You can probably get it with an AR, but I got original Metroid by beating Metroid Fusion on my GBA and uplinking it to the GC. (Still haven't beaten Metroid Prime to get the other Metroid connection bonus, I'm at the giant Omega Pirate and haven't had the interest/stamina to beat it yet...)
They are handy to carry along for those types of situations, but no, they aren't exclusively for them. There are a lot of great GBA titles out there - some of them are only fit for screaming 10 year olds, but some of them are works of art on par with console games. I've often opted to play my GBA SP instead of my GC or PC - just depends on what game I feel like playing.
Q3A does support non-standard resolutions. There's a few config-file options that you can twiddle that make it work.
Many games on the Mac actually do support widescreen, as it's much more common for a Mac to have a widescreen monitor (due to Apple's widescreen laptops and two of their three LCD monitors being widescreen) then for a PC. For example, Warcraft 3 and Diablo II both support them (don't know if the PC versions do or not).
My advice to you: Avoid the original GBA at all costs. The SP is much more comfortable to hold (for me, anyway), has a 10 to 15 hour rechargeable battery and (most importantly) a lit screen. The original GBA does not have a lit screen, and while it looks fine in sunlight, if you're indoors or on a cloudy day it's a complete bitch to see, even if you're sitting directly beneath a lamp. (Penny Arcade isn't joking in this particular comic) Our family owns both an original GBA and the SP... The original GBA is basically regulated to second-player status in multiplayer games, whereas the SP is used most of the time, mainly because you can't see the original.
Go easy on your kid's eyes, get the SP.
I'm sure typing "dialphone 555-123-4567" from the command line will work, but if you want a GUI you're going to have to download the correct video drivers, recompile your X server and pray that everything works properly.
Oh, and good luck editing/etc/gsm.conf and/etc/gprs.conf properly, the man pages aren't quite finished yet.;)
Actually, Panther has built in DVD+RW support. So it now supports it at the system level also, and many of Apple's DVD burners shipped in the past year or two have been dual mode DVD+/-RW drives.
Bluetooth will almost certainly be availiable within a few months. Handspring is working with OS 5 BlueTooth SDIO card makers to make sure that one of them has a headset profile. So, there goes one thing.
Second, one of the cool things about the 600 is that the microphone and speaker are exposed to Palm OS applications, so you could do all sorts of cool things, one of which could (theoretically) be voice dialing. Somebody would have to write it, of course, but it is possible.
But personally, I haven't been impressed with voice dialing. Maybe the phone I used it on was just too old, but if the conditions weren't *exactly* right, it wouldn't dial or would dial the wrong number. Have the newer phones improved their recognition capabilities to the point where it's actually useable?
Oh, one other thing... while the built in SMS capabilities aren't going to be activated for another month or so, if you log onto Sprint's Vision site, there should be an option for Short Mail, which is sort of the same thing. It's not mobile-originated like SMS usually is, but it is SMS, and cross-links with every other providers' SMS system like standard SMS does.
On a Treo 300, you can simply switch to the Speakerphone and tap the small icon that looks like a list in the bottom-right hand corner of the screen, or press the phone button repeatedly until it shows the contact list. I don't know if this works on the 600, but you definitely don't need to put the person on hold - the speakerphone is high enough quality that it doesn't piss off the person you're talking to and even the Treo 300 can let you talk and use the palm capabilities at the same time.
Secondly, I love the Treo's contact list - the best part: typing in somebody's initials will jump you directly to the entry. From there, all you do is select the number you want and boom, you're making the call. I can call anyone in my address book within about 5 seconds. You can also do just a last name, or a first initial and a few letters of the last name.
I'm debating whether or not I really want to upgrade from my 300. The 600 is definitely a nice upgrade, and the $200 off for previous Treo owners is really a big incentive, but at the same time my current Treo does everything I want it to do quite well, and I'm not sure I want to shell out $400 to get it to do more. Although, maybe I can sell off my old Treo... I'd upgrade for a total cost of $200.
Not exactly... the closest thing to it is if you switch iTunes to "shopping cart mode" in the prefs, when you view your shopping cart there will be a "people who bought these tracks also bought...".
No problem. Obviously there are no guarantees (for all I know, they were both heavily requested and that's why Apple added them), and I think I may have even requested Chemical Bros. at one point, but at least some of the time it does work.
Almost certainly not. iTunes is a Carbon application, based on the APIs that date back to 1984 and the original Macintosh. However, Apple's QuickTime on Windows has most of the Carbon API calls already in it, so it almost certainly uses QuickTime as a sort of porting layer.
If you find anything missing from the iTunes Music Store, make sure you request it via the "Requests & Feedback" link on the left side of the home music store page, near the top. I've requested a few albums via the form and a few weeks later Apple had added them to the iTunes library. Of course, by then I had already bought one of them, and for the other I didn't really want to buy it via iTunes since it comes with a DVD if you buy the physical disc. Still, for most of my music I buy it off the iTunes Music Store if they have it. I'm a lazy fuck, and one-click convience works for me.;)
From my (somewhat limited) personal experiences, BG1 has a tendency to crash every hour or so in Classic, whereas BG2 doesn't quite seem to have the same time limit. The annoying thing about BG1 crashing is that then you have to completely reload Classic from scratch, which takes a minute. With BG2, at least you don't have to load Classic.;)
At any rate, the net effect has been that I haven't played any of the BG games very far through, just because of the general bugginess of the ports.:/
This would be especially great on a Mac since the original BG1 is an OS 9 only application and a very buggy port, whereas BG2 was somewhat less crash-prone. I wonder if I were to install the files, copy them all over to my PC, convert them and then copy them all back if they would work... worth looking into at some point I suppose.
Either that, or perhaps the source code could be ported over. It is suppsedly availiable, although the link seems to throw a 404. It does seem to be written in a langauge called OCaml, which apparently has a Mac OS X port, so that's a good thing methinks.
You know how in StarCraft, when a freshly-cloned marine pops out of the barracks and he says his little thing that's supposed to be "You want a piece o' me, boy"? Well, ever since a friend told me his dad misinterpreted it as "You want a piece of meat, boy?", every time hear hear that sound, I think of it as meat rather then me. My friend is the same way. And now I've passed it on to Slashdot. Enjoy.
If it had been available on other platforms, the other companies probably would be named in the suit also.
Just as a minor point, shouldn't Microsoft also be named in the lawsuit, since the GTA games came out for Windows, and are coming out for X-Box in a matter of months?
No matter how you slice it or dice it, this is a completely bogus lawsuit. The only people responsible are the kids who did the shooting, and the parents for not doing an adequate job of teaching their kids that shooting a gun at a moving vehicle with people inside is a bad idea in real life.
As far as I can tell (and I am not an advertising major, so I could be wrong), that pretty much is the reason for an ad for a game. Get it out there. Let everyone know that it exists. But, the trick is you have to make it look as cool as possible. Make it stick in your mind long enough for you to perform an action - say, look up reviews, rent it at your local Hollywood Video, pick it up in the EBGames bargain bin when it hits a few bucks. Basically, enough of a "push" to get you to "pull" in the rest of the information you need to buy the game. For those who are rather uneducated (e.g. parents who don't quite realize that buying a game based on the ad isn't the same as seeing a movie based on what you saw in a trailer), or for fanboys of the genre/series/license, the ad will serve as the reason for the sale itself.
Again, I'm not an marketing exec, but that's how I see it.
Apple's PowerBook 1400 did it already with the BookCover. There's a removable clear plastic cover (they also included one of grey plastic in case you didn't like the idea) that slides off the top part of the laptop, and underneath you can put any appropriately shaped piece of paper. It even came with templates pre-installed on the hard drive so you could design something to place there. Was kind of a cool idea, but it didn't really take off, as one can easily see.
Just thought I would mention that Woz is appearing for our local Mac user group on Wednesday. I realize I'll probably get modded down for this, but we really need to sell a few more tickets, so if you mods can find it in your heart to at least leave it at karma 1...:)
What he's talking about is that the Apple I was (and will be) sold as just a circuit board; you had to make or buy your own case, power supply, keyboard, etc. Sure, slapping an iBook motherboard inside a IIe is easy (although I worry a bit about cooling), but there's no case of an Apple I to put a mobo into.:)
Erm. The first Myst was entirely 8-bit graphics, even on the Mac. It was indexed colors, so you could pick and choose which colors those 256 were, but it was still just 256 colors. IIRC, the movies on the Mac version also looked like shit... if I were to take a wild guess, I'd say that Quicktime didn't like being told what colors to use and so dithered everything all to hell, but it's just a guess.
At any rate, I have RealMyst now, so I'm not overly concerned about it.;)
Slashdot Mirror
You can probably get it with an AR, but I got original Metroid by beating Metroid Fusion on my GBA and uplinking it to the GC. (Still haven't beaten Metroid Prime to get the other Metroid connection bonus, I'm at the giant Omega Pirate and haven't had the interest/stamina to beat it yet...)
Price of GBA SP: $99.
/typing on his 12" PB
Price of 17" Powerbook and Neverwinter Nights: $3050.
Saving over $2950 and buying a Tapwave Zodiac, for which Neverwinter Nights will be availiable: Priceless.
(well, maybe not priceless, but how the hell else am I supposed to do an MasterCard impreession?!??)
They are handy to carry along for those types of situations, but no, they aren't exclusively for them. There are a lot of great GBA titles out there - some of them are only fit for screaming 10 year olds, but some of them are works of art on par with console games. I've often opted to play my GBA SP instead of my GC or PC - just depends on what game I feel like playing.
Q3A does support non-standard resolutions. There's a few config-file options that you can twiddle that make it work.
Many games on the Mac actually do support widescreen, as it's much more common for a Mac to have a widescreen monitor (due to Apple's widescreen laptops and two of their three LCD monitors being widescreen) then for a PC. For example, Warcraft 3 and Diablo II both support them (don't know if the PC versions do or not).
My advice to you: Avoid the original GBA at all costs. The SP is much more comfortable to hold (for me, anyway), has a 10 to 15 hour rechargeable battery and (most importantly) a lit screen. The original GBA does not have a lit screen, and while it looks fine in sunlight, if you're indoors or on a cloudy day it's a complete bitch to see, even if you're sitting directly beneath a lamp. (Penny Arcade isn't joking in this particular comic) Our family owns both an original GBA and the SP... The original GBA is basically regulated to second-player status in multiplayer games, whereas the SP is used most of the time, mainly because you can't see the original. Go easy on your kid's eyes, get the SP.
I'm sure typing "dialphone 555-123-4567" from the command line will work, but if you want a GUI you're going to have to download the correct video drivers, recompile your X server and pray that everything works properly.
/etc/gsm.conf and /etc/gprs.conf properly, the man pages aren't quite finished yet. ;)
Oh, and good luck editing
Actually, Panther has built in DVD+RW support. So it now supports it at the system level also, and many of Apple's DVD burners shipped in the past year or two have been dual mode DVD+/-RW drives.
:)
Just thought I would point it out.
Bluetooth will almost certainly be availiable within a few months. Handspring is working with OS 5 BlueTooth SDIO card makers to make sure that one of them has a headset profile. So, there goes one thing.
Second, one of the cool things about the 600 is that the microphone and speaker are exposed to Palm OS applications, so you could do all sorts of cool things, one of which could (theoretically) be voice dialing. Somebody would have to write it, of course, but it is possible.
But personally, I haven't been impressed with voice dialing. Maybe the phone I used it on was just too old, but if the conditions weren't *exactly* right, it wouldn't dial or would dial the wrong number. Have the newer phones improved their recognition capabilities to the point where it's actually useable?
Oh, one other thing... while the built in SMS capabilities aren't going to be activated for another month or so, if you log onto Sprint's Vision site, there should be an option for Short Mail, which is sort of the same thing. It's not mobile-originated like SMS usually is, but it is SMS, and cross-links with every other providers' SMS system like standard SMS does.
On a Treo 300, you can simply switch to the Speakerphone and tap the small icon that looks like a list in the bottom-right hand corner of the screen, or press the phone button repeatedly until it shows the contact list. I don't know if this works on the 600, but you definitely don't need to put the person on hold - the speakerphone is high enough quality that it doesn't piss off the person you're talking to and even the Treo 300 can let you talk and use the palm capabilities at the same time.
Secondly, I love the Treo's contact list - the best part: typing in somebody's initials will jump you directly to the entry. From there, all you do is select the number you want and boom, you're making the call. I can call anyone in my address book within about 5 seconds. You can also do just a last name, or a first initial and a few letters of the last name.
I'm debating whether or not I really want to upgrade from my 300. The 600 is definitely a nice upgrade, and the $200 off for previous Treo owners is really a big incentive, but at the same time my current Treo does everything I want it to do quite well, and I'm not sure I want to shell out $400 to get it to do more. Although, maybe I can sell off my old Treo... I'd upgrade for a total cost of $200.
Not exactly... the closest thing to it is if you switch iTunes to "shopping cart mode" in the prefs, when you view your shopping cart there will be a "people who bought these tracks also bought...".
No problem. Obviously there are no guarantees (for all I know, they were both heavily requested and that's why Apple added them), and I think I may have even requested Chemical Bros. at one point, but at least some of the time it does work.
Well, nobody on Windows ever installs the security patches, so I'm sure it's just to make Windows users feel even more at home... ;)
Almost certainly not. iTunes is a Carbon application, based on the APIs that date back to 1984 and the original Macintosh. However, Apple's QuickTime on Windows has most of the Carbon API calls already in it, so it almost certainly uses QuickTime as a sort of porting layer.
If you find anything missing from the iTunes Music Store, make sure you request it via the "Requests & Feedback" link on the left side of the home music store page, near the top. I've requested a few albums via the form and a few weeks later Apple had added them to the iTunes library. Of course, by then I had already bought one of them, and for the other I didn't really want to buy it via iTunes since it comes with a DVD if you buy the physical disc. Still, for most of my music I buy it off the iTunes Music Store if they have it. I'm a lazy fuck, and one-click convience works for me. ;)
1) Get a Palm SSH client.
2) Get a Palm VPN client and a Palm VNC client.
3) THis is the trickyish part. The best you can do for low-cost is have SMS_Biffsend you an SMS every time you get an e-mail. The cool part is, there's a program out there that will monitor your incoming SMS messages and do something based on the contents. Basically you could set it up so as soon as you get the SMS notification (usually within a matter of seconds), it pulls down your mail, so you'd have it from within a minute or two of when it hits your inbox.
From my (somewhat limited) personal experiences, BG1 has a tendency to crash every hour or so in Classic, whereas BG2 doesn't quite seem to have the same time limit. The annoying thing about BG1 crashing is that then you have to completely reload Classic from scratch, which takes a minute. With BG2, at least you don't have to load Classic. ;)
:/
At any rate, the net effect has been that I haven't played any of the BG games very far through, just because of the general bugginess of the ports.
This would be especially great on a Mac since the original BG1 is an OS 9 only application and a very buggy port, whereas BG2 was somewhat less crash-prone. I wonder if I were to install the files, copy them all over to my PC, convert them and then copy them all back if they would work... worth looking into at some point I suppose.
Either that, or perhaps the source code could be ported over. It is suppsedly availiable, although the link seems to throw a 404. It does seem to be written in a langauge called OCaml, which apparently has a Mac OS X port, so that's a good thing methinks.
You know how in StarCraft, when a freshly-cloned marine pops out of the barracks and he says his little thing that's supposed to be "You want a piece o' me, boy"? Well, ever since a friend told me his dad misinterpreted it as "You want a piece of meat, boy?", every time hear hear that sound, I think of it as meat rather then me. My friend is the same way. And now I've passed it on to Slashdot. Enjoy.
If it had been available on other platforms, the other companies probably would be named in the suit also.
Just as a minor point, shouldn't Microsoft also be named in the lawsuit, since the GTA games came out for Windows, and are coming out for X-Box in a matter of months?
No matter how you slice it or dice it, this is a completely bogus lawsuit. The only people responsible are the kids who did the shooting, and the parents for not doing an adequate job of teaching their kids that shooting a gun at a moving vehicle with people inside is a bad idea in real life.
As far as I can tell (and I am not an advertising major, so I could be wrong), that pretty much is the reason for an ad for a game. Get it out there. Let everyone know that it exists. But, the trick is you have to make it look as cool as possible. Make it stick in your mind long enough for you to perform an action - say, look up reviews, rent it at your local Hollywood Video, pick it up in the EBGames bargain bin when it hits a few bucks. Basically, enough of a "push" to get you to "pull" in the rest of the information you need to buy the game. For those who are rather uneducated (e.g. parents who don't quite realize that buying a game based on the ad isn't the same as seeing a movie based on what you saw in a trailer), or for fanboys of the genre/series/license, the ad will serve as the reason for the sale itself.
Again, I'm not an marketing exec, but that's how I see it.
Apple's PowerBook 1400 did it already with the BookCover. There's a removable clear plastic cover (they also included one of grey plastic in case you didn't like the idea) that slides off the top part of the laptop, and underneath you can put any appropriately shaped piece of paper. It even came with templates pre-installed on the hard drive so you could design something to place there. Was kind of a cool idea, but it didn't really take off, as one can easily see.
Just thought I would mention that Woz is appearing for our local Mac user group on Wednesday. I realize I'll probably get modded down for this, but we really need to sell a few more tickets, so if you mods can find it in your heart to at least leave it at karma 1... :)
What he's talking about is that the Apple I was (and will be) sold as just a circuit board; you had to make or buy your own case, power supply, keyboard, etc. Sure, slapping an iBook motherboard inside a IIe is easy (although I worry a bit about cooling), but there's no case of an Apple I to put a mobo into. :)
Erm. The first Myst was entirely 8-bit graphics, even on the Mac. It was indexed colors, so you could pick and choose which colors those 256 were, but it was still just 256 colors. IIRC, the movies on the Mac version also looked like shit... if I were to take a wild guess, I'd say that Quicktime didn't like being told what colors to use and so dithered everything all to hell, but it's just a guess.
;)
At any rate, I have RealMyst now, so I'm not overly concerned about it.