This kind of reminds me of a Top10 list I saw on some Usenet group way back in the day, Top10 Most Useless Super Powers. Among the list...
The ability to breath hot soup
The ability to tame excited squirrles
Forgot the rest. Anyway, the ability of Enhanced Color Depth Vision seems to fit. I wonder what her secret identity would be? Magenta? Rainbora? Mistress Spectrum?
Think of it this way: somewhere out there in America, there is a guy who is entirely too rich. He bought a lot of stock in Microsoft, or Disney, or whatever back in the day, and sold it when it was still at $140. Or maybe his daddy had a bunch of oil wells in Texas in 1983; doesn't matter. He's got way to much money to spend, and by now is used to getting whatever he wants.
So his kid tells him that if he doesn't get a PS2 at release, he'll kill himself. Mr. Rich has no idea what a PS2 is, but Jr. is really starting to intrude on Daddy's Nasdaq time. So the old man heads over the fao Schwartz, but finds none in stock. Desperate, he degrades himself to Best Buy, Circuit City, and *gasp* The Mall, but still no luck. Sorry mister, should have been in line at 1:00 last night.
But this is a man used to being able to buy whatever he wants, price be damned. Solution?: Ebay, of course. On Ebay, money talks. Would he really spend $15,000? I saw some of those, and my guess is that the really high-end auctions were goof bids. But I would bet there are many out there who would have dropped $1500+ on one, just to prove to themselves that their money CAN buy whatever they want.
As furiousgeorge already said, science is about seeking truth. And you know what? The truth is that on a cosmic stage, we aren't significant. The universe has been here for billions of years before us, and it will be here for billions of years after we're gone. Even if humanity manages to survive long enough to colonize our entire galaxy, which would obviously be no small feat and take millions of years, we would still have little to no impact on 99.99% of the rest of the universe, and we would only occupy a fraction of the universe's entire history.
Whatever status or accomplishments mankind has assigned itself is only significant to us.
True, but the consoles can be repaired inside of 10 minutes with some power couplers and a Dilithium Linear Accelerator. And don't let your chief engineer tell you it's going to take longer than 10 minutes, either. He's just sandbagging it down there.
It must show the most recent moderation effect in the description? Not the first one like that I've seen; really not that big of deal in the long run. I just couldn't believe anyone would give that post an Insightful mod. Hopefully it was done as a joke, I'd hate to think anyone was that dense.
Nice post, but how in the world does this garner a +1 Insightful? I'm starting to believe the "Moderators are Smoking Crack" dogma more and more every day.
Sure it has 800 games, but how many of those would you actually play? A lot of them you might load up, play for 5 minutes or so, and then realize it's a crap game and never load it up again. Meanwhile, you continue to play the 25 or so standards (Yars Revenge, Asteroids, River Raid, etc).
Having Atari put out something like this would be cool as hell, but no way I'd pay over $100 for one. Price them around $59, advertise it as "800 Classic Games for the price of one!" or something like that, and you've got something. I gotta think that Atari could still make a profit at that point if they mass-produced them.
That having been said, enough of these damn Sega rumor and Playstation 2 hype articles on/.
As opposed to the Microsoft rumor and OS X hype stories? I fail to see how console articles are any different than the norm here, unless you just don't want to read about video games. And there are home page preferences to take care of that.
Just curious: what verson of Minesweeper was that on? Windows 3.11/95/98? Linux version of some kind? I ask because, as you might have guessed, I used to play a lot of Minesweeper. Let's just say college work study programs are great. Not once did I ever get a bomb on the first click; a fact that actually became a point of debate between myself and several others in the campus computer lab back in the day. We wondered whether the board was generated on load, and the bomb moved to another space if you click on one first; or if the board was generated after the first click.
As for my being a Windows user, AC, I admit it freely, no shame. When your a support technician, you use what the lusers use baby.
I find it very hard to believe that Minesweeper could be won every time, at least on the Expert level, or similar "big" boards. Mostly I think this because it can be really unpredictable.
Consider: Minesweeper (at least the Windows version) seems to give you the first "click" free. In all my playing, I've never hit a bomb on the first click. Presumably the bomb locations are randomly located after this first click.
Now, sometimes on that first click, you get a "2" or "3", with no other spaces uncovered. What then? It comes down to luck, basically. You have no way of knowing for sure which of the 8 squares surrounding your numbers has mines, so you just have to click one and hope. Alternatively, you could click on a totally different area of the board. The odds of you not hitting a bomb are probably better if you do this, but in my experience you end up hitting a bomb enough times to make "winning almost every time" impossible.
Even throughout a game, you usually cannot avoid coming to these "decision points", where you are unable to logically deduce the locations of bombs, and are forced to make a blind pick.
Forget Bush and Gore, let's see what some popular video game characters have to say about these questions:
1) War on Drugs
Pac-Man: If by "drugs" you mean Power Pills, then I would have to say that we need to keep them. How else am I supposed to get away from those ghosts past the Banana level?
2) Minority Religions...
Cloud Strife: I don't care about religions, I'm just doing this job for the money. If you want to believe in that kind of stuff, it doesn't really matter to me.
3) Why give a tax cut?
Simon Belmont: I've cut a bunch of stuff in my time, mostly shitloads of zombies and vampires. Let me tell you, those zombies stink like you wouldn't believe when you burn them with Holy Water.
4) electoral reform
Mappy: We need some electoral reform. Those damn cats are all over this place, and as far as I can tell I'm the only one who's trying to do something about it! At least there are some trampolines to help me out.
5)How Do You Feel About Intellectual Property?
Glass Joe: Take whatever you want! Just don't hit me in the face!
6) Encryption....
Solid Snake: Encryption seems like a waste of time to me. I mean, just tune the radio to the right frequency, and the enemy will tell you whatever you need to know.
7) Rising Political Protests
Command&Conquer's Kane: If the people would ever rise up against me, I'd probably just travel back in time and change history to my liking.
8) Asteroid Defenses
Samus Aran: Forget asteroids, it's those damn Metroids we have to watch out for.
9) The Future of the Country, and of Humanity
MegaMan: I don't know about you, but my mission has always been killing evil robots. You try doing that for a while, and then tell me how your not satisfied with surfing the internet anymore.
Perhaps I'm just reading this differently, but it seems to me that this guy didn't come in "after the cops had got there". He was on IRC, someone told him that yankees.com had "just been hacked", and he immediately went on over to see what's up. And he then proceeds to start snooping around the site, and 5 minutes later announces how it was accomplished.
It seems to me that he was snooping around where he shouldn't have. I can certainly understand the curiosity factor, and don't really condem him for wanting to find out how it was done. But what you've got to remember is that web sites are big business now. A companies going to get pissed if there's is tampered with, and they certainly won't want you nosing around there as well. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.
But because the image might be a little too scary, they've decided to use a broader angle, which makes Perseus A look like a pumpkin.
I really don't know what to say about this. Are they really suggesting they're worried someone will be scared out of their wits by this picture? "Man sues Discovery.com, Observatory for posting Satanic-themed picture"? Surely over-sensitive people haven't taken over THIS much.
One can only hope that they made this comment tounge-in-cheek.
Christ, get a grip man. Slashdot has had what, 2? 3 stories over the past couple of days on PS2? And suddenly, Slashdot is a pawn of the multi-conglomerate, corporate driven BigBrother world? Suddenly, Rob, Hemos etc, are all rich, fat-cats who really don't care about the common geek?
God, I am sick and tired of people bitching and whining about expensive CD's, region coded DVD's, PS emulators, whatever. You know what: it's entertainment media. They are, by definition, only useful in giving me something to do with my free time. The companies that produce this media produce it in a form they see fit, at a price they think is market value, and restrict your use of it any way they want. You don't like it? Don't buy it! If enough people agree with you, the companies will adapt to meet those expectations. But please don't act as if you as an individual have some sort of right to demand that these companies produce entertainment media the way you think it should be produced.
Like it or not, the PS2 is going to be the biggest, fastest selling game console in history, and it IS news that deserves to be reported. I'm sure that you'll have loads of fun playing your Nintendo emulator, or Sega Saturn, secure in the knowledge you paid little to nothing for it and screwed "The Man". Me, I'm going to gladly plunk down $299 for a PS2 as soon as I can, get my friends to buy some games, and have fun with the latest and greatest in console technology.
My local Best Buy and CompUSA were the same. The guy at Best Buy said that people started lining up at 7:00 last night. They had something like 50 consoles in, but there must have been at least that many people in line at 10:00 this morning.
Playstation is really kind of odd, in that the hype about it seems to transcend from geeks and games to almost everyone. CNN.com had a front page story on it this morning, for Christ sake. My parents would give me blank stares if I tell them about Dreamcast, X-Box, or GameCube. But they sure as hell know what a Playstation is. Sony has done a brilliant job marketing both this and the PS1.
*sigh* Hopefully Sony will stick to their 100k consoles a week until Christmas promise, and I can get one in a couple weeks. DOA2 and NHL2001 are calling me.
The only one on this list I had the unfortunate pleasure of buying and playing was Force Commander. Problem is, the idea seems so damn cool. Star Wars Starcraft! Of course it was awful for all the reasons pointed out in the article and more. I still can't believe someone thought that camera system was a good idea.
After playing through the first 2 missons of Force Commander, I realized that this game wasn't getting any better and shelved it. The plot was half-way interesting: lowly Imperial officer rises through the ranks, and presumably ends up switching to the rebellion (didn't get that far). But between stupid AI on units and a camera angle that makes things look like a Picasso painting...One has to wonder how this can be from the same publisher that gave us Tie Fighter and Jedi Knight. LucasArts needs to find some better game companies to farm their license out too.
Really though, even if you do decide that a "kernel with a shell and some services" aren't a real OS, so what? It's just a title, and doesn't make UNIX (or any other OS) any less useful. I mean, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
But if you want to go to the trouble of checking for and downloading updated drivers, why not just install an OS on the computer? Seriously, your talking about video cards, sound cards, network cards, joysticks, gamepads, and anything else a game might need to use. Factor into that the sheer number of manufacturers for each type of perhipheral, conflicts between them, etc..., it hardly seems worth the trouble.
There's just too much hardware out there; too many potential driver incompatabilities to make something like this reasonable.
Why can't I play ALL games from the CD with no install?
Because then you'd have a console?
This is a good idea, but I don't think practical in all PC-related situations. Think new hardware: what happens when the Voodoo X's come out? Will this CD support them? What if NVidia releases new enhanced drivers for TNT2. How do you get these new drivers on your game CD's?
Unique hardware are what make's PC's such great gaming equipment. Unfortunately, that also means you have to have your own OS with your own drivers, and have to install the games to your harddrive.
The ZDNet review kinda hints at this, but I wonder: will the Curusoe(sp?) chips necessitate a new set of benchmarks to acurately measure performance?
I don't usually put a lot of faith in most benchmarks, but a lot of people do. It would be a shame to see Transmeta chips slurred by poor benchmark scores that may not reflect the chips true power.
I love Battlebots, I hate the crappy announcers who seem to think that this is some sort of WWF episode.
SILENCE! Bil Dwyer is a God who walks among mortal men. When Bil Dwyer conquers all of mankind (as he is destined to do), only those of us who recognize the genius of spelling your name with one "L" will be allowed to sit at the Great Council Hall!
The best part is when they go to their "sideline reporter" Donna D'Erico. Watching those M-Tech geeks stare at her tits while she asks them, "So, what do you feel the turning point of the match was?" is just pure funny.
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of reminds me of a Top10 list I saw on some Usenet group way back in the day, Top10 Most Useless Super Powers. Among the list...
The ability to breath hot soup
The ability to tame excited squirrles
Forgot the rest. Anyway, the ability of Enhanced Color Depth Vision seems to fit. I wonder what her secret identity would be? Magenta? Rainbora? Mistress Spectrum?
Think of it this way: somewhere out there in America, there is a guy who is entirely too rich. He bought a lot of stock in Microsoft, or Disney, or whatever back in the day, and sold it when it was still at $140. Or maybe his daddy had a bunch of oil wells in Texas in 1983; doesn't matter. He's got way to much money to spend, and by now is used to getting whatever he wants.
So his kid tells him that if he doesn't get a PS2 at release, he'll kill himself. Mr. Rich has no idea what a PS2 is, but Jr. is really starting to intrude on Daddy's Nasdaq time. So the old man heads over the fao Schwartz, but finds none in stock. Desperate, he degrades himself to Best Buy, Circuit City, and *gasp* The Mall, but still no luck. Sorry mister, should have been in line at 1:00 last night.
But this is a man used to being able to buy whatever he wants, price be damned. Solution?: Ebay, of course. On Ebay, money talks. Would he really spend $15,000? I saw some of those, and my guess is that the really high-end auctions were goof bids. But I would bet there are many out there who would have dropped $1500+ on one, just to prove to themselves that their money CAN buy whatever they want.
As furiousgeorge already said, science is about seeking truth. And you know what? The truth is that on a cosmic stage, we aren't significant. The universe has been here for billions of years before us, and it will be here for billions of years after we're gone. Even if humanity manages to survive long enough to colonize our entire galaxy, which would obviously be no small feat and take millions of years, we would still have little to no impact on 99.99% of the rest of the universe, and we would only occupy a fraction of the universe's entire history.
Whatever status or accomplishments mankind has assigned itself is only significant to us.
They must use the command line.
True, but the consoles can be repaired inside of 10 minutes with some power couplers and a Dilithium Linear Accelerator. And don't let your chief engineer tell you it's going to take longer than 10 minutes, either. He's just sandbagging it down there.
It must show the most recent moderation effect in the description? Not the first one like that I've seen; really not that big of deal in the long run. I just couldn't believe anyone would give that post an Insightful mod. Hopefully it was done as a joke, I'd hate to think anyone was that dense.
Nice post, but how in the world does this garner a +1 Insightful? I'm starting to believe the "Moderators are Smoking Crack" dogma more and more every day.
Sure it has 800 games, but how many of those would you actually play? A lot of them you might load up, play for 5 minutes or so, and then realize it's a crap game and never load it up again. Meanwhile, you continue to play the 25 or so standards (Yars Revenge, Asteroids, River Raid, etc). Having Atari put out something like this would be cool as hell, but no way I'd pay over $100 for one. Price them around $59, advertise it as "800 Classic Games for the price of one!" or something like that, and you've got something. I gotta think that Atari could still make a profit at that point if they mass-produced them.
That having been said, enough of these damn Sega rumor and Playstation 2 hype articles on /.
As opposed to the Microsoft rumor and OS X hype stories? I fail to see how console articles are any different than the norm here, unless you just don't want to read about video games. And there are home page preferences to take care of that.
Just curious: what verson of Minesweeper was that on? Windows 3.11/95/98? Linux version of some kind? I ask because, as you might have guessed, I used to play a lot of Minesweeper. Let's just say college work study programs are great. Not once did I ever get a bomb on the first click; a fact that actually became a point of debate between myself and several others in the campus computer lab back in the day. We wondered whether the board was generated on load, and the bomb moved to another space if you click on one first; or if the board was generated after the first click.
As for my being a Windows user, AC, I admit it freely, no shame. When your a support technician, you use what the lusers use baby.
I find it very hard to believe that Minesweeper could be won every time, at least on the Expert level, or similar "big" boards. Mostly I think this because it can be really unpredictable.
Consider: Minesweeper (at least the Windows version) seems to give you the first "click" free. In all my playing, I've never hit a bomb on the first click. Presumably the bomb locations are randomly located after this first click.
Now, sometimes on that first click, you get a "2" or "3", with no other spaces uncovered. What then? It comes down to luck, basically. You have no way of knowing for sure which of the 8 squares surrounding your numbers has mines, so you just have to click one and hope. Alternatively, you could click on a totally different area of the board. The odds of you not hitting a bomb are probably better if you do this, but in my experience you end up hitting a bomb enough times to make "winning almost every time" impossible.
Even throughout a game, you usually cannot avoid coming to these "decision points", where you are unable to logically deduce the locations of bombs, and are forced to make a blind pick.
Forget Bush and Gore, let's see what some popular video game characters have to say about these questions:
1) War on Drugs
Pac-Man: If by "drugs" you mean Power Pills, then I would have to say that we need to keep them. How else am I supposed to get away from those ghosts past the Banana level?
2) Minority Religions...
Cloud Strife: I don't care about religions, I'm just doing this job for the money. If you want to believe in that kind of stuff, it doesn't really matter to me.
3) Why give a tax cut?
Simon Belmont: I've cut a bunch of stuff in my time, mostly shitloads of zombies and vampires. Let me tell you, those zombies stink like you wouldn't believe when you burn them with Holy Water.
4) electoral reform
Mappy: We need some electoral reform. Those damn cats are all over this place, and as far as I can tell I'm the only one who's trying to do something about it! At least there are some trampolines to help me out.
5)How Do You Feel About Intellectual Property?
Glass Joe: Take whatever you want! Just don't hit me in the face!
6) Encryption....
Solid Snake: Encryption seems like a waste of time to me. I mean, just tune the radio to the right frequency, and the enemy will tell you whatever you need to know.
7) Rising Political Protests
Command&Conquer's Kane: If the people would ever rise up against me, I'd probably just travel back in time and change history to my liking.
8) Asteroid Defenses
Samus Aran: Forget asteroids, it's those damn Metroids we have to watch out for.
9) The Future of the Country, and of Humanity
MegaMan: I don't know about you, but my mission has always been killing evil robots. You try doing that for a while, and then tell me how your not satisfied with surfing the internet anymore.
Perhaps I'm just reading this differently, but it seems to me that this guy didn't come in "after the cops had got there". He was on IRC, someone told him that yankees.com had "just been hacked", and he immediately went on over to see what's up. And he then proceeds to start snooping around the site, and 5 minutes later announces how it was accomplished.
It seems to me that he was snooping around where he shouldn't have. I can certainly understand the curiosity factor, and don't really condem him for wanting to find out how it was done. But what you've got to remember is that web sites are big business now. A companies going to get pissed if there's is tampered with, and they certainly won't want you nosing around there as well. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.
But because the image might be a little too scary, they've decided to use a broader angle, which makes Perseus A look like a pumpkin.
I really don't know what to say about this. Are they really suggesting they're worried someone will be scared out of their wits by this picture? "Man sues Discovery.com, Observatory for posting Satanic-themed picture"? Surely over-sensitive people haven't taken over THIS much.
One can only hope that they made this comment tounge-in-cheek.
Christ, get a grip man. Slashdot has had what, 2? 3 stories over the past couple of days on PS2? And suddenly, Slashdot is a pawn of the multi-conglomerate, corporate driven BigBrother world? Suddenly, Rob, Hemos etc, are all rich, fat-cats who really don't care about the common geek?
God, I am sick and tired of people bitching and whining about expensive CD's, region coded DVD's, PS emulators, whatever. You know what: it's entertainment media. They are, by definition, only useful in giving me something to do with my free time. The companies that produce this media produce it in a form they see fit, at a price they think is market value, and restrict your use of it any way they want. You don't like it? Don't buy it! If enough people agree with you, the companies will adapt to meet those expectations. But please don't act as if you as an individual have some sort of right to demand that these companies produce entertainment media the way you think it should be produced.
Like it or not, the PS2 is going to be the biggest, fastest selling game console in history, and it IS news that deserves to be reported. I'm sure that you'll have loads of fun playing your Nintendo emulator, or Sega Saturn, secure in the knowledge you paid little to nothing for it and screwed "The Man". Me, I'm going to gladly plunk down $299 for a PS2 as soon as I can, get my friends to buy some games, and have fun with the latest and greatest in console technology.
My local Best Buy and CompUSA were the same. The guy at Best Buy said that people started lining up at 7:00 last night. They had something like 50 consoles in, but there must have been at least that many people in line at 10:00 this morning.
Playstation is really kind of odd, in that the hype about it seems to transcend from geeks and games to almost everyone. CNN.com had a front page story on it this morning, for Christ sake. My parents would give me blank stares if I tell them about Dreamcast, X-Box, or GameCube. But they sure as hell know what a Playstation is. Sony has done a brilliant job marketing both this and the PS1.
*sigh* Hopefully Sony will stick to their 100k consoles a week until Christmas promise, and I can get one in a couple weeks. DOA2 and NHL2001 are calling me.
The only one on this list I had the unfortunate pleasure of buying and playing was Force Commander. Problem is, the idea seems so damn cool. Star Wars Starcraft! Of course it was awful for all the reasons pointed out in the article and more. I still can't believe someone thought that camera system was a good idea.
After playing through the first 2 missons of Force Commander, I realized that this game wasn't getting any better and shelved it. The plot was half-way interesting: lowly Imperial officer rises through the ranks, and presumably ends up switching to the rebellion (didn't get that far). But between stupid AI on units and a camera angle that makes things look like a Picasso painting...One has to wonder how this can be from the same publisher that gave us Tie Fighter and Jedi Knight. LucasArts needs to find some better game companies to farm their license out too.
Agreed. While we're at it, though, perhaps we should add a few more things to the list:
- War
- Famine
- Racial Bigotry
- User Friendly
...wouldn't happen to be Yakko, Wacko, and Dot, would they?
*Boingie Boingie Boingie*
Really though, even if you do decide that a "kernel with a shell and some services" aren't a real OS, so what? It's just a title, and doesn't make UNIX (or any other OS) any less useful. I mean, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
But if you want to go to the trouble of checking for and downloading updated drivers, why not just install an OS on the computer? Seriously, your talking about video cards, sound cards, network cards, joysticks, gamepads, and anything else a game might need to use. Factor into that the sheer number of manufacturers for each type of perhipheral, conflicts between them, etc..., it hardly seems worth the trouble.
There's just too much hardware out there; too many potential driver incompatabilities to make something like this reasonable.
Why can't I play ALL games from the CD with no install?
Because then you'd have a console?
This is a good idea, but I don't think practical in all PC-related situations. Think new hardware: what happens when the Voodoo X's come out? Will this CD support them? What if NVidia releases new enhanced drivers for TNT2. How do you get these new drivers on your game CD's?
Unique hardware are what make's PC's such great gaming equipment. Unfortunately, that also means you have to have your own OS with your own drivers, and have to install the games to your harddrive.
That tears it. I'm going to have to go pick up the Sims expansion pack. That tank looks ultra cool!
The ZDNet review kinda hints at this, but I wonder: will the Curusoe(sp?) chips necessitate a new set of benchmarks to acurately measure performance?
I don't usually put a lot of faith in most benchmarks, but a lot of people do. It would be a shame to see Transmeta chips slurred by poor benchmark scores that may not reflect the chips true power.
I love Battlebots, I hate the crappy announcers who seem to think that this is some sort of WWF episode.
SILENCE! Bil Dwyer is a God who walks among mortal men. When Bil Dwyer conquers all of mankind (as he is destined to do), only those of us who recognize the genius of spelling your name with one "L" will be allowed to sit at the Great Council Hall!
The best part is when they go to their "sideline reporter" Donna D'Erico. Watching those M-Tech geeks stare at her tits while she asks them, "So, what do you feel the turning point of the match was?" is just pure funny.