I miss the witty humor in games like Heroes Quest I (before the VGA upgrade) and II, Leisure Suit Larry, etc. It seems that as the company evolved they got rid of a lot of the humorous element in their games (well maybe not Leisure Suit...)
Oh well... Anybody know of any other game companies around now who now provide a similar quality of entertainment?
Somewhat true, however, the child appealing element has not really been that heavily emphasized except in later movies (i.e TPM and ROTJ). I thought ROTJ was bad with the ewoks, but Jar-jar and the gungans were just way over the top.
Other than these two movies there are really no characters with the "kiddie" (for lack of a better term) appeal. R2D2 and C3PO in ESB and Star Wars might be a possible choice. But they are not so outlandishly targeted to the younger folks in the audience as groups of characters in the last two, and Phantom Menace especially.
My final exception to your post revolves around the Star Wars movies being for children. I disagree. The flow of the Star Wars movie is taken almost verbatim from Joeseph Cambell's lectures/notes/books? (I heard it on an audio book kinda thing) on how to write an epic tale. This is why Star Wars is so successful, it spans generations. Empire Strikes Back, again has epic tale stuff, and spans generations. Return of the Jedi, still pretty good because it keeps along these lines. Phantom Menace, still has some epic stuff when you look at the overall work of films, but there is an awful lot of emphasis on making it a "fun", bring the whole family kinda movie IMO.
My feelings are mixed, it was an O.k. movie. Perhaps in the grand scheme of things it will fit nicely, but right now, I think it was well below the quality of movie that George Lucas can put out. As a result, I'm looking forward to episode's II and III because with the turn in the story line, I think he can focus less (or at least give me more to focus on so I can focus less) on the cuddly cute characters and more on a really good story.
I'd like to see that movie. I think the dramatic conflicts simliar to Melrose Place that will show up between ANAKIN Skywalker and this Aidan fellow when ANAKIN finds out he's shagging his woman will be most interesting.... In other news, George has backed down on directing Episode II and has hired Aaron Spelling, an expert in this genre of filmwork.
Sorry couldn't resist...
Now I know why Darth Vader (Anakin for those who think the man behind the mask is Aidan) was a sap for all those girly movies. (ref. TIE-tanic)
A judge somewhere has also outlawed crobars, rocks, sledgehammers, guns, battering rams, and other large bludgeoning objects since they can be used to break into personal residences and businesses.
The inventors, and manufacturers, and distributors have all been found guilty. A spokesman for a large unamed home improvement store has stated under anononimity, "Its rough, but were going to help efforts to appeal this to the highest courts of the land if necessary."
As a result of the decision, the plaintifs are considering bringing lawsuits against our ancient ancestor's who discovered rocks, and invented primative tools like the club and hammer guaranteeing that everyone will be sued.
Of course. The inhabitants of the country sponsoring an Olympic team/athlete would be issued a a 16-bit decryption key with a Caesar cipher(hey we've got to use modern security techniques) to access our web content.
Then we wait...
When somebody finally comes up with a crack for our regional encoding scheme and publishes it, we'll put them on trial. We'll scream about lost fortunes due to this person ruining our great protection scheme. We'll shut down websites left and right who publish ANY information about this breach. Hell we'll shutdown CNN if they even publish an article regarding the trial(s) and what not. We'll shutdown Slashdot.
We'll use all those Olympic sponsor dollars (and the small fortune made from advertising off of our new Olympic site) to tie site operators and the ENTIRE WORLD up in legal cases. All because we don't want some hacker in the Netherlands to see that their team kicked the crap out of the US in some event.
Good idea, I'm glad you thought of it....
Long live the American dream, market, pay somebody off, and SUE, SUE, SUE.
Yeah, but whats the fun of watching the best of the East and West NBA all-stars come out and kick the crap out of the rest of the world.
I mean c'mon, you know that the NBA is going to draft players from other countries and bring 'em over here if they are a really good players. And if they are really elite, they'll also them on the USA basketball team, because USA has gotta be #1 when it comes to these things.
I mean honestly, how many people really watch the Olympics on TV for any long period of time. I'll flip them on if something interesting is happening but thats about it.
Shutting out the Internet. Hmmm. Maybe there vision is limited. If they're looking to hire a developer to make this happen let me know I think it would be a very cool project:
Web site listing all events with links to home pages dedicated to that event
Event homepages can provide history of event, summary stats, schedule for that event of the couple of weeks
Provide highlight summary clips of important news for that days worth competition.
Provide realtime video of events as they take place
Provide the same realtime video at a later date in the event somebody can't watch the event at its scheduled time
Lets not forget merchandizing. Get your official Olympic discus signed by team USA, etc.
etc., etc.
I think a big turn off with the Olympics is that I can't watch certain events because of my personal schedule. However, perhaps I would like to view the entire boxing competition, at home, on a Saturday after its finished, rather than getting the distilled facts from my favorite sports program.
I understand the desire to keep up with tradition, etc., but I think making use of the above concepts and technologies (minus the merchandizing maybe) will allow that heritage to thrive even more so than current methods of broadcast. Look what's happened to the world of figure skating since its been broadcasted more and more. Why not maximize that broadcast range for all Olympic games?
I looked at that product. The powers that be won't let me put that extra component you speak of on the exchange server box.
I've actually got a copy of TradeXCH (based off TradeClient I think) by Bynari sitting on my desk as the next step in trying to solve my problem. Unfortunately, it looks like you still need an NT box between your UNIX box and the Exchange Server for it to work (or on the exchange server). When we ordered it, it sounded like this was not necessary.
Other than that I haven't got much deeper. I'm running very low on space on my Linux box and I'm waiting to get another disk before moving on.
You won't believe how many times I get a 1/2 - 1 page corporate memo written up in Word, or a power point slide that somebody has done up to have a fancy looking poster.
All this information could just as easily been rendered in good old fashioned ASCII text. It drives me up a friggin wall...
Not only is it a non-Windows viewing annoyance, but it wastes a hell of a lot more space in mailboxes. The funniest thing I saw today was a 3MB word document. Not only was the message utterly useless importance-wise, but it was no more than 100 characters of text. My guess is the rest of the space came from the pretty graphic of some dude's signature at the bottom... WTF?
Yeah running Outlook on Linux depends a lot on how the Exchange server is set up. It can be configured to do the POP/3 or IMAP thing thus solving all my problems (I'm assuming this is how yours is working?) The other possibility I've found is using fetchmail to pull it off, but NTLM (some proprietary M$ thing) needs to be enabled. None of these are present and I've been told by the administrator that they were not going to do anything to change it
The trials and tribulations of corporate bullsh*t...
Seriously though, it might not be too bad. For instance, the corporation I work for's e-mail standard is Outlook/Exchange which I'd like to be able to run on Linux (my primary desktop). I haven't found a suitable Outlook clone yet so I can get my mail easily. Incidentally, I tried the fetchmail thing, they don't have NTLM enabled and won't turn it on.
Not to mention how many times I've recieved e-mail documents containg Word or Powerpoint presentations that StarOffice couldn't convert very nicely.
I don't know about it being a bridge over to Windows, however, some good could come out of it. You'd think they would start by helping out the wine project, but then again, thats not M$'s style. They'll probably take the wine code and make it proprietary.
I used VMS for 2 years professionally (2+ while getting my undergrad) in a group filled with the wizards you speak of. I would have to agree with you that VMS is a solid operating system and can do some wonderous stuff.
Unfortunately, in this day in age, who in their right mind would buy VAX hardware to run VMS. Performance-wise Alphas that cost the same, will run circles around VAXes. You still have all the ability to cluster them. Programming on them is considerably easier in many cases. I ask to anybody, why would you go out and buy a new VAX (not counting to replace existing hardware)? Only thing I can thing of is for clustering, but is it possible to effectively cluster an Alpha with a VAX?
The only thing I really wished the CLI for VMS had was easy piping and file redirection ability. Its a lot easier to do >f1.txt than "SET SYS$OUTPUT F1.TXT".
I saw that 7.x does finally support piping but its nowhere near as elegant as the | command in UNIX IMO.
On a sorta similar note to your filesystem gripe, I never liked having to set up symbols just to run programs with command line arguments either. It seemed stupid. The run command should have either let you pass arguments in as well, or type the text that one put into a symbol into the command line and have it work.
Otherwise, the OS is pretty incredible. It has all the power of an real operating system, like UNIX, and then some, while still being pretty user friendly (as far as CLI user friendliness goes).
I'm on a bit of a soapbox today but I have pretty strong feelings towards VAX hardware.
I wouldn't waste money just to run Linux on a VAX. Buy an Alpha first (the VAX's successor for VMS), it runs linux as well and I'm sure the performance is lightyears ahead of anything Linux VAX can do.
I honestly see no reason to purchase VAX hardware in this day and age. VMS'ers should probably port applications to Alpha's before they even consider buying another VAX. (chances are they're running OpenVMS already, anyway, making it that much easier (unless its VAX assembly code))
I understand the soft spot and the power of VMS you feel, but lets face it, VAX hardware is dead, and I frankly am glad to see it go.
Long live the Alpha my friend. And incidentally, if you haven't had the opportunity and pleasure of working on an Alpha running VMS as opposed to god awful VAX VMS, you don't know what you're missing.
when you can buy a Digital (oops Compaq, sorry) Alpha, and still run VMS and have the thing run faster than a VAX ever did. Not to mention a lot of stuff became easier when they created OpenVMS (especially when run on Alpha hardware). Shared modules (DLL's or shared objects for the non-VMS enlightened) specifically comes to mind.
I think there is a lot of good with the VMS operating system, but as for good stuff with VAX hardware, its just plain outdated IMO.
(Perhaps repeated, I don't have time to flip through all 575+ postings...)
This is such a bundle of <pick favorite animal> sh*t. I understand the concern, companies don't want their employee's tweaking their production OS. (Duh!) Make a policy that such a thing is not allowed, without due process. Anyone in violation without following that process, which might include documentation, review, proof that alternatives can't be found, etc., can be dismissed.
Just because the source is available doesn't mean you have to, need to, want to, should alter the code. I'd be a little hesitant to modify a production operating systems code for fear of messing something up. The next problem of course is that in modifying the source you are off on your own branch of the source tree (figuratively and literally), unless you can push it back into the development tree. Any changes you make might hinder your upgrade ability, or at least require some more work or modification to make you changes work with future upgrades.
Some people are never going to get the beauty and promise of open source. I think the above "problem" isn't a problem with Linux or open source software, but with the software development practices and discipline of the company implementing the software.
Anybody who has been burned by a closed source system (many might not even recognize it) sees the benefit of having access to the source code. Doesn't mean your going to change it, you just want to understand it. After all, how many times have you joked or recognized that the some of the best documentation, is the source code.
There was a similar situation at my last employer, where they didn't want employee's to have unrestricted access, and limit us to 'job' oriented material on the net.
The technique employed would be to flash up a warning screen if you tried to access a 'bad' site and provide some sort of simple explanation as to why (i.e. pornography, hate site, etc.) On this page was a link to appeal this decision. Based on the argument made, access might be re-opened up or not. In a borderline case, a temporary username/password on a separate proxy would be granted for some period of time so that person could gain access.
It sounds like you will need more of an instantaneous response so there might be some issues you'd need to work out with this scenario, but it worked pretty good.
I kinda wish I could go back and compare now but I don't have access to the computers at the university where I used it anymore.
I remember liking it, and the stuff I didn't like about it was typically similar to the stuff I don't like in X-windows now. It'd be interesting to go back and give it a whirl.
As for the price problem, I want to pose the following question to those who might know a bit more about NeXT than myself. I vaguely remember on the systems I used, that the hardware the OS was running on were Gateway 2000 boxes. Can the NeXT operating system run on x86 hardware? If so, was it the OS that was pricey or the actual NeXT hardware? (I'm thinking the latter)
Also, if it does run on x86, does anyone know where I can get it for free or minimal cost, or is it totally dead?
Or DCYS ripping your kids away from you when they find out you've endangered your child's life by not removing any and all bad genes.
Just what we need, one more place where they can totally f*ck up on their interpretations of child abuse.
(OT, can't resist) I've had people I know have cocaine and all sorts of other drugs out in a house where several children under the age of 10, where they don't do a good enough job. C'mon you call ahead of time, I can clean the place up. I've also known some of the best parents go through hell because their child broke a bone falling out of a tree or doing other things that kids do that get them scraped, bruised, cut. Those bastards need to revise there approach to doing things. I've got plenty more examples, but I think I've beat enough into my now completely offtopic rant...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh well... Anybody know of any other game companies around now who now provide a similar quality of entertainment?
Other than these two movies there are really no characters with the "kiddie" (for lack of a better term) appeal. R2D2 and C3PO in ESB and Star Wars might be a possible choice. But they are not so outlandishly targeted to the younger folks in the audience as groups of characters in the last two, and Phantom Menace especially.
My final exception to your post revolves around the Star Wars movies being for children. I disagree. The flow of the Star Wars movie is taken almost verbatim from Joeseph Cambell's lectures/notes/books? (I heard it on an audio book kinda thing) on how to write an epic tale. This is why Star Wars is so successful, it spans generations. Empire Strikes Back, again has epic tale stuff, and spans generations. Return of the Jedi, still pretty good because it keeps along these lines. Phantom Menace, still has some epic stuff when you look at the overall work of films, but there is an awful lot of emphasis on making it a "fun", bring the whole family kinda movie IMO.
My feelings are mixed, it was an O.k. movie. Perhaps in the grand scheme of things it will fit nicely, but right now, I think it was well below the quality of movie that George Lucas can put out. As a result, I'm looking forward to episode's II and III because with the turn in the story line, I think he can focus less (or at least give me more to focus on so I can focus less) on the cuddly cute characters and more on a really good story.
Big fat gungan leader shaking his face back and forth: "BWRABWRABWRABWRA"
<BANG!>
Big fat gungan falls to the floor dead, a victim of a disgruntled die hard Star Wars fan who's sick of seeing the "child" element in Star Wars films
Gungans could be cool, but between the fat dude and Jar-jar, George just fscked up.
Sorry couldn't resist...
Now I know why Darth Vader (Anakin for those who think the man behind the mask is Aidan) was a sap for all those girly movies. (ref. TIE-tanic)
C'mon do you thing George would choose such an obvious title? Why not call Episode I, "We are introduced to Anakin..."
The inventors, and manufacturers, and distributors have all been found guilty. A spokesman for a large unamed home improvement store has stated under anononimity, "Its rough, but were going to help efforts to appeal this to the highest courts of the land if necessary."
As a result of the decision, the plaintifs are considering bringing lawsuits against our ancient ancestor's who discovered rocks, and invented primative tools like the club and hammer guaranteeing that everyone will be sued.
The VAX is now dead
Another one bites the dust
We will miss you VAX
Then we wait...
When somebody finally comes up with a crack for our regional encoding scheme and publishes it, we'll put them on trial. We'll scream about lost fortunes due to this person ruining our great protection scheme. We'll shut down websites left and right who publish ANY information about this breach. Hell we'll shutdown CNN if they even publish an article regarding the trial(s) and what not. We'll shutdown Slashdot.
We'll use all those Olympic sponsor dollars (and the small fortune made from advertising off of our new Olympic site) to tie site operators and the ENTIRE WORLD up in legal cases. All because we don't want some hacker in the Netherlands to see that their team kicked the crap out of the US in some event.
Good idea, I'm glad you thought of it....
Long live the American dream, market, pay somebody off, and SUE, SUE, SUE.
I mean c'mon, you know that the NBA is going to draft players from other countries and bring 'em over here if they are a really good players. And if they are really elite, they'll also them on the USA basketball team, because USA has gotta be #1 when it comes to these things.
Shutting out the Internet. Hmmm. Maybe there vision is limited. If they're looking to hire a developer to make this happen let me know I think it would be a very cool project:
I think a big turn off with the Olympics is that I can't watch certain events because of my personal schedule. However, perhaps I would like to view the entire boxing competition, at home, on a Saturday after its finished, rather than getting the distilled facts from my favorite sports program.
I understand the desire to keep up with tradition, etc., but I think making use of the above concepts and technologies (minus the merchandizing maybe) will allow that heritage to thrive even more so than current methods of broadcast. Look what's happened to the world of figure skating since its been broadcasted more and more. Why not maximize that broadcast range for all Olympic games?
I've actually got a copy of TradeXCH (based off TradeClient I think) by Bynari sitting on my desk as the next step in trying to solve my problem. Unfortunately, it looks like you still need an NT box between your UNIX box and the Exchange Server for it to work (or on the exchange server). When we ordered it, it sounded like this was not necessary.
Other than that I haven't got much deeper. I'm running very low on space on my Linux box and I'm waiting to get another disk before moving on.
You won't believe how many times I get a 1/2 - 1 page corporate memo written up in Word, or a power point slide that somebody has done up to have a fancy looking poster. All this information could just as easily been rendered in good old fashioned ASCII text. It drives me up a friggin wall...
Not only is it a non-Windows viewing annoyance, but it wastes a hell of a lot more space in mailboxes. The funniest thing I saw today was a 3MB word document. Not only was the message utterly useless importance-wise, but it was no more than 100 characters of text. My guess is the rest of the space came from the pretty graphic of some dude's signature at the bottom... WTF?
Yeah running Outlook on Linux depends a lot on how the Exchange server is set up. It can be configured to do the POP/3 or IMAP thing thus solving all my problems (I'm assuming this is how yours is working?) The other possibility I've found is using fetchmail to pull it off, but NTLM (some proprietary M$ thing) needs to be enabled. None of these are present and I've been told by the administrator that they were not going to do anything to change it
The trials and tribulations of corporate bullsh*t...
What's this Outlook port? I've been looking for someway of getting my corporate e-mail account to work with my Linux box...
Seriously though, it might not be too bad. For instance, the corporation I work for's e-mail standard is Outlook/Exchange which I'd like to be able to run on Linux (my primary desktop). I haven't found a suitable Outlook clone yet so I can get my mail easily. Incidentally, I tried the fetchmail thing, they don't have NTLM enabled and won't turn it on.
Not to mention how many times I've recieved e-mail documents containg Word or Powerpoint presentations that StarOffice couldn't convert very nicely.
I don't know about it being a bridge over to Windows, however, some good could come out of it. You'd think they would start by helping out the wine project, but then again, thats not M$'s style. They'll probably take the wine code and make it proprietary.
alone or in pairs,
rolls over your neighbors dog.
Its great for a hack,
it fits in a rack, (a big one)
its VAX, VAX, VAX.
Its VAAAX, its VAAAX,
its big, its heavy, its wood (well not really)
it VAAAX, its VAAAX, its better than bad, its good
Everyone wants a VAX (not really again)
You're gonna love it VAX (from Compaq)
Sorry, couldn't resist....
Unfortunately, in this day in age, who in their right mind would buy VAX hardware to run VMS. Performance-wise Alphas that cost the same, will run circles around VAXes. You still have all the ability to cluster them. Programming on them is considerably easier in many cases. I ask to anybody, why would you go out and buy a new VAX (not counting to replace existing hardware)? Only thing I can thing of is for clustering, but is it possible to effectively cluster an Alpha with a VAX?
I saw that 7.x does finally support piping but its nowhere near as elegant as the | command in UNIX IMO.
On a sorta similar note to your filesystem gripe, I never liked having to set up symbols just to run programs with command line arguments either. It seemed stupid. The run command should have either let you pass arguments in as well, or type the text that one put into a symbol into the command line and have it work.
Otherwise, the OS is pretty incredible. It has all the power of an real operating system, like UNIX, and then some, while still being pretty user friendly (as far as CLI user friendliness goes).
I wouldn't waste money just to run Linux on a VAX. Buy an Alpha first (the VAX's successor for VMS), it runs linux as well and I'm sure the performance is lightyears ahead of anything Linux VAX can do.
I honestly see no reason to purchase VAX hardware in this day and age. VMS'ers should probably port applications to Alpha's before they even consider buying another VAX. (chances are they're running OpenVMS already, anyway, making it that much easier (unless its VAX assembly code))
Long live the Alpha my friend. And incidentally, if you haven't had the opportunity and pleasure of working on an Alpha running VMS as opposed to god awful VAX VMS, you don't know what you're missing.
I think there is a lot of good with the VMS operating system, but as for good stuff with VAX hardware, its just plain outdated IMO.
This is such a bundle of <pick favorite animal> sh*t. I understand the concern, companies don't want their employee's tweaking their production OS. (Duh!) Make a policy that such a thing is not allowed, without due process. Anyone in violation without following that process, which might include documentation, review, proof that alternatives can't be found, etc., can be dismissed.
Just because the source is available doesn't mean you have to, need to, want to, should alter the code. I'd be a little hesitant to modify a production operating systems code for fear of messing something up. The next problem of course is that in modifying the source you are off on your own branch of the source tree (figuratively and literally), unless you can push it back into the development tree. Any changes you make might hinder your upgrade ability, or at least require some more work or modification to make you changes work with future upgrades.
Some people are never going to get the beauty and promise of open source. I think the above "problem" isn't a problem with Linux or open source software, but with the software development practices and discipline of the company implementing the software.
Anybody who has been burned by a closed source system (many might not even recognize it) sees the benefit of having access to the source code. Doesn't mean your going to change it, you just want to understand it. After all, how many times have you joked or recognized that the some of the best documentation, is the source code.
The technique employed would be to flash up a warning screen if you tried to access a 'bad' site and provide some sort of simple explanation as to why (i.e. pornography, hate site, etc.) On this page was a link to appeal this decision. Based on the argument made, access might be re-opened up or not. In a borderline case, a temporary username/password on a separate proxy would be granted for some period of time so that person could gain access.
It sounds like you will need more of an instantaneous response so there might be some issues you'd need to work out with this scenario, but it worked pretty good.
I remember liking it, and the stuff I didn't like about it was typically similar to the stuff I don't like in X-windows now. It'd be interesting to go back and give it a whirl.
As for the price problem, I want to pose the following question to those who might know a bit more about NeXT than myself. I vaguely remember on the systems I used, that the hardware the OS was running on were Gateway 2000 boxes. Can the NeXT operating system run on x86 hardware? If so, was it the OS that was pricey or the actual NeXT hardware? (I'm thinking the latter) Also, if it does run on x86, does anyone know where I can get it for free or minimal cost, or is it totally dead?
Just what we need, one more place where they can totally f*ck up on their interpretations of child abuse.
(OT, can't resist) I've had people I know have cocaine and all sorts of other drugs out in a house where several children under the age of 10, where they don't do a good enough job. C'mon you call ahead of time, I can clean the place up. I've also known some of the best parents go through hell because their child broke a bone falling out of a tree or doing other things that kids do that get them scraped, bruised, cut. Those bastards need to revise there approach to doing things. I've got plenty more examples, but I think I've beat enough into my now completely offtopic rant...