Of course, in my circle of friends, I don't know anyone who's interested in a next-gen console. Period.
XBox360 has no games I'm interested in. PS3 has no games - at all, that I've heard of. (Other than random speculation that Series X+1 will be on it.) Revolution has no games - at all, that I've heard of. Not even speculation on sequels.
So, based on that quicky-analysis, I can come up with absolutely no reason why I'd want to get a next generation console.
Yet.
That can all change. But it all depends on the games, and all the next-gen consoles seem to be lacking in that department...
Are people really itching to play NES games that badly?
On the Revolution? Nope. On the GBA/GBDS? Sure. Most of my GBA games are re-released NES/SNES games...
I hope you weren't implying that Slashdot posters are pendantic.....oh, wait, you were.
And, on that note, it's "pedantic." I know, because the last time I misspelled it "pendantic" on Slashdot, I had a good five or six replies correcting me...
They were at one point. Apparently they changed projects to Seeker.
It's still listed on their Development page, although I can't find any hint of when it was last updated. (Beyond "2005" since the website is "copyright 1995-2005.")
My brother and I both bought copies of Galactic Civilizations 2 - one of the primary reasons I decided to buy it was because there was no copy protection. It's a good game, although I personally still prefer Ascendancy. Definitely worth the $40, but it's also nice to know that I don't have to worry about where the CD is.
Most of my other PC games I play are hacked versions (even though I own a legal copy) because I hate having to deal with copy protection. I hate having to swap disks on my PC, and I hate having to wait the extra pointless time for whatever copy protection they use to "validate" my game CD. I've got 2GB of hard drive space used by the game, I shouldn't need to deal with the CD.
So instead I use the warezed versions of the games I actually purchased...
Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called "monolithic insanity."
You should read the article. It mentions that he's dead, and it explains (based on accounts by his still-living peers) how his original Action Office devolved into the cubicle.
I played the Xenogears demo, and you have like 10 times and many hitpoints as you do at the beginning of the real game, and you have a full party instead of just your main character.
I hate demos like that, because they give you no feel for the game at all. Kind of like the FFXII demo, which is probably why it was so disappointing. After playing through it I have absolutely no idea what FFXII will actually play like. If the demo isn't going to give you a taste of the actual game, there's really no point in releasing it.
I think Sqaure is afraid that if people die in their demos they won't buy the game.
Hmmm... You've just given me something to try this evening, see if I can die in the FFXII demo...
Sky Pirates don't bother me, and it's cool to see vieras (bunny girls) and bangas (lizard boys) since I like FFTA, but I wish they didn't dress the vieras up in lingerie.
I didn't really like FFTA - I've still yet to finish it, although I think I'm fairly close to the end. My main problem with it was the lousy advancement system. I didn't like the "equip weapons to learn abilities" system in FFIX, and I didn't like it in FFTA. The judges wound up making gameplay more frusterating than it had to be due to poorly defined rules. (Specifically, "Holy." I'm still not entirely sure what counts as "Holy" and what doesn't. I think Cure does, but I'm not positive...) But, most of all, I really liked the FFT system and it didn't quite reuse that.
I need to rewatch the trailer, because it wasn't specifically the concept of Sky Pirates, but more the vast assortment of "flying thingies" belonging to some random Evil Empire (I think). Plus, the characters they introduced all seemed to be annoying in some way.
As for Vieras in lingerie, I've got to say: I found them to be, flat-out, scary. I'm not sure who they're trying to appeal to, and I'm not sure I really want to, either...
I haven't preordered it. I'm debating, but the last time I preordered and bought a Squenix game the day it came out it was X-2, which I so thought was going to be awesome, so I'm going to be a little more cautious this time.
I waited on that one, and finally got it hoping that it would explain WTF happened to Tidus at the end of FFX. But, supposedly it doesn't, so I'm only a good three missions into it. My possibly irrational hatred of Yuna's voice and extreme dislike of Rikku's character didn't help much either - and the frosty third character wasn't any good either.
I really want another good Final Fantasy... Something to get me as excited as FFVII did... Which, unfortunately, is probably impossible. But here's hoping...
I liked the demo. Yeah, it was incredibly easy, but when have you seen a demo that was remotely challenging?
Plenty of times - usually with games that I wound up buying once they were released... I remember plenty of old PC games were the demo was essentially just a limited section of the full game. You weren't playing some easy-mode version of the game, you were playing the actual game - it just ended far earlier than the real game did. I bought Ascendancy, Abuse, and Total Annihilation after playing demos which essentially limited you to the very early parts of the game. And in all three cases, the final game didn't disappoint me. (And in all three cases, the developers went under shortly after releasing the mentioned games... *sigh*)
But that's not really my problem with the crappy FFXII demo. My problem is that it left out essentially everything I wanted to know about the game! You couldn't get to the status screen. I have no idea how equipment works, no idea how characters advance. That's the stuff I want to know. I'm a bit of a min/maxxer myself (two copies of all three Master Materias in FFVII, a Yuna with over 20000 HP in FFX...), and I really wanted to see the advancement system!
Then there was the trailer with the Sky Pirates and the animated Bunny Girls and things that looked like Jar Jar Binks... (I honestly cannot remember what their races were called, and am far too lazy to look it up - but, yes, I know what they really are.) The demo has me worried...
I dunno, I haven't preordered it and I'm not planning on buying it on release day, but I'm definitely going to follow it after release and see how people like it. Let me know how it is.:)
And am i the only one that sees the author as a bit of a troll? Comments are for opinions, not stories.
It's some dude's blog. He has every right to post comments on it - it's his blog! Slashdot, on the other hand, should know better than to post opinion as a factual story, but if you've been around here long enough, you'll know that Slashdot doesn't bother to actually check links... (Check out this article where the link to the "New York Times" actually went to Hooters until they editted the story... Read through the comments.)
But, yeah, the story is slightly on the trollish side. Which is fine for some dude's blog, but a little less acceptable from a site that advertises a subscription service...
I'd go a step farther and say it's a sign of bad game design. If you, as a player, find yourself seriously thinking about paying someone else to play the game for you, that means that the game has stopped being a game and started being a chore. If I enjoy something, I'm not going to pay someone else to go enjoy it for me. But if it bores me, then I might be willing to pay someone to do it so I don't have to.
Is gold buying cheating? Almost certainly, in the same way that slipping someone $5 real world currency for Boardwalk would be cheating in Monopoly. There are rules that you're supposed to follow, and buying gold is breaking them.
But it's also a time saver. Instead of having to camp some stupid mob for hours on end to get your Jujitsu Gi, you instead pay someone to camp some stupid mob for hours on end, thereby skipping the boring part.
When a game has people willing to pay good money not to have to play the boring parts, that's a sign that the game has problems. Gold buying is both cheating and a time saver - and a sign of poor game design.
Now all you're missing is calendaring, the task list, and a whole host of other features I can't remember. The only one I care about is the calendaring, though.
I'm currently using Debian Testing on my development machine at work, but I still have to have a second Windows machine for Outlook's calendar functions. (Yes, I know that Evolution has an Exchange connector, but it appears to be broken in Debian Testing. There's a bug report filed against it - hopefully it'll get fixed soonish and I can start checking email on my primary machine.)
If all I wanted was an email client, I wouldn't be using Outlook. I also happen to need the calendaring feature to keep track of what meetings I have scheduled. (Oh, and there's all those other various features that I don't use but someone might.)
Re:What exactly is this hurdle Blizzard speaks of?
on
No WoW for the 360
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· Score: 1
And WoW's interface is considered to be the WORST of all MMOs out there, so Blizzard isn't one to talk.
By who?! Have you ever played FFXI? FFXI's is far, far, far worse than WoW. The default interface in WoW may not be one of the best (it's far better than FFXI's, though) - but it's customizable using XML and LUA.
That beats FFXI's completely uncustomizable interface any day. Not to mention other "minor" things like FFXI crashing if it loses application focus, the extremely limited "background" resolutions, the horrendous PlayOnline interface...
I'm willing to believe WoW's isn't the best - that's why almost everyone uses UI mods. But FFXI's is by far the worse than WoWs.
The only reason I still have an active FFXI account and canceled my WoW account is because I like the world of Vana'diel far better than Azeroth. It certainly isn't because of the user interface. (Which is really annoying - I'd love to see Square-Enix modernize their interface.)
Usually if something is taking a long time, it's not because you haven't polished it enough, or because it's not perfect yet, but rather because it's too broken to sell in its current state. Usually a 3-5 month initial devel, followed by a month or so of in house testing, followed by 3 fscking years of beta tests leads to a very polished terd with lots of useless doodads added on.
Combined with the fact that more and more games are simply unplayable thanks to "copy protection," yeah, I've switched over to consoles too. Console games just work. I've had enough games crap out on me on the PC over "copy protection" that I've just given up on them.
I can't play WarCraft III any more. It decided it was pirated, and now my Collector's Edition CD just won't run. I've had my CD-ROM drivers get destroyed by some over-zealous "copy protection" scheme. I've just given up on dealing with "copy protection" - in the end, it means that if I want to enjoy the game, I'd have to go out and download the hacked version. The pirated version works better than the version you pay money for.
So, I'll just stick with console games. At least they work out of the box, and don't require you to look through warez sites just to play the thing you spent $50 for.
Um - no. Because they fit two entirely different needs. I'm currently working on a project that's using Maven to build the project and reports, and using Eclipse as the IDE. Maven handles the build via the Eclipse "external tools" feature. (Although there is a Maven plugin for Eclipse, I'm not using it.) Eclipse handles being the IDE, Maven handles downloading random libraries from who-knows-where and creating massive HTML documents. I mean, Maven handles the build process.
It's sorta like saying "I expect automake is going to be more important than vi soon" - they fill different areas.
Maven might be as important as Eclipse, but Eclipse will always be important in its own way. I've seen enterprise systems use the Eclipse Rich Client Platform for their tools. I'm currently working on another project that wants to use the RCP as the basis for their client. Eclipse and Maven simply fulfill two different roles.
Firefox uses a custom allocator, located in the Netscape Portable Runtime in nsprpub/pr/src/malloc/prmalloc.c, so I can tell you with certainty that it uses sbrk() and not mmap().
This is really moot on most systems; don't do a lot of little allocations that you're going to keep around for a while and DO use pooled allocators that can use mmap().
Ooo boy, XPCOM uses lots of little allocations, and the NSPR allocator doesn't use mmap()...
This isn't offtopic, it's Link's catch-phrase from the animated series. I remember being in second grade, and people using the "well, excuuuuuuse me" line, and thinking it was really funny.
Rewatching it, it just seems really - well, corny. But it's from the show, and one of the first things I thought of when I saw the article title. In fact, I'm kinda disappointed this isn't from the "well-excuuuuuse-me-princess dept."
FFXII is for the PS2, not PS3, so it's not a next generation game in the first place.
That being said, did you play the demo that came with DragonQuest VIII? Ugh. To whoever was complaining about "long cutscenes to complete moves" (which DragonQuest VIII has in spades, BTW), that's not a worry in Final Fantasy XII - because everything happens in "real time." Instead, you just kinda stand there, and watch your party beat up enemies without ever having to lift a finger. Then, once they've cleared out the enemies in the area, you can just point them to the next cluster.
At least the AI doesn't suck - it's good enough to play the entire game for you! It looks like Square-Enix has finally gotten "interactive movie" down to an art.
(Although, to be quite honest, the worst part of the demo disk was the trailer. Apparently you're going to be "sky pirates." And, no matter how cute they may look in anime, "bunny girls" should never, ever, be rendered in 3-d. Plus, one of the races looks suspiciously like Jar-Jar Binks...)
With an XBL bound element whose constructor sets document.title.:)
But seriously, I kinda hope that by the time they're complete with CSS3, you'll be able to create a stylesheet that allows you to completely define the default XHTML tag's behaviors entirely in CSS. To do this right now, you need to use non-standard stuff like XBL.
That was kinda my point originally, XHTML isn't going to replace HTML because XHTML offers nothing. (It certainly doesn't offer any form of semantic markup.)
What's interesting is more of creating your own "markup language" and using CSS to explain to the browser how it looks like. It's not really that much more helpful to the computer, but it can make the actual markup easier to read. So instead of having a page full of <div class="comment">, you can have <comment>, making the markup more understandable.
It won't be more useful outside of keeping the backend code more readable, but - meh. It's still kinda cool, and has interesting possibilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, in my circle of friends, I don't know anyone who's interested in a next-gen console. Period.
XBox360 has no games I'm interested in. PS3 has no games - at all, that I've heard of. (Other than random speculation that Series X+1 will be on it.) Revolution has no games - at all, that I've heard of. Not even speculation on sequels.
So, based on that quicky-analysis, I can come up with absolutely no reason why I'd want to get a next generation console.
Yet.
That can all change. But it all depends on the games, and all the next-gen consoles seem to be lacking in that department...
On the Revolution? Nope. On the GBA/GBDS? Sure. Most of my GBA games are re-released NES/SNES games...
And, on that note, it's "pedantic." I know, because the last time I misspelled it "pendantic" on Slashdot, I had a good five or six replies correcting me...
They were at one point. Apparently they changed projects to Seeker.
It's still listed on their Development page, although I can't find any hint of when it was last updated. (Beyond "2005" since the website is "copyright 1995-2005.")
My brother and I both bought copies of Galactic Civilizations 2 - one of the primary reasons I decided to buy it was because there was no copy protection. It's a good game, although I personally still prefer Ascendancy. Definitely worth the $40, but it's also nice to know that I don't have to worry about where the CD is.
Most of my other PC games I play are hacked versions (even though I own a legal copy) because I hate having to deal with copy protection. I hate having to swap disks on my PC, and I hate having to wait the extra pointless time for whatever copy protection they use to "validate" my game CD. I've got 2GB of hard drive space used by the game, I shouldn't need to deal with the CD.
So instead I use the warezed versions of the games I actually purchased...
It's not news, the stuff at the end of the article explaining how companies are moving away from traditional cubicles is news.
Yeah, he died in 2000, according to this FORTUNE article which was posted in this Slashdot story. From the first paragraph of the article:
You should read the article. It mentions that he's dead, and it explains (based on accounts by his still-living peers) how his original Action Office devolved into the cubicle.
I hate demos like that, because they give you no feel for the game at all. Kind of like the FFXII demo, which is probably why it was so disappointing. After playing through it I have absolutely no idea what FFXII will actually play like. If the demo isn't going to give you a taste of the actual game, there's really no point in releasing it.
Hmmm... You've just given me something to try this evening, see if I can die in the FFXII demo...
I didn't really like FFTA - I've still yet to finish it, although I think I'm fairly close to the end. My main problem with it was the lousy advancement system. I didn't like the "equip weapons to learn abilities" system in FFIX, and I didn't like it in FFTA. The judges wound up making gameplay more frusterating than it had to be due to poorly defined rules. (Specifically, "Holy." I'm still not entirely sure what counts as "Holy" and what doesn't. I think Cure does, but I'm not positive...) But, most of all, I really liked the FFT system and it didn't quite reuse that.
I need to rewatch the trailer, because it wasn't specifically the concept of Sky Pirates, but more the vast assortment of "flying thingies" belonging to some random Evil Empire (I think). Plus, the characters they introduced all seemed to be annoying in some way.
As for Vieras in lingerie, I've got to say: I found them to be, flat-out, scary. I'm not sure who they're trying to appeal to, and I'm not sure I really want to, either...
I waited on that one, and finally got it hoping that it would explain WTF happened to Tidus at the end of FFX. But, supposedly it doesn't, so I'm only a good three missions into it. My possibly irrational hatred of Yuna's voice and extreme dislike of Rikku's character didn't help much either - and the frosty third character wasn't any good either.
I really want another good Final Fantasy... Something to get me as excited as FFVII did... Which, unfortunately, is probably impossible. But here's hoping...
Plenty of times - usually with games that I wound up buying once they were released... I remember plenty of old PC games were the demo was essentially just a limited section of the full game. You weren't playing some easy-mode version of the game, you were playing the actual game - it just ended far earlier than the real game did. I bought Ascendancy, Abuse, and Total Annihilation after playing demos which essentially limited you to the very early parts of the game. And in all three cases, the final game didn't disappoint me. (And in all three cases, the developers went under shortly after releasing the mentioned games... *sigh*)
But that's not really my problem with the crappy FFXII demo. My problem is that it left out essentially everything I wanted to know about the game! You couldn't get to the status screen. I have no idea how equipment works, no idea how characters advance. That's the stuff I want to know. I'm a bit of a min/maxxer myself (two copies of all three Master Materias in FFVII, a Yuna with over 20000 HP in FFX...), and I really wanted to see the advancement system!
Then there was the trailer with the Sky Pirates and the animated Bunny Girls and things that looked like Jar Jar Binks... (I honestly cannot remember what their races were called, and am far too lazy to look it up - but, yes, I know what they really are.) The demo has me worried...
I dunno, I haven't preordered it and I'm not planning on buying it on release day, but I'm definitely going to follow it after release and see how people like it. Let me know how it is. :)
It's some dude's blog. He has every right to post comments on it - it's his blog! Slashdot, on the other hand, should know better than to post opinion as a factual story, but if you've been around here long enough, you'll know that Slashdot doesn't bother to actually check links... (Check out this article where the link to the "New York Times" actually went to Hooters until they editted the story... Read through the comments.)
But, yeah, the story is slightly on the trollish side. Which is fine for some dude's blog, but a little less acceptable from a site that advertises a subscription service...
Wait, the Marines have special combat boots just for that?! Wow, the Marines really are prepared for everything!
Bingo.
I'd go a step farther and say it's a sign of bad game design. If you, as a player, find yourself seriously thinking about paying someone else to play the game for you, that means that the game has stopped being a game and started being a chore. If I enjoy something, I'm not going to pay someone else to go enjoy it for me. But if it bores me, then I might be willing to pay someone to do it so I don't have to.
Is gold buying cheating? Almost certainly, in the same way that slipping someone $5 real world currency for Boardwalk would be cheating in Monopoly. There are rules that you're supposed to follow, and buying gold is breaking them.
But it's also a time saver. Instead of having to camp some stupid mob for hours on end to get your Jujitsu Gi, you instead pay someone to camp some stupid mob for hours on end, thereby skipping the boring part.
When a game has people willing to pay good money not to have to play the boring parts, that's a sign that the game has problems. Gold buying is both cheating and a time saver - and a sign of poor game design.
Now all you're missing is calendaring, the task list, and a whole host of other features I can't remember. The only one I care about is the calendaring, though.
I'm currently using Debian Testing on my development machine at work, but I still have to have a second Windows machine for Outlook's calendar functions. (Yes, I know that Evolution has an Exchange connector, but it appears to be broken in Debian Testing. There's a bug report filed against it - hopefully it'll get fixed soonish and I can start checking email on my primary machine.)
If all I wanted was an email client, I wouldn't be using Outlook. I also happen to need the calendaring feature to keep track of what meetings I have scheduled. (Oh, and there's all those other various features that I don't use but someone might.)
By who?! Have you ever played FFXI? FFXI's is far, far, far worse than WoW. The default interface in WoW may not be one of the best (it's far better than FFXI's, though) - but it's customizable using XML and LUA.
That beats FFXI's completely uncustomizable interface any day. Not to mention other "minor" things like FFXI crashing if it loses application focus, the extremely limited "background" resolutions, the horrendous PlayOnline interface...
I'm willing to believe WoW's isn't the best - that's why almost everyone uses UI mods. But FFXI's is by far the worse than WoWs.
The only reason I still have an active FFXI account and canceled my WoW account is because I like the world of Vana'diel far better than Azeroth. It certainly isn't because of the user interface. (Which is really annoying - I'd love to see Square-Enix modernize their interface.)
So you're excited about Windows Vista too, huh? :)
It's "Zewlrunner". XUL = Zuul from Ghostbusters, that's why the namespace for XUL documents is "http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there .is.only.xul".
Similarly "XPI" is "zippy" - the install technology used to distribute XUL apps.
Combined with the fact that more and more games are simply unplayable thanks to "copy protection," yeah, I've switched over to consoles too. Console games just work. I've had enough games crap out on me on the PC over "copy protection" that I've just given up on them.
I can't play WarCraft III any more. It decided it was pirated, and now my Collector's Edition CD just won't run. I've had my CD-ROM drivers get destroyed by some over-zealous "copy protection" scheme. I've just given up on dealing with "copy protection" - in the end, it means that if I want to enjoy the game, I'd have to go out and download the hacked version. The pirated version works better than the version you pay money for.
So, I'll just stick with console games. At least they work out of the box, and don't require you to look through warez sites just to play the thing you spent $50 for.
And what I'm trying to tell you is that Eclipse is far more than just an IDE. It's a platform for building rich, cross-platform, client applications.
There's a lot more to Eclipse than the IDE.
Um - no. Because they fit two entirely different needs. I'm currently working on a project that's using Maven to build the project and reports, and using Eclipse as the IDE. Maven handles the build via the Eclipse "external tools" feature. (Although there is a Maven plugin for Eclipse, I'm not using it.) Eclipse handles being the IDE, Maven handles downloading random libraries from who-knows-where and creating massive HTML documents. I mean, Maven handles the build process.
It's sorta like saying "I expect automake is going to be more important than vi soon" - they fill different areas.
Maven might be as important as Eclipse, but Eclipse will always be important in its own way. I've seen enterprise systems use the Eclipse Rich Client Platform for their tools. I'm currently working on another project that wants to use the RCP as the basis for their client. Eclipse and Maven simply fulfill two different roles.
Firefox uses a custom allocator, located in the Netscape Portable Runtime in nsprpub/pr/src/malloc/prmalloc.c , so I can tell you with certainty that it uses sbrk() and not mmap().
Firefox (or, rather, the NSPR) will attempt to return memory to the OS when the final pages are clear using sbrk() if it can.
Ooo boy, XPCOM uses lots of little allocations, and the NSPR allocator doesn't use mmap()...
This isn't offtopic, it's Link's catch-phrase from the animated series. I remember being in second grade, and people using the "well, excuuuuuuse me" line, and thinking it was really funny.
Rewatching it, it just seems really - well, corny. But it's from the show, and one of the first things I thought of when I saw the article title. In fact, I'm kinda disappointed this isn't from the "well-excuuuuuse-me-princess dept."
Are you kidding? That was the best part!
FFXII is for the PS2, not PS3, so it's not a next generation game in the first place.
That being said, did you play the demo that came with DragonQuest VIII? Ugh. To whoever was complaining about "long cutscenes to complete moves" (which DragonQuest VIII has in spades, BTW), that's not a worry in Final Fantasy XII - because everything happens in "real time." Instead, you just kinda stand there, and watch your party beat up enemies without ever having to lift a finger. Then, once they've cleared out the enemies in the area, you can just point them to the next cluster.
At least the AI doesn't suck - it's good enough to play the entire game for you! It looks like Square-Enix has finally gotten "interactive movie" down to an art.
(Although, to be quite honest, the worst part of the demo disk was the trailer. Apparently you're going to be "sky pirates." And, no matter how cute they may look in anime, "bunny girls" should never, ever, be rendered in 3-d. Plus, one of the races looks suspiciously like Jar-Jar Binks...)
Well, yeah: "HELO", "GET", "POST", "if", "then", "mov", "add" - those are all English... :)
With an XBL bound element whose constructor sets document.title. :)
But seriously, I kinda hope that by the time they're complete with CSS3, you'll be able to create a stylesheet that allows you to completely define the default XHTML tag's behaviors entirely in CSS. To do this right now, you need to use non-standard stuff like XBL.
That was kinda my point originally, XHTML isn't going to replace HTML because XHTML offers nothing. (It certainly doesn't offer any form of semantic markup.)
What's interesting is more of creating your own "markup language" and using CSS to explain to the browser how it looks like. It's not really that much more helpful to the computer, but it can make the actual markup easier to read. So instead of having a page full of <div class="comment">, you can have <comment>, making the markup more understandable.
It won't be more useful outside of keeping the backend code more readable, but - meh. It's still kinda cool, and has interesting possibilities.