cal fat now. But I fear it will be a while.
Up and until this post, I was going to ignore that transchiral food additives have been on the market for almost a decade. However, in light of this almost-observant post, I remind you that Olestra has been teaching us for quite some time.
Sugar in my foeces probably won't be nearly as bad as oil, thankfully. What we need is an oil that degrades in our stomach to two other things that a) don't get ingested and b) don't leave me feeling like i just left a porn stage.
Whereas Mozilla will be moving to Firebird sooner-or-later, it's waiting until Firebird is ready; 1.6a, which is almost frozen, is still Moz suite, and it looks like 1.7 might be too.
Sorry. Firebird isn't that ready just yet.
Unfortunately, you also posted, thereby undoing your metamoderation. ;)
Thank you for the thought.
Sometimes I hate being right.
This seems about as problematic as an Arab nomad behing hydrophobic. Hint: patting yourself on the back doesn't make you seem right.
I though I illustrated it pretty clearly by what I chose to quote.
Oh, sure. And if what you chose to quote didn't significantly alter the meaning of what was being said by inference of context, you might have half a point.
Or perhaps you consider belittling "dorks" to be a valid social skill.
No, but I'm more than happy to sound off about the holier-than-thou tech jock that read two Compaq manuals and thinks he's Wozniak.
You seem to take cause to imply responsibility. I don't.
Bullshit. If it weren't about responsibility, the quote would pack no weight. That's like saying "you're the kind of guy that sets off avalanches sneezing."
The implication that you're now pretending that you didn't make is that I'm some sort of overbearing bully. What you cartoonishly fail to realize is that the converse is true: you IT dorks lord your competence over other people's heads as if it is the very definition of being a tool using mammal to know how to take a macro virus out of MS Word. If the user cannot merely upgrade a video driver to fix a bug, they are the simplest of buffons, not fit to spit shine the shoes you won't wear because they're too old. If the user can't do something ostensibly as simple as running their virus updater, they are beneath the contempt of the species, not fit to pity, surely encoded in a lesser genome made of tar, filth, potted meat product and caffeine-free rc cola.
Anything the user doesn't know how to weild is blamed on the inability to handle simple tool use, something a different IT orangutan in a different branch of this thread is being his chest about at this very moment.
What you aspergers rejects don't seem to fully grasp is that that's not simple tool use. When I have to call AAA because my car started making a horrible sound while I was driving, does the tow truck guy make fun of me for not recognizing the sound of a pebble stuck under my brake pad? No. When my garbage disposal overflows, and the plumber has it fixed in under five minutes with a drain snake after I flooded my apartment for two days being certain of my ability to handle it myself, do I get an earlashing about how I should learn to use a wrench and a flashlight? No. When the neighbor kids hear you can burn letters into someone's lawn with fertilizer, does the grounds guy harass me for not knowing you can't just wash it away because it'll be permanent? Nope.
The problem isn't that people can't handle simple tool use. The canonical example, my mother, which by rote cannot set either her VCR clock or her car stereo presets, is quite adept at moving between MS Word and IE. This is all a user should need to know how to do, other than turning the damned thing on and off, and maybe how to start pinball. It's a tool! It's a multiple thousand dollar tool! Why can't it just be made to fucking work right?
Granted, that's voiced as Joe Average User; like every slashdot relic, i yearn for the days when the subpar BBS loser knew his IRQ and DMA/HDMA list by heart, and could probably whistle his init strings. Big scary microsoft word doesn't scare me any more than you, and like you, I find it somewhat disappointing that there's so much confusion over a tool which generally works without fuss.
Unlike you, I still have ties to my mortal soul. I remember what it was like to be befuddled by the literally hundreds of similarly (badly) named menu items, grotesque lists of impenetrable options arranged in a fashion familiar only to those familiar with the underpinnings of software and the generic OS metaphor.
Of course, you seem to have missed in both of your points that I was doing something other than to belittle IT jocks. For one, I'm only belittling those which have the attitudes; I for one didn't, back when
I know, as I also frequent usenet, and have my paws in a fair number of GotWs. That said, don't fool yourself: there is a tremendous amount of work involved in just writing that approachably. The authors of math textbooks are no less authors even though the problems are just nubmers and the answers derivable with a calculator; it's the explanation in which the real effort lies.
Calling Meyers a novice in the face of Sutter is like calling Stroustrup a novice in the face of Knuth. IE: true, *barely*. Watch it: that sort of talk angers the Ghods.
Ugh, seems I've hit a button here :-)
You certainly have. I find nothing more frustrating than MS' seeming inability to get their shit together and write a tutorial that doesn't assume that the user is experienced or stupid. It seems MS doesn't see them as seperable concerns.
"This is a mouse. If you can't hook your printer up, you've obviously missed the last 20 years of pop culture. Even Scotty from Star Trek figured this out when it was 400 years obsolete, so you must be a putz. First, put your hand down. No, the one on your arm. Good: you may have a grape."
etc.
I'm sure you can't see the inconsistancy in your own thinking.
Perhaps you would point it out? I see no inconsistency in "you have a drastically overinflated self image, and need to be knocked down a notch and stop acting as if you were to efeete to mingle with us lowly peasants."
I'm really just responding to let you know that you are the kind of asshole that gets high schools shot up.
Spoken like a shooter. "It's your fault I pulled the trigger!"
I don't see the point -- as long as I do my job and get my stuff done, whats the point and the problem?
Because the rest of us can't fucking stand working with you. Contemptuous IT people act as if their five years of experience in a limited domain somehow makes them better than people with 30, 40, 50 years' experience in alternate domains.
Frankly, I don't care if you're the nobel laureate that single-handedly ironed out our disputes with martians over trade rights while solving world hunger with three nine volt batteries and two VHS tapes of MacGuyver. You're in public. Act like a big boy.
The problem with fields which are in demand is that the practicioners often don't see anything whatsoever wrong with their primadonna attitudes. You're just the computer dork. Get over it. And before you whine about how twenty minutes could save these people so much this and that and the other, let me remind you that each one of those people almost certainly also has some common skill set that you don't - simple home maintenance, car maintenance, farming, writing, et cetera. It's not that hard to stick up for someone else. Maybe spend less time sticking up for yourself and be a social person instead.