I have well over a thousand music CDs and several hundred console and computer games as well. Some of them date back to the beginning of the format. I have never -- NEVER -- damaged a CD to the point it won't play/boot/install/whatever. For crying out loud, be careful with your stuff.
I use SimpleMU, which is superior to all other Windows MUD clients I've tried for one reason -- spawn windows. Based on a regex, you can send incoming lines of text to subwindows, which is handy for keeping chat channels straight. It's also very quick and versatile. It's not free in either sense, but neither are many of the clients mentioned in replies.
Nah, that was the first thing I noticed. "Dammit, there's no headphone jack!" I was already annoyed enough at having to order a headphone adapter from Nintendo because they don't sell them in stores...
The Gameboy Advance SP is a really neat little thing and I'm glad I got one. (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is really fun, and I've had a copy of Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis lying around for months.) Still, the lack of a built-in headphone jack is annoying. Their FAQ about it says they ran out of space to put it -- and looking at the SP I can believe it. But why not just include the adapter in the box? I can't be the only person who doesn't want to inflict buzzy Nintendo music on those around me when I want to get my fix.
Once, I was standing in the game store talking to the clerk when nobody was around. In came a big stereotypical biker dude -- leather vest, chain wallet, big bushy beard, do-rag, the whole nine yards. He comes up to the counter, and the clerk says "Can I help you?"
In a gruff voice, the guy says "Yeah. I heard that Animal Crossing came in today. Can I pick one of those up?"
Shenmue is a 3D adventure game with a few collection sidequests and some action gaming shoehorned in. None of the individual elements are innovative, and you can't call it innovative just because these elements are squashed together.
The game (and its sequel) are also badly paced, poorly -- no, pathetically voice acted (in the US), needlessly tedious and have a very bad tendency to use action-based sequences as either timewasting filler or, even worse, roadblocks to the rest of the gameplay. Like another flawed game with many cutscenes (Xenosaga), the cinematic sequences were clearly scripted and directed by someone with no moviemaking experience whatsoever.
It frustrates me when someone praises Shenmue to the skies, or promotes its originality. There are so many other better games out there.
Since that page is hopelessly out of date, no, it doesn't.
Intermetrics no longer exists as a company, and after several mergers is a consulting company that no longer sells software. Aonix' ObjectAda no longer targets the JVM.
While I really enjoyed Perdido Street Station, it is very much a work with flaws; the invention and worldbuilding is wonderful, the writing suspenseful, but the whole thing sprawls just a little too much. Good plot points are abandoned -- in fact, it seems like some characters are abandoned, left to have things happen to them offstage because there's no room onstage; lots of threads are left hanging; the whole book changes into a chase-the-monster story; and the character's reactions to the final revelation seem way off base.
Both "American Gods" and "Passage" are, in my analysis at least, far superior novels when all is said and done.
I've never understood the US fanbase's reaction to Akira. It is, at times, a visually impressive movie, but that's aboutthe only thing it has going for it. A story that originally took many volumes of manga to tell is compressed to an hour and a half; it almost requires knowledge of the source material to make real sense of the movie.
There are so many BETTER movies that could be brought over, or even 'adapted' if they have to be... there's just no real REASON to do it with Akira.
I post to Usenet with my real unscrambled e-mail address because I value the fact that someone may reply privately to my post over the time I spend fighting spam. I also know that I get frustrated trying to unbend people's e-mail addresses, and am less likely to try again if I do it incorrectly and a mail bounces.
I do pay for this, I guess. I get, on average, 60 spam e-mails per day. A couple of filters used to mean I saw very little of it, but they became ineffective; now I use MailWasher, take a few minutes per pass to look at what it has accepted and rejected, bounce the spams back to origin, and none of it gets through. It doesn't add that much time to the time I spend reading e-mail, and I still know that people can mail me with a minimum of hassle.
It's not that Sony didn't make enough Yaroze units for you to find them on eBay -- although they didn't make very many for the US market. When you purchased a Yaroze, you had to sign an agreement restricting you from reselling or giving it away; the only thing you could do with it if you no longer wanted it was return it to Sony.
A few years ago, there was a similar frackus about, I think it was the Borland C++ license. They had a "non-compete" clause there. That was promptly removed after the application of public pressure. You'd think they learn from that. Perhaps, if they're smart, they'll pass the license by their real users for review and comment before putting it in the box.
Apparently they haven't learned from that -- seeing as that exact same clause is in the new JBuilder and Kylix licenses.
I can't really see how this can be seen as Borland "backing down" when there's no real explanation of how the new licenses will be different.
What, do they just think we're not paying attention now? I remember purchasing the earlier version of BC++ that had the no-competing-products clause -- and at the time, Borland had a much wider range of application-type products.
There were some interesting discussions on Usenet and Compuserve's Borland message boards about the ramifications of this: we really couldn't write any program approximating a database? How close to the functionality of the database Borland sold did we have to get before we were breaking the license agreement? This could still apply with Borland's Database Engine.
How close is a text editor to a word processor? -- or a programmer's editor to the editor in a Borland IDE? How about an HTML editor? Could I really not write a replacement progress meter?
I'm mad again, and I don't even *use* Borland products any more. What are they THINKING?
You're rather disingenuously ignoring the fact that an upgrade for software is generally understood to be a license to a new version of the software given at a discount because you already hold and have paid for a previous license; whereas all of the upgrades in your post are actually new things purchased and intended to replace old, different things. It is not the same thing at all.
The only ads I disallow are Flash ads and pop-ups/pop-unders caused by page loads or page closes. The pop-up is understandably blocked, I think; Flash ads make NOISE, and I don't want my computer to make NOISE unless I ask it to. One Flash/javascript ad on ign.com shook the screen, "tore" a rip down the center, and played an INCREDIBLY loud sound clip as well, then opened an unclosable floating window which also made noise. This is something I *have* to put up with? It's like watching television; when the commercials come on, we hit the MUTE button and talk, keeping half an eye on the screen for when the show comes back.
BTW, with IE 6.0, the banner ads on http://www.tale.com do not appear, EVEN IF I TOTALLLY UNLOAD WEBWASHER. Whatever "tech" they're using to disallow pressing the "next" button if I haven't seen the ad quite obviously is not working.
If you go to www.doubleclick.com, click on "privacy policy" and follow a few more links, tey can send you an opt-out cookie. It sets your doubleclick user ID to "OPT_OUT". Is this good enough? I dunno. I'm going to see, though.
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I have well over a thousand music CDs and several hundred console and computer games as well. Some of them date back to the beginning of the format. I have never -- NEVER -- damaged a CD to the point it won't play/boot/install/whatever. For crying out loud, be careful with your stuff.
I use SimpleMU, which is superior to all other Windows MUD clients I've tried for one reason -- spawn windows. Based on a regex, you can send incoming lines of text to subwindows, which is handy for keeping chat channels straight. It's also very quick and versatile. It's not free in either sense, but neither are many of the clients mentioned in replies.
Zmud is an awful hacky mess.
Nah, that was the first thing I noticed. "Dammit, there's no headphone jack!" I was already annoyed enough at having to order a headphone adapter from Nintendo because they don't sell them in stores...
The Gameboy Advance SP is a really neat little thing and I'm glad I got one. (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is really fun, and I've had a copy of Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis lying around for months.) Still, the lack of a built-in headphone jack is annoying. Their FAQ about it says they ran out of space to put it -- and looking at the SP I can believe it. But why not just include the adapter in the box? I can't be the only person who doesn't want to inflict buzzy Nintendo music on those around me when I want to get my fix.
Once, I was standing in the game store talking to the clerk when nobody was around. In came a big stereotypical biker dude -- leather vest, chain wallet, big bushy beard, do-rag, the whole nine yards. He comes up to the counter, and the clerk says "Can I help you?"
In a gruff voice, the guy says "Yeah. I heard that Animal Crossing came in today. Can I pick one of those up?"
I asked. I HAD to. It was for him.
I loved "I, Robot". I used to play it all the time. Hell, I used to put quarters in it to play with the 3D painting mode.
I miss the arcade.
You mean all those spams I've been getting titled "Fruit Machines from #120" aren't for fruit *vending* machines?
I'm shocked.
Shenmue is a 3D adventure game with a few collection sidequests and some action gaming shoehorned in. None of the individual elements are innovative, and you can't call it innovative just because these elements are squashed together.
The game (and its sequel) are also badly paced, poorly -- no, pathetically voice acted (in the US), needlessly tedious and have a very bad tendency to use action-based sequences as either timewasting filler or, even worse, roadblocks to the rest of the gameplay. Like another flawed game with many cutscenes (Xenosaga), the cinematic sequences were clearly scripted and directed by someone with no moviemaking experience whatsoever.
It frustrates me when someone praises Shenmue to the skies, or promotes its originality. There are so many other better games out there.
...they got the voice actors from the original game to return!
Since that page is hopelessly out of date, no, it doesn't.
Intermetrics no longer exists as a company, and after several mergers is a consulting company that no longer sells software. Aonix' ObjectAda no longer targets the JVM.
While I really enjoyed Perdido Street Station, it is very much a work with flaws; the invention and worldbuilding is wonderful, the writing suspenseful, but the whole thing sprawls just a little too much. Good plot points are abandoned -- in fact, it seems like some characters are abandoned, left to have things happen to them offstage because there's no room onstage; lots of threads are left hanging; the whole book changes into a chase-the-monster story; and the character's reactions to the final revelation seem way off base.
Both "American Gods" and "Passage" are, in my analysis at least, far superior novels when all is said and done.
I've never understood the US fanbase's reaction to Akira. It is, at times, a visually impressive movie, but that's aboutthe only thing it has going for it. A story that originally took many volumes of manga to tell is compressed to an hour and a half; it almost requires knowledge of the source material to make real sense of the movie.
There are so many BETTER movies that could be brought over, or even 'adapted' if they have to be... there's just no real REASON to do it with Akira.
Um, when zip files were introduced, there was one program to deal with them: Phil Katz' pkunzip for DOS. How is this any different?
I post to Usenet with my real unscrambled e-mail address because I value the fact that someone may reply privately to my post over the time I spend fighting spam. I also know that I get frustrated trying to unbend people's e-mail addresses, and am less likely to try again if I do it incorrectly and a mail bounces.
I do pay for this, I guess. I get, on average, 60 spam e-mails per day. A couple of filters used to mean I saw very little of it, but they became ineffective; now I use MailWasher, take a few minutes per pass to look at what it has accepted and rejected, bounce the spams back to origin, and none of it gets through. It doesn't add that much time to the time I spend reading e-mail, and I still know that people can mail me with a minimum of hassle.
It's not that Sony didn't make enough Yaroze units for you to find them on eBay -- although they didn't make very many for the US market. When you purchased a Yaroze, you had to sign an agreement restricting you from reselling or giving it away; the only thing you could do with it if you no longer wanted it was return it to Sony.
Ronin Developer said:
A few years ago, there was a similar frackus about, I think it was the Borland C++ license. They had a "non-compete" clause there. That was promptly removed after the application of public pressure. You'd think they learn from that. Perhaps, if they're smart, they'll pass the license by their real users for review and comment before putting it in the box.
Apparently they haven't learned from that -- seeing as that exact same clause is in the new JBuilder and Kylix licenses.
I can't really see how this can be seen as Borland "backing down" when there's no real explanation of how the new licenses will be different.
What, do they just think we're not paying attention now? I remember purchasing the earlier version of BC++ that had the no-competing-products clause -- and at the time, Borland had a much wider range of application-type products.
There were some interesting discussions on Usenet and Compuserve's Borland message boards about the ramifications of this: we really couldn't write any program approximating a database? How close to the functionality of the database Borland sold did we have to get before we were breaking the license agreement? This could still apply with Borland's Database Engine.
How close is a text editor to a word processor? -- or a programmer's editor to the editor in a Borland IDE? How about an HTML editor? Could I really not write a replacement progress meter?
I'm mad again, and I don't even *use* Borland products any more. What are they THINKING?
You're rather disingenuously ignoring the fact that an upgrade for software is generally understood to be a license to a new version of the software given at a discount because you already hold and have paid for a previous license; whereas all of the upgrades in your post are actually new things purchased and intended to replace old, different things. It is not the same thing at all.
The only ads I disallow are Flash ads and pop-ups/pop-unders caused by page loads or page closes. The pop-up is understandably blocked, I think; Flash ads make NOISE, and I don't want my computer to make NOISE unless I ask it to. One Flash/javascript ad on ign.com shook the screen, "tore" a rip down the center, and played an INCREDIBLY loud sound clip as well, then opened an unclosable floating window which also made noise. This is something I *have* to put up with? It's like watching television; when the commercials come on, we hit the MUTE button and talk, keeping half an eye on the screen for when the show comes back.
BTW, with IE 6.0, the banner ads on http://www.tale.com do not appear, EVEN IF I TOTALLLY UNLOAD WEBWASHER. Whatever "tech" they're using to disallow pressing the "next" button if I haven't seen the ad quite obviously is not working.
And then there is Super Runabout, a WinCE game that's fast, fairly good-looking, and a heck of a lot of fun.
If you go to www.doubleclick.com, click on "privacy policy" and follow a few more links, tey can send you an opt-out cookie. It sets your doubleclick user ID to "OPT_OUT". Is this good enough? I dunno. I'm going to see, though.