My feeling is the latter. My Netgear ADSL modem / firewall uses embedded Linux. If not for a "debug mode" hidden in the advanced settings which enables you to SSH into a busybox shell, I wouldn't know nor care. The thing just works and it works very well. I expect millions of people are running Linux in their homes in their modems, TVs, audio / DVD players, washing machines or elsewhere and simply don't know it.
The Freeplay Foundation uses radio, all-but-indestructible clockwork and solar powered multiband portables that can be manufactured anywhere.
Freeplay shows a good business model for this MIT thing. Use the consumer version to fund efforts on the charitable side. I got a Freeplay as a present. Having said that, it was far from "all-but-indestructible" - it broke after ten winds. The band connecting the coil to the charger came off and even after I took it apart to fix it it hasn't been the same since.
Pretty please with a cherry on top, sell these things in a consumer model. Load it up with a simple GUI, a word processor, a web browser, IM and a music player and turn it loose. The clamour for these things means you could sell them at $250 and use the profits to subsidize the educational efforts.
Sony. Why on Earth did they think they could sell movies at 25-30 euros at reduced quality & features on a proprietary disc format and expect people to buy them? How many times is a PSP owner going to view that disc anyway? Even if it were the best title in the world, you could still get the equivalent DVD for 10-20 euros with more features in a standard format with plenty of available ripping tools.
Anyway if UMD Video does bite the dust, there is a perfect way to turn the disaster into a victory. The immediate and screamingly obvious next step is to uncripple the PSP so it can show ripped titles at full resolution. Then produce some funky ripping software akin to iTunes (with a built-in store with more titles if they like) and let PSP users use that. Sony might even make a few bucks from people prepared to pay a *reasonable* price for a movie. I'd hope they'd learn from past mistakes and do the smart thing for their customers and themselves.
But then again, this is Sony we're talking about here. Most corporates eventually snap out of the schizophrenic, self-harm phase. I wonder when Sony will.
I'm sure you could find mistakes in any university text book. Most in fact issue an errata or a new edition to correct problems found after publication. Does that mean that they're not substantially correct or more accurate than other sources of information?
What does authoritative mean in this context? Always right? Usually right?
It means they go out and find the foremost experts (recognized as such within their field, e.g. Nobel prize winners etc.) and then ask them to produce an article which goes on to be peer-reviewed. This is then proofed, edited for conformity, cross-referenced and indexed.
The Wikipedia model is for someone to produce an article and hope that some genuine experts turn up to fix / correct the mistakes and that others turn up to give the article some semblance of form. If an article gets really lucky, many experts will pool their knowledge and shape the article. Wikipedia further hopes that some asshole(s) won't see fit to disrupt the article either through bias, malice or their own ignorance of the subject.
Generally speaking, the experts do win out in Wikipedia, although the more controversial the subject, the more supervision is required. Articles on George Bush, abortion, Church of Scientology, Adolph Hitler, Palestine etc. are subject to near constant vandalism by jerks, meaning someone has to be continuously watching those articles to revert the changes. There must also be a low level form of corruption going on too. It would not surprise me if polictical parties, marketing departments, etc. were engaging in subtle editing and embellishment of certain articles to cast a product / person in a better light. This form of vandalism is far harder to catch and might ultimately prove to be the biggest issue for Wikipedia.
Britannica is authorative, peer reviewed and reliable but it costs money. Wikipedia can be spotty but is generally authorative, peer (+ idiot) reviewed and mostly reliable. It costs nothing but has massively more articles and can turn on a dime to cover current events, weather, popular culture etc.. While I feel sorry for Britannica, the simple fact is that most people are not going to fork a pile of cash when Wikipedia is good enough for day to day use.
Would you say where the break in progression was between the PC you used until so recently and the original IBM AT?
Or for that matter, between the 1984 original Macintosh and any 2006 model Macintosh?
My point is not to be an Apple II fan boy because I've never used let alone owned a model. The point is that PCs and Macs have been around a lot longer than 8 years from their original inception but you can trace their evolution to the machines we know and love (or hate) today. Both have also leapt from 16 bits up to 64 bits in that time, while providing some degree of backwards compatibility, if just for a transitional period before emulators take over. If there were a reason to prolong the Apple II, you can bet that it would have morphed along similar lines to a PC or Mac.
I used to work for IBM during the heyday of OS/2, just when Windows 95 showed up. My group did video conferencing software for OS/2 & NT. I saw first hand how there was absolutely no cooperation between groups. It meant that one part of IBM was busy programming OS/2 solutions while the PC division was busy signing contracts with Microsoft to be exclusively Windows. In another example of self-abuse, IBM canned our project in favour of the Windows-exclusive Intel Proshare. Great forward thinking there.
On top of that, I was extremely frustrated with OS/2 programming. I loved CSet++ which was a fantastic development tool with a very cool set of UI classes but there was no IDE for it. On top of that, but IBM didn't even have an equivalent to common controls for OS/2 so every single app (all developed by IBM) looked and felt entirely different from one another because every single app had to reimplement toolbars, status bars, tooltips etc. and the usability guidelines called CUA were useless for creating modern UIs. It's no wonder that OS/2 was perceived to have sucked.
Finally CSet++ did get a UI of sorts, via VisualAge which was a Smalltalk based design environment, but 10 years on I still doubt a machine exists that can run it with with acceptable performance.
Perhaps this is a case of stating the bleeding obvious, but if you were to go back 15 years I bet that more than 50% of 9-19 year olds would have seen porn offline. In magazines or films.
I know I did. I know that by the time I was 13, porn mags were easy to come by. Certainly it wasn't quite as accessible as it might be now, and in the UK all the mags were soft core, but it was there all the same.
Perhaps it helps to think of Sony as a consumer version of IBM as it was 10 years ago. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and even when it does, left hand is quite prepared to fuck the right hand over in some way. The net result is a schizophrenic company which sells cool products that are hobbled by DRM or use stupid proprietary formats or storage and consequently don't sell very well.
Nintendo don't have to do anything other than what they've been doing all along. GC may have the least market share, but it made the most money.
This is another common apologist excuse. Nintendo is a business. It doesn't like being #3, and would rather be #1. Being #1 implies 5x the games, 5x the number of consumers and 5x the profits.
As stated, I'm sure there are "fun" games on the Nintendo, but with the Revolution falling so far behind the other consoles, you can look forward to more cutesy Mario / Pokemon games. Why? Because Nintendo will have shoulder more of the games development because less independent developers will bother with a platform that implies rewriting rather than porting titles.
Personally I see no problem with cutesy cartoon games, but I'd despise any platform that restricts the kinds of game I played, or expected me to be happy about seemingly half the titles being Mario or Pokemon games. I expect that's the reason for many people shunning the platform and its just going to get worse with the Revolution unless the price advantage is totally compelling. It certainly wasn't for the Gamecube.
I reckon some people just have addictive personalities. They might be hooked on booze, food or drugs but its their need for some form of dependency that gets them hook. The religious loonies know a mark when they see one which can explain why cults such as scientology are so eager to "cure" addicts. Afterall, if they can get addicted to one thing, then perhaps they can be coerced in their desperation to become addicted to the cult too.
Plant a few seeds of doubt in his head and perhaps sooner or later he's going to realise the game is a waste and give up on it. Ask him what he spends his time doing and follow up with a comment of how much that sucks. Invite him out to the pub, and if he's hesitant, ask what better thing he's got to do.
I used to play EQ, perhaps 4 hours a day. This wasn't to the detriment of real life since if there was something on I'd go out. But even so, I played it enough over several years. The thing with games like this is that they start off as fun - you advance quickly and there is a lot to do. But as the levels plod on, the stuff to do diminishes to almost nothing. You might group up for a raid or something, but much of the rest of the time is concerned with corpse dragging, doing pointless repetitive-click crafting, auctioning the crap you made and basically getting nowhere. An hour of effort might see the xp bar advance a pixel. On top of that, shitty EQ won't even let you flip to Windows during downtime. I looked at some of the people who spent their lives camped in front of a spawn point. I watched as the game became so top heavy that twinking was the norm. I wondered to myself - what the hell is wrong with me - do I have to be like those assholes camped on a spawn for 20 hours to get anywhere with this game?
It didn't help that Sony / Verant treated the players like shit - unpaid beta testers - and there were some very crappy upgrades. The final straw was the Shadows of Luclin expansion which forced everyone to upgrade their DirectX and was so flakey that the game crashed for weeks. I was close to quitting anyway but every crash during that period was an extra shock to the system. When time came to renew my subscription, I just uninstalled. There is a wrench to let a character disappear like that and I still get occasional begging emails from Verant to reactivate, but it ain't gonna happen unless they give me 30 days free play or something for nothing. I might take them up for nostalgia's sake, but when that period is up, my character will die again.
Funnily enough, the experience has innoculated me somewhat against other MMPORGs. I've played City of Heroes / Villains, Puzzle Pirates, Star Wars Galaxies, EVE: Online, A Tale in The Desert, WoW (during beta), Guild Wars, Anarchy Online. Some of these I paid for (COH, Eve, ATITD), some through free trials (SWG, AO). While I've found some of those games to be fun, the same grind affects most of them.
The most innovative counter-grind measure I was was EVE which allowed you to automate your grind such that even if something took days to finish, it would happen even if you weren't there. EVE was a great game, but its too intense for me, and grind is grind even if you don't have to be there for it. But if something is going to take 25 days to finish, that's almost an entire month's sub right there.
The worst by far for grind was A Tale in the Desert. The demo period was fairly cute and fun so I stumped up $10 for an extra month. Oh the fun I had growing flax, planting seeds, watering seeds, harvesting flax, putting flax in the river, waiting for it to rot, combing it and spinning it. For variety I could gather planks, slate and create mud bricks and watch them dry in the sun. After that I could use the bricks, planks and slate to repair the machines that wore out from all the flax making! What fun! And that's just the basic crafting. It just got worse after that. I don't know how anyone stuck it out for the game to finish (when the pyramid was built).
I played WOW during the beta and to be honest I thought it was a major improvement over EQ and a lot more fun. But the same grind soon becomes apparent by level 10 or so. I haven't tried EQ2, but I did try SWG for a free trial and I was convinced that it Verant had spent even more time ensuring you spent time grinding than even in EQ.
Now I've decided that I'm not going to grind in any game. If I can't enjoy myself during a spare hour, then the game isn't worth playing at a
Nintendo do something Sony and Microsoft don't get. You'll shit yourself when you ehar what it is.. because it's like EARTH SHAKINGLY AMAZING. Nintendo make fun games, games you can pick up and just play, enjoy them and be done with them. They don't need Mario to be super realistic, or 12 hours of FMV per 3 minutes of gameplay. They just make good games.
That's the #1 favourite excuse from Nintendo apologists when comparing hardware or market share. Sony, Microsoft and the army of developers for their platforms also make fun games. I don't have to cite the titles because there are so many that it would be a pointless exercise.
If you can't see this or think that's "lame". I suggest you stop playing games and start watching films. Fun comes before the latest greatest graphics engine. If you'd look beyond your biast to maybe try Mario kart or something like billy hatcher you may enjoy something.
It is lame, because because no system has the monopoly on fun. I've owned Nintendo systems over the years and I can't say they were any more "fun" than anything you can get on another platform. There were fun titles of course, but the PS2 has fun titles and so does the XBox. Once you realise that, you should consider which offers the best choice of titles, value and features that suit your pocket. Personally I have a finite amount of space by TV and I want something that is capable of more than playing games, be it playing DVDs, music, browsing or whatever.
Of course, there is another factor to consider. The Gamecube is allegedly more powerful than a PS2, yet it has a fraction of the market share. It's in last place in fact. If it's such a fun console and cheaper, why is that so? I suspect part of it is Nintendo's self-inflicted policy of making predominantly "cute" cartoony, kid friendly games.
I assume Nintendo want their next gen box to do better, but if the hardware is as underpowered as implied, then the games makers are not going to bother with the platform. Porting from XBox 360 to PS3 or vice versa will be a comparitively straightforward job. Porting to the Revolution will be a huge pain in the ass. That means the Revolution stands more chance of becoming a niche than even the Gamecube is. That means even more "exclusive" cutesy games than the current generation box. Nintendo sure as hell had better make their wand system a compelling reason to buy the console or their system will be DOA.
So, how does(n't) this all affect Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and other sorts of browsers? At the technological, legal, and market-share levels?
It probably does, but assuming the shysters at Eolas start threatening Firefox, I'm sure they'll just implement something similar to IE. Oh, and they'll also ship or prominently link to an extension which just happens to automatically detect and activate any EMBED / OBJECT tag content on the page.
I doubt legacy drivers have much to do with it. A fresh XP install is fairly snappy. Plug and play means it only loads drivers for stuff you have actually install. It's only afterwards when you install a bunch of crap like anti virus, anti spyware, startup apps (iPod, Quicktime, Real Player etc.) that it drags to a halt.
The main slowness problem for Linux is the graphics drivers are bad. Once you fix that and give you have no need for anti-virus / anti-spyware etc., it is probably faster.
The main slowness for the Mac is the eye candy and the inherent slowness built into the UI - e.g. having to move the mouse to the top of the display for example to access menu items.
Not 5 years, 11 years. It's about time that MS did something about the fucking awful "accessories" they bundle with Windows. Notepad and calculator could do with a complete rewrite too. Notepad still can't cope with Unix or Mac line endings.
Hence the reason I said its token competition. It's a platform that MS can point and wave to when claiming they're not a monopoly, even if OS X + Linux + others occupy only a small fraction of desktop deployments.
The real reason for the delay is an event that occurred this Tuesday, which was written up by an Apple Insider in the famous MacRumors forums. I quote the post below in full. My comments are at the end.
This sounds like bull for so many reasons it is hard to start, but I'd list some reasons it seems absurd.
The assumption that Apple matters to Microsoft is way off. Apple is a prominent but hardly viable competitor to Microsoft. It occupies a niche that MS tolerates (token competition) and even makes a little money from. But not even the iPod has boosted the Mac beyond its minority status.
I'm sure the iPod is a thorn in the side for MS, but you can bet for sure that Gates wouldn't spend billions in delays to support Mac without massive, MASSIVE concessions in return. Including killing or otherwise diluting the iPod brand.
Second you could not beat Vista into any kind of shape acceptable to an OS X user in 6 months let alone a year, short of virtualizing one or other system and allowing it to coexist with the other as a guest. Both operating systems are too distinct. A dumb cocoa / carbon port is not enough. You're talking frameworks, a Unix environment, the look and feel of every single application, the position of buttons within dialogs, the filing system. Everything
Apple have already gone through one traumatic transition that must have annoyed some of its users. A move to Windows would infuriate the remainder and basically anihilate its developer base. After all, if its running Windows, why program for the Mac at all. They'd just be yet another PC maker. It would be as nonsensical as programming exclusively for Packard Bell machines.
Where's the value add for Apple if it runs Windows? If a consumer is faced between buying an Apple running Windows and a Dell / Acer / Compaq / Sony etc. running Windows, what reason is there left for choosing an Apple?
Apple has nothing to fear in the music space from either MS or Sony until both of them pull their fingers out when it comes to their confusing as hell and anal DRM. Plays for sure my arse.
Finally, that Apple would trust Microsoft that much that it would be akin to allowing a mental patient to cup your furry balls in his hand while he holds a pair scissors in the other.
Now, strange things have happened before, e.g. AOL bending over for MS when they had their own browser, Apple moving to Intel. The move for Apple probably made sense, the AOL one certainly didn't. But this way out there.
If there is any convergence between the two I'd suggest it is what I touched on slightly above - virtualization. It might serve Apple quite well to be able to run Windows apps at near native speeds, but even that path has dangers. Remember OS/2? That could run Windows 3.1 programs at near native speeds. The net result is few companies even bothered writing native OS/2 apps since what was the point?
Perhaps its 60% of the new code. It certainly makes no sense of the existing and presumably working code.
Anyway, I've seen the February build of Vista running and to be honest it's in a horrible shape. I can understand why they pushed the deadline again because by now it should be code complete with the next 4/5 months spent on fixing bugs. As it is, it feels less like a beta than an alpha.
Which brings up an interesting point, how big of a problem are illegal downloads of movies.
I'd say they are not much of a problem at all. The kind of people who download movies would be unlikely to pay the full price for them anyway. So you've lost close to nothing, although that doesn't stop studios inflating the figures (i.e. lying) by counting each copy as a lost sale.
If they really, really want to stamp out piracy, there is an easy way. Sell movies in a common standard for five or six bucks from a download service that works faster and more reliably than P2P. It works for music, it would work for movies. Toss in a little watermarking to track the pirates, but to be honest, assuming the service worked and there was value added stuff like forums, special offers etc., the vast majority wouldn't be bothered looking elsewhere for all the effort involved.
This no-copying business is kind of stupid. Why not just watermark the film, and let them copy as much as they like. Then send their ass to jail for it.
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My feeling is the latter. My Netgear ADSL modem / firewall uses embedded Linux. If not for a "debug mode" hidden in the advanced settings which enables you to SSH into a busybox shell, I wouldn't know nor care. The thing just works and it works very well. I expect millions of people are running Linux in their homes in their modems, TVs, audio / DVD players, washing machines or elsewhere and simply don't know it.
Freeplay shows a good business model for this MIT thing. Use the consumer version to fund efforts on the charitable side. I got a Freeplay as a present. Having said that, it was far from "all-but-indestructible" - it broke after ten winds. The band connecting the coil to the charger came off and even after I took it apart to fix it it hasn't been the same since.
Pretty please with a cherry on top, sell these things in a consumer model. Load it up with a simple GUI, a word processor, a web browser, IM and a music player and turn it loose. The clamour for these things means you could sell them at $250 and use the profits to subsidize the educational efforts.
Anyway if UMD Video does bite the dust, there is a perfect way to turn the disaster into a victory. The immediate and screamingly obvious next step is to uncripple the PSP so it can show ripped titles at full resolution. Then produce some funky ripping software akin to iTunes (with a built-in store with more titles if they like) and let PSP users use that. Sony might even make a few bucks from people prepared to pay a *reasonable* price for a movie. I'd hope they'd learn from past mistakes and do the smart thing for their customers and themselves.
But then again, this is Sony we're talking about here. Most corporates eventually snap out of the schizophrenic, self-harm phase. I wonder when Sony will.
I'm sure you could find mistakes in any university text book. Most in fact issue an errata or a new edition to correct problems found after publication. Does that mean that they're not substantially correct or more accurate than other sources of information?
The $100 devices are for children. Unless you propose the entire class of 60 crowds around the single PC, I suggest they serve two different purposes.
It means they go out and find the foremost experts (recognized as such within their field, e.g. Nobel prize winners etc.) and then ask them to produce an article which goes on to be peer-reviewed. This is then proofed, edited for conformity, cross-referenced and indexed.
The Wikipedia model is for someone to produce an article and hope that some genuine experts turn up to fix / correct the mistakes and that others turn up to give the article some semblance of form. If an article gets really lucky, many experts will pool their knowledge and shape the article. Wikipedia further hopes that some asshole(s) won't see fit to disrupt the article either through bias, malice or their own ignorance of the subject.
Generally speaking, the experts do win out in Wikipedia, although the more controversial the subject, the more supervision is required. Articles on George Bush, abortion, Church of Scientology, Adolph Hitler, Palestine etc. are subject to near constant vandalism by jerks, meaning someone has to be continuously watching those articles to revert the changes. There must also be a low level form of corruption going on too. It would not surprise me if polictical parties, marketing departments, etc. were engaging in subtle editing and embellishment of certain articles to cast a product / person in a better light. This form of vandalism is far harder to catch and might ultimately prove to be the biggest issue for Wikipedia.
Britannica is authorative, peer reviewed and reliable but it costs money. Wikipedia can be spotty but is generally authorative, peer (+ idiot) reviewed and mostly reliable. It costs nothing but has massively more articles and can turn on a dime to cover current events, weather, popular culture etc.. While I feel sorry for Britannica, the simple fact is that most people are not going to fork a pile of cash when Wikipedia is good enough for day to day use.
I should add that the PC goes further back than the AT, but I had the same timeframe as the article's "Apple II forever" bash when I said this.
Would you say where the break in progression was between the PC you used until so recently and the original IBM AT?
Or for that matter, between the 1984 original Macintosh and any 2006 model Macintosh?
My point is not to be an Apple II fan boy because I've never used let alone owned a model. The point is that PCs and Macs have been around a lot longer than 8 years from their original inception but you can trace their evolution to the machines we know and love (or hate) today. Both have also leapt from 16 bits up to 64 bits in that time, while providing some degree of backwards compatibility, if just for a transitional period before emulators take over. If there were a reason to prolong the Apple II, you can bet that it would have morphed along similar lines to a PC or Mac.
On top of that, I was extremely frustrated with OS/2 programming. I loved CSet++ which was a fantastic development tool with a very cool set of UI classes but there was no IDE for it. On top of that, but IBM didn't even have an equivalent to common controls for OS/2 so every single app (all developed by IBM) looked and felt entirely different from one another because every single app had to reimplement toolbars, status bars, tooltips etc. and the usability guidelines called CUA were useless for creating modern UIs. It's no wonder that OS/2 was perceived to have sucked.
Finally CSet++ did get a UI of sorts, via VisualAge which was a Smalltalk based design environment, but 10 years on I still doubt a machine exists that can run it with with acceptable performance.
I know I did. I know that by the time I was 13, porn mags were easy to come by. Certainly it wasn't quite as accessible as it might be now, and in the UK all the mags were soft core, but it was there all the same.
Perhaps it helps to think of Sony as a consumer version of IBM as it was 10 years ago. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and even when it does, left hand is quite prepared to fuck the right hand over in some way. The net result is a schizophrenic company which sells cool products that are hobbled by DRM or use stupid proprietary formats or storage and consequently don't sell very well.
This is another common apologist excuse. Nintendo is a business. It doesn't like being #3, and would rather be #1. Being #1 implies 5x the games, 5x the number of consumers and 5x the profits.
As stated, I'm sure there are "fun" games on the Nintendo, but with the Revolution falling so far behind the other consoles, you can look forward to more cutesy Mario / Pokemon games. Why? Because Nintendo will have shoulder more of the games development because less independent developers will bother with a platform that implies rewriting rather than porting titles.
Personally I see no problem with cutesy cartoon games, but I'd despise any platform that restricts the kinds of game I played, or expected me to be happy about seemingly half the titles being Mario or Pokemon games. I expect that's the reason for many people shunning the platform and its just going to get worse with the Revolution unless the price advantage is totally compelling. It certainly wasn't for the Gamecube.
I reckon some people just have addictive personalities. They might be hooked on booze, food or drugs but its their need for some form of dependency that gets them hook. The religious loonies know a mark when they see one which can explain why cults such as scientology are so eager to "cure" addicts. Afterall, if they can get addicted to one thing, then perhaps they can be coerced in their desperation to become addicted to the cult too.
I used to play EQ, perhaps 4 hours a day. This wasn't to the detriment of real life since if there was something on I'd go out. But even so, I played it enough over several years. The thing with games like this is that they start off as fun - you advance quickly and there is a lot to do. But as the levels plod on, the stuff to do diminishes to almost nothing. You might group up for a raid or something, but much of the rest of the time is concerned with corpse dragging, doing pointless repetitive-click crafting, auctioning the crap you made and basically getting nowhere. An hour of effort might see the xp bar advance a pixel. On top of that, shitty EQ won't even let you flip to Windows during downtime. I looked at some of the people who spent their lives camped in front of a spawn point. I watched as the game became so top heavy that twinking was the norm. I wondered to myself - what the hell is wrong with me - do I have to be like those assholes camped on a spawn for 20 hours to get anywhere with this game?
It didn't help that Sony / Verant treated the players like shit - unpaid beta testers - and there were some very crappy upgrades. The final straw was the Shadows of Luclin expansion which forced everyone to upgrade their DirectX and was so flakey that the game crashed for weeks. I was close to quitting anyway but every crash during that period was an extra shock to the system. When time came to renew my subscription, I just uninstalled. There is a wrench to let a character disappear like that and I still get occasional begging emails from Verant to reactivate, but it ain't gonna happen unless they give me 30 days free play or something for nothing. I might take them up for nostalgia's sake, but when that period is up, my character will die again.
Funnily enough, the experience has innoculated me somewhat against other MMPORGs. I've played City of Heroes / Villains, Puzzle Pirates, Star Wars Galaxies, EVE: Online, A Tale in The Desert, WoW (during beta), Guild Wars, Anarchy Online. Some of these I paid for (COH, Eve, ATITD), some through free trials (SWG, AO). While I've found some of those games to be fun, the same grind affects most of them.
The most innovative counter-grind measure I was was EVE which allowed you to automate your grind such that even if something took days to finish, it would happen even if you weren't there. EVE was a great game, but its too intense for me, and grind is grind even if you don't have to be there for it. But if something is going to take 25 days to finish, that's almost an entire month's sub right there.
The worst by far for grind was A Tale in the Desert. The demo period was fairly cute and fun so I stumped up $10 for an extra month. Oh the fun I had growing flax, planting seeds, watering seeds, harvesting flax, putting flax in the river, waiting for it to rot, combing it and spinning it. For variety I could gather planks, slate and create mud bricks and watch them dry in the sun. After that I could use the bricks, planks and slate to repair the machines that wore out from all the flax making! What fun! And that's just the basic crafting. It just got worse after that. I don't know how anyone stuck it out for the game to finish (when the pyramid was built).
I played WOW during the beta and to be honest I thought it was a major improvement over EQ and a lot more fun. But the same grind soon becomes apparent by level 10 or so. I haven't tried EQ2, but I did try SWG for a free trial and I was convinced that it Verant had spent even more time ensuring you spent time grinding than even in EQ.
Now I've decided that I'm not going to grind in any game. If I can't enjoy myself during a spare hour, then the game isn't worth playing at a
That's the #1 favourite excuse from Nintendo apologists when comparing hardware or market share. Sony, Microsoft and the army of developers for their platforms also make fun games. I don't have to cite the titles because there are so many that it would be a pointless exercise.
If you can't see this or think that's "lame". I suggest you stop playing games and start watching films. Fun comes before the latest greatest graphics engine. If you'd look beyond your biast to maybe try Mario kart or something like billy hatcher you may enjoy something.
It is lame, because because no system has the monopoly on fun. I've owned Nintendo systems over the years and I can't say they were any more "fun" than anything you can get on another platform. There were fun titles of course, but the PS2 has fun titles and so does the XBox. Once you realise that, you should consider which offers the best choice of titles, value and features that suit your pocket. Personally I have a finite amount of space by TV and I want something that is capable of more than playing games, be it playing DVDs, music, browsing or whatever.
Of course, there is another factor to consider. The Gamecube is allegedly more powerful than a PS2, yet it has a fraction of the market share. It's in last place in fact. If it's such a fun console and cheaper, why is that so? I suspect part of it is Nintendo's self-inflicted policy of making predominantly "cute" cartoony, kid friendly games.
I assume Nintendo want their next gen box to do better, but if the hardware is as underpowered as implied, then the games makers are not going to bother with the platform. Porting from XBox 360 to PS3 or vice versa will be a comparitively straightforward job. Porting to the Revolution will be a huge pain in the ass. That means the Revolution stands more chance of becoming a niche than even the Gamecube is. That means even more "exclusive" cutesy games than the current generation box. Nintendo sure as hell had better make their wand system a compelling reason to buy the console or their system will be DOA.
It probably does, but assuming the shysters at Eolas start threatening Firefox, I'm sure they'll just implement something similar to IE. Oh, and they'll also ship or prominently link to an extension which just happens to automatically detect and activate any EMBED / OBJECT tag content on the page.
The main slowness problem for Linux is the graphics drivers are bad. Once you fix that and give you have no need for anti-virus / anti-spyware etc., it is probably faster.
The main slowness for the Mac is the eye candy and the inherent slowness built into the UI - e.g. having to move the mouse to the top of the display for example to access menu items.
Not 5 years, 11 years. It's about time that MS did something about the fucking awful "accessories" they bundle with Windows. Notepad and calculator could do with a complete rewrite too. Notepad still can't cope with Unix or Mac line endings.
Hence the reason I said its token competition. It's a platform that MS can point and wave to when claiming they're not a monopoly, even if OS X + Linux + others occupy only a small fraction of desktop deployments.
This sounds like bull for so many reasons it is hard to start, but I'd list some reasons it seems absurd.
- The assumption that Apple matters to Microsoft is way off. Apple is a prominent but hardly viable competitor to Microsoft. It occupies a niche that MS tolerates (token competition) and even makes a little money from. But not even the iPod has boosted the Mac beyond its minority status.
- I'm sure the iPod is a thorn in the side for MS, but you can bet for sure that Gates wouldn't spend billions in delays to support Mac without massive, MASSIVE concessions in return. Including killing or otherwise diluting the iPod brand.
- Second you could not beat Vista into any kind of shape acceptable to an OS X user in 6 months let alone a year, short of virtualizing one or other system and allowing it to coexist with the other as a guest. Both operating systems are too distinct. A dumb cocoa / carbon port is not enough. You're talking frameworks, a Unix environment, the look and feel of every single application, the position of buttons within dialogs, the filing system. Everything
- Apple have already gone through one traumatic transition that must have annoyed some of its users. A move to Windows would infuriate the remainder and basically anihilate its developer base. After all, if its running Windows, why program for the Mac at all. They'd just be yet another PC maker. It would be as nonsensical as programming exclusively for Packard Bell machines.
- Where's the value add for Apple if it runs Windows? If a consumer is faced between buying an Apple running Windows and a Dell / Acer / Compaq / Sony etc. running Windows, what reason is there left for choosing an Apple?
- Apple has nothing to fear in the music space from either MS or Sony until both of them pull their fingers out when it comes to their confusing as hell and anal DRM. Plays for sure my arse.
- Finally, that Apple would trust Microsoft that much that it would be akin to allowing a mental patient to cup your furry balls in his hand while he holds a pair scissors in the other.
Now, strange things have happened before, e.g. AOL bending over for MS when they had their own browser, Apple moving to Intel. The move for Apple probably made sense, the AOL one certainly didn't. But this way out there.If there is any convergence between the two I'd suggest it is what I touched on slightly above - virtualization. It might serve Apple quite well to be able to run Windows apps at near native speeds, but even that path has dangers. Remember OS/2? That could run Windows 3.1 programs at near native speeds. The net result is few companies even bothered writing native OS/2 apps since what was the point?
Anyway, I've seen the February build of Vista running and to be honest it's in a horrible shape. I can understand why they pushed the deadline again because by now it should be code complete with the next 4/5 months spent on fixing bugs. As it is, it feels less like a beta than an alpha.
I'd say they are not much of a problem at all. The kind of people who download movies would be unlikely to pay the full price for them anyway. So you've lost close to nothing, although that doesn't stop studios inflating the figures (i.e. lying) by counting each copy as a lost sale.
If they really, really want to stamp out piracy, there is an easy way. Sell movies in a common standard for five or six bucks from a download service that works faster and more reliably than P2P. It works for music, it would work for movies. Toss in a little watermarking to track the pirates, but to be honest, assuming the service worked and there was value added stuff like forums, special offers etc., the vast majority wouldn't be bothered looking elsewhere for all the effort involved.
This no-copying business is kind of stupid. Why not just watermark the film, and let them copy as much as they like. Then send their ass to jail for it.