Well, personally I think the Spice girls have done some of the best pure pop of the decade. I gave up being snooty about pop music a long while ago -- not that I don't know shite when I hear it (Puff Daddy are you listening?)
However, some more of the EMI catalogue:
All the Pink Floyd albums
All the Robbie Williams albums
A lot of the Rolling Stones albums
Both Whale albums
The Sex Pistols album
Most Genesis albums
Queen
Radiohead
Kenickie
Hot Chocolate
Rolf Harris
Kate Bush
David Bowie
Jesus Jones
Blur
... and thousands more besides
I suspect that it's the "thousands more" that might sway you. EMI subsiduary labels include Food, Hut, Parlophone... etc.
Those really are gross generalisations. They're about as gross as saying "Black consumers only buy branded hip-hop style sportswear. Advertising suits to blacks is a waste of time", or something crass like that.
If you can market cars at women, then you can market games at them.
We should be careful not to confuse women with non-gamers. Since most of the women you meet are non-gamers (either because they never will be, or because nobody's managed to market to them properly yet, so the bug hasn't bitten), it's easy to confuse the two. How do you market Quake III to someone who *hasn't* graduated from Doom (etc), regardless of whether they're male or female.
The adverts in question here aren't trying to reach non-gamers. They're aiming for established gamers, and since so many of them are 15-25 yr old men, they go for the sex angle. --
Well, it's funny and everything, but why must you assume that you have to be sex-starved to enjoy porn?
The implication behind your satire is that games aren't for girls. Full stop. That's bollocks. My girlfriend routinely thrashes me at Mario Kart, Tekken, Bomberman and Puzzle Fighter. I bought her two Playstation games for her birthday, and she was grateful. She can't be unique in that respect (I, lucky, but not *that* lucky...) --
You don't need an HDD, or even a keyboard, to run Linux on a games console. What you *do* need is a small readonly filesystem on whatever the machine's native medium is, and some sort of access to a network (where there could be a telnet client, and an NFS mountable/usr,/var and/home.
The Dreamcast is ideal for this of course, because it has a modem already (not as ideal as Ethernet, but workable). --
"GSM phones must be nearing saturation, in europe at least, and people are waiting for 3G to upgrade etc etc."
Mobile phones in most of Europe are treated as fashion accessories. Most people seem to get a new one annually, just because it looks nicer, or plays more tunes, or something. Because they're bundled with contracts or sold as loss-leaders, they're affordable enough to treat in this way.
As a result, demand for mobile phone hardware in europe is about as likely to reach saturation as the demand for trousers. --
>> Computers are just simple turing machines. This
>> means that everything they do is utterly
>> predictable. The very essence of being conscious
>> is an ability to behave in a random fashion,
>> also known as free will.
> Devil's advocate time:
> Prove this
See Roger Penrose's book on the subject The Emperor's New Mind wherein he uses rather a lot of words to explain why he believes hard AI is not possible. It's an opinion I personally don't agree with (and as an earnest teenager I was delighted to be able to read a book by such a well respected academic, and find myself capable of actually disagreeing with it!).
Penrose's central theme is that computers are deterministic and that the human brain is not. My angle is that any sufficiently complex deterministic system can appear non-deterministic (hey, that's Chaos Theory) -- and anyway, even if that's not the case, you could easily hook up a random noise source to an A/D convertor and have your computer AI grab input from that for its "free will".
I say, if it can be done in wetware, it can be done in software -- to deny this is to invoke the supernatural, to say the Soul is seperate from the physical brain, and that's something I personally can't agree with.
Part of the problem is that when people come up with Tetris clones, they get whinged at -- somehow they're supposed to develop sprawling RPGs, FPSs or action-adventure games.
My favourite Playstation game is Super Puzzle Fighter: basically a very polished Puyo-puyo clone, with slightly different rules.
That's a project that a small hobbyist group might have a general stab at, and get a good prototype going in a couple of months.
Of course, coding a game like that is the easy bit. Inventing the play mechanics, balancing the various characters, drawing those gorgeous, gorgeous graphics, writing that catchy music: that's the tricky bit. --
The trouble is, writing a console game nowadays is an enormous task. With the PS2 coming along, games companies are having to double and treble the size of a team, just to create the more detailed models, etc.
On the other side of the coin, the average Gameboy title takes 6 person-months to complete. That's well within the resources of a hobbyist. Look for Gameboy hacks instead of PS hacks, and you'll find a whole load of interesting stuff. The Dreamcast VMU is less complex than a Gameboy: projects will by necessity be small, and therefore plentiful. --
There's been a *lot* of stuff around for a while, but today was the first time I saw a proper VMU emulator, so I submitted it. If you saw it earlier, maybe you should have told/. ? --
Yup, but the only tool on there is Dream Animator, which ain't a "proper" development tool, unless you also count Macromedia Director as a proper development tool. The docs are pretty good though. --
I'm afraid I don't have a whole lot of technical know-how when it comes to hardware systems. Would this allow you to create a Dreamcast-compatible system?
Erm, all it allows you to do is to write software for the memory card. The Dreamcast memory card has a little processor on board, an LCD screen and a some buttons, so you can run mini-applications on it.
I suppose the specs these guys have worked out would help you clone the VMU if you wanted to. --
The go-between between a VMU and a Dreamcast is the joypad cable (the VMU slots into the joypad). The go-between between a PC and a DC is... the Internet, via the bundled modem. --
Please, let me take a moment of your time to recommend the less gassy members of the esteemed Guinness family.
Draught Guinness (from the pub) is very nice, and all, but I never felt the DraughtFlow(TM) cans quite reached the same standard.
... so I drink Guinness Original, which you can get in cans or bottles, and which has a subtly different, more irony taste, without the creaminess. You can sometimes buy Guinness original in bottles in the pub, in which case you might be lucky enough to get the unpasteurised version. Yum.
Alternatively, there's the gorgeous Guinness Foreign Export. In the last century (heh, the century before that, I s'pose) beer for export had to be brewed a little bit stronger, so it survived the long sea journey (hence India Pale Ale). Guinness Foreign Export is 7.5% alcohol by volume, and it's like drinking Marmite. Class in a glass (bottle) -- if you can get hold of it. --
21? Blimey. I was knocking back several pints of Guinness a night, legally, at the age of 18. Even at 16 it's legal here if you're drinking it with a meal...
Mind you, the drinking age is 21 in Eire, so I guess for the proper Guinness experience... --
Just remember - as far as the Dinosaur Folks are concerned, they've been around forever and it's up to us *IX types to work with them. Not the other way around. In that light, it's absolutely fascinating that the Dinosaur Maker itself has put such a wide-spread stamp of approval over Linux...
Some of the big IBM decision makers were techies back in the early days of mainframes. My boss was recently telling me how in the early days, the source code to mainframe operating systems was freely given to customers, and customers would frequently provide a fix along with any bug reports. Then gradually, it became de-rigeur to keep your source code in a locked box.
In light of that, you can see how Open Source just might click with that generation. --
So, unless you can run Windows and Linux simultaneously on your PC, you're out of luck.
.. which you can do using VMWare (or the upcoming free clone).
Does this Bridges software just give you a whole Windows desktop in a window, or does it present each Windows-window in an X-window? If it does the latter, I can see a lot of benefit in running the Bridges server under VMware, and using the Linux Bridges client to interact with your Windows apps.
That's a common mistake, and it was discussed a *lot* in Perl circles in the run up to Y2K, but it is most certainly not a bug in Perl. The polite way to say "you just suck" is "you didn't read the documentation, you just guessed how locatime worked" -- which is no way to use an API.
Localtime() is inherited from C. Man localtime says "tm_year - The number of years since 1900". Arbitary, yes, programmer-unfriendly, yes, but a bug, no, and its behaviour is well documented.
Far worse, is the javascript year function I hear about (I've nver used Javascript personally) - where the function returns the last two digits of the year if the year is 2000, then from 2000 onwards, returns the whole four digits. I dread to think what fevered mind thought that one up. --
I don't think the guy deserves to get slapped down for this.
It's true that two people can write two well-designed Perl scripts which achieve the job elegantly and correctly, and yet each use a feature of the language which the other has not encountered. Perl prides itself on the fact that you don't need to learn the whole of Perl in order to get stuff done -- and yet as a result, learning the whole of Perl becomes more difficult than learning the whole of other languages.
It's certainly possible to write large scale software projects in Perl (define some standards at the very beginning. Tell your coders what features of Perl they may not use.)
I keep meaning to learn Python. I like its philosophy. For the record, one the strengths Guido claims for Python is that it works excellently in 100k LOC programs: you prototype in Python, then profile, then replace the slow parts (which will be 5% of the code) with C. Python is friendly to that kind of approach.
Is it any surprise that the Playstation (1) is outselling the Dreamcast? The Dreamcast is at the "early adopters" stage: £300 or more when you include a couple of games, controllers, memory cards etc. Meanwhile, you can pick up a Playstation for £65 quid in the supermarket, as an impulse buy when you're shopping for groceries. Maybe £120 with a game, spare controller and a memory card.
Those are very different markets. It's Coca-cola vs £100-a-bottle-champagne.
The PS2 will cost more than the Dreamcast, and will not be an impulse buy for anyone but the very rich, for a good few years -- until like the PLaystation before it, it becomes ubiquitous, and the production costs fall. --
If the Dreamcast "isn't doing that great", Sega can't have been ambitious enough, since the DC is exceeding their targets wildly. Most of the games publishers who were initally custards (of the cowardy-cowardy variety) and didn't develop for DC have changed their minds in light of the current DC userbase.
The PS2 is going to be expensive. I'll get one (because I have one of every mainstream console since the NES) and I imagine a number of hardcore gamers and early adopters will too. However, initially the DC will have more games, will be cheaper, will have online gaming (by the time PS2 comes out).
I wonder what form the PS2 broadband network will take. DC users are getting full access to the Web -- the kiddie filters can be taken off, and you can get every porn site, every weird-arse opinion on whatever web site you like. I guess Sony will dictate the content on their own network -- how dull!
It's going to be a close fight, and it'll be a lot of fun to watch (and take part in) --
I'm fairly certain that the console itself will not be running Linux as its OS. Firstly, I gather the PS2 is a pretty unconventional piece of architecture, so the port would not be straightforward. Secondly, a games console needs a very different kind of OS to a general purpose computer. Since the console model relies on the hardware being a constant, the abstractions that a high-level OS like UNIX or Windows provide are an unnecessary waste of resource. Games coders need something much closer to the metal.
That said, I'm sure Linux *could* be ported. The Dreamcast boots an OS off the game disk, so different games will run under different OSs, and we may see all sorts of new OSs appear to enable quicker/better/easier-ported games. The PS2 may turn out the same. --
Slashdot Mirror
However, some more of the EMI catalogue:
I suspect that it's the "thousands more" that might sway you. EMI subsiduary labels include Food, Hut, Parlophone... etc.
Thanks to Sean for that list, by the way.
--
Those really are gross generalisations. They're about as gross as saying "Black consumers only buy branded hip-hop style sportswear. Advertising suits to blacks is a waste of time", or something crass like that.
If you can market cars at women, then you can market games at them.
We should be careful not to confuse women with non-gamers. Since most of the women you meet are non-gamers (either because they never will be, or because nobody's managed to market to them properly yet, so the bug hasn't bitten), it's easy to confuse the two. How do you market Quake III to someone who *hasn't* graduated from Doom (etc), regardless of whether they're male or female.
The adverts in question here aren't trying to reach non-gamers. They're aiming for established gamers, and since so many of them are 15-25 yr old men, they go for the sex angle.
--
Well, it's funny and everything, but why must you assume that you have to be sex-starved to enjoy porn?
The implication behind your satire is that games aren't for girls. Full stop. That's bollocks. My girlfriend routinely thrashes me at Mario Kart, Tekken, Bomberman and Puzzle Fighter. I bought her two Playstation games for her birthday, and she was grateful. She can't be unique in that respect (I, lucky, but not *that* lucky...)
--
You don't need an HDD, or even a keyboard, to run Linux on a games console. What you *do* need is a small readonly filesystem on whatever the machine's native medium is, and some sort of access to a network (where there could be a telnet client, and an NFS mountable /usr, /var and /home.
The Dreamcast is ideal for this of course, because it has a modem already (not as ideal as Ethernet, but workable).
--
"GSM phones must be nearing saturation, in europe at least, and people are waiting for 3G to upgrade etc etc."
Mobile phones in most of Europe are treated as fashion accessories. Most people seem to get a new one annually, just because it looks nicer, or plays more tunes, or something. Because they're bundled with contracts or sold as loss-leaders, they're affordable enough to treat in this way.
As a result, demand for mobile phone hardware in europe is about as likely to reach saturation as the demand for trousers.
--
Turing machines can be built, and can be functional and even useful.
"Can be built", I'll buy. "Functional" I will also acknowledge. But "useful"?
Other than as an educational toy, what use is a physical Turing machine (that can't be done cheaper and better by a PIC chip or something)?
--
>> Computers are just simple turing machines. This
>> means that everything they do is utterly
>> predictable. The very essence of being conscious
>> is an ability to behave in a random fashion,
>> also known as free will.
> Devil's advocate time:
> Prove this
See Roger Penrose's book on the subject The Emperor's New Mind wherein he uses rather a lot of words to explain why he believes hard AI is not possible. It's an opinion I personally don't agree with (and as an earnest teenager I was delighted to be able to read a book by such a well respected academic, and find myself capable of actually disagreeing with it!).
Penrose's central theme is that computers are deterministic and that the human brain is not. My angle is that any sufficiently complex deterministic system can appear non-deterministic (hey, that's Chaos Theory) -- and anyway, even if that's not the case, you could easily hook up a random noise source to an A/D convertor and have your computer AI grab input from that for its "free will".
I say, if it can be done in wetware, it can be done in software -- to deny this is to invoke the supernatural, to say the Soul is seperate from the physical brain, and that's something I personally can't agree with.
--
"Type rm -rf /, once more, motherfucker. I dare ya, I double dare ya."
"Big KahunaLinux? That's that new Hawaiian RedHat variant, isn't it?"
I now declare the Pulp Fiction parodies over...
(if only t'were true)
--
Part of the problem is that when people come up with Tetris clones, they get whinged at -- somehow they're supposed to develop sprawling RPGs, FPSs or action-adventure games.
My favourite Playstation game is Super Puzzle Fighter: basically a very polished Puyo-puyo clone, with slightly different rules.
That's a project that a small hobbyist group might have a general stab at, and get a good prototype going in a couple of months.
Of course, coding a game like that is the easy bit. Inventing the play mechanics, balancing the various characters, drawing those gorgeous, gorgeous graphics, writing that catchy music: that's the tricky bit.
--
The trouble is, writing a console game nowadays is an enormous task. With the PS2 coming along, games companies are having to double and treble the size of a team, just to create the more detailed models, etc.
On the other side of the coin, the average Gameboy title takes 6 person-months to complete. That's well within the resources of a hobbyist. Look for Gameboy hacks instead of PS hacks, and you'll find a whole load of interesting stuff. The Dreamcast VMU is less complex than a Gameboy: projects will by necessity be small, and therefore plentiful.
--
There's been a *lot* of stuff around for a while, but today was the first time I saw a proper VMU emulator, so I submitted it. If you saw it earlier, maybe you should have told /. ?
--
Yup, but the only tool on there is Dream Animator, which ain't a "proper" development tool, unless you also count Macromedia Director as a proper development tool. The docs are pretty good though.
--
I'm afraid I don't have a whole lot of technical know-how when it comes to hardware systems. Would this allow you to create a Dreamcast-compatible system?
Erm, all it allows you to do is to write software for the memory card. The Dreamcast memory card has a little processor on board, an LCD screen and a some buttons, so you can run mini-applications on it.
I suppose the specs these guys have worked out would help you clone the VMU if you wanted to.
--
The go-between between a VMU and a Dreamcast is the joypad cable (the VMU slots into the joypad). The go-between between a PC and a DC is... the Internet, via the bundled modem.
--
I do beg your pardon. I must have gone to an "over 21s" pub, when I was in Ireland. Sorry.
--
Please, let me take a moment of your time to recommend the less gassy members of the esteemed Guinness family.
Draught Guinness (from the pub) is very nice, and all, but I never felt the DraughtFlow(TM) cans quite reached the same standard.
... so I drink Guinness Original, which you can get in cans or bottles, and which has a subtly different, more irony taste, without the creaminess. You can sometimes buy Guinness original in bottles in the pub, in which case you might be lucky enough to get the unpasteurised version. Yum.
Alternatively, there's the gorgeous Guinness Foreign Export. In the last century (heh, the century before that, I s'pose) beer for export had to be brewed a little bit stronger, so it survived the long sea journey (hence India Pale Ale). Guinness Foreign Export is 7.5% alcohol by volume, and it's like drinking Marmite. Class in a glass (bottle) -- if you can get hold of it.
--
21? Blimey. I was knocking back several pints of Guinness a night, legally, at the age of 18. Even at 16 it's legal here if you're drinking it with a meal...
Mind you, the drinking age is 21 in Eire, so I guess for the proper Guinness experience...
--
Just remember - as far as the Dinosaur Folks are concerned, they've been around forever and it's up to us *IX types to work with them. Not the other way around. In that light, it's absolutely fascinating that the Dinosaur Maker itself has put such a wide-spread stamp of approval over Linux...
Some of the big IBM decision makers were techies back in the early days of mainframes. My boss was recently telling me how in the early days, the source code to mainframe operating systems was freely given to customers, and customers would frequently provide a fix along with any bug reports. Then gradually, it became de-rigeur to keep your source code in a locked box.
In light of that, you can see how Open Source just might click with that generation.
--
So, unless you can run Windows and Linux simultaneously on your PC, you're out of luck.
:)
.. which you can do using VMWare (or the upcoming free clone).
Does this Bridges software just give you a whole Windows desktop in a window, or does it present each Windows-window in an X-window? If it does the latter, I can see a lot of benefit in running the Bridges server under VMware, and using the Linux Bridges client to interact with your Windows apps.
... until Wine is finished, at least
--
Tom, you've hung around Slashdot long enough to know that's /always/ what happens. Maybe it stings more when it's about Perl...
--
That's a common mistake, and it was discussed a *lot* in Perl circles in the run up to Y2K, but it is most certainly not a bug in Perl. The polite way to say "you just suck" is "you didn't read the documentation, you just guessed how locatime worked" -- which is no way to use an API.
Localtime() is inherited from C. Man localtime says "tm_year - The number of years since 1900". Arbitary, yes, programmer-unfriendly, yes, but a bug, no, and its behaviour is well documented.
Far worse, is the javascript year function I hear about (I've nver used Javascript personally) - where the function returns the last two digits of the year if the year is 2000, then from 2000 onwards, returns the whole four digits. I dread to think what fevered mind thought that one up.
--
I don't think the guy deserves to get slapped down for this.
It's true that two people can write two well-designed Perl scripts which achieve the job elegantly and correctly, and yet each use a feature of the language which the other has not encountered. Perl prides itself on the fact that you don't need to learn the whole of Perl in order to get stuff done -- and yet as a result, learning the whole of Perl becomes more difficult than learning the whole of other languages.
It's certainly possible to write large scale software projects in Perl (define some standards at the very beginning. Tell your coders what features of Perl they may not use.)
I keep meaning to learn Python. I like its philosophy. For the record, one the strengths Guido claims for Python is that it works excellently in 100k LOC programs: you prototype in Python, then profile, then replace the slow parts (which will be 5% of the code) with C. Python is friendly to that kind of approach.
--
Is it any surprise that the Playstation (1) is outselling the Dreamcast? The Dreamcast is at the "early adopters" stage: £300 or more when you include a couple of games, controllers, memory cards etc. Meanwhile, you can pick up a Playstation for £65 quid in the supermarket, as an impulse buy when you're shopping for groceries. Maybe £120 with a game, spare controller and a memory card.
Those are very different markets. It's Coca-cola vs £100-a-bottle-champagne.
The PS2 will cost more than the Dreamcast, and will not be an impulse buy for anyone but the very rich, for a good few years -- until like the PLaystation before it, it becomes ubiquitous, and the production costs fall.
--
If the Dreamcast "isn't doing that great", Sega can't have been ambitious enough, since the DC is exceeding their targets wildly. Most of the games publishers who were initally custards (of the cowardy-cowardy variety) and didn't develop for DC have changed their minds in light of the current DC userbase.
The PS2 is going to be expensive. I'll get one (because I have one of every mainstream console since the NES) and I imagine a number of hardcore gamers and early adopters will too. However, initially the DC will have more games, will be cheaper, will have online gaming (by the time PS2 comes out).
I wonder what form the PS2 broadband network will take. DC users are getting full access to the Web -- the kiddie filters can be taken off, and you can get every porn site, every weird-arse opinion on whatever web site you like. I guess Sony will dictate the content on their own network -- how dull!
It's going to be a close fight, and it'll be a lot of fun to watch (and take part in)
--
I'm fairly certain that the console itself will not be running Linux as its OS. Firstly, I gather the PS2 is a pretty unconventional piece of architecture, so the port would not be straightforward. Secondly, a games console needs a very different kind of OS to a general purpose computer. Since the console model relies on the hardware being a constant, the abstractions that a high-level OS like UNIX or Windows provide are an unnecessary waste of resource. Games coders need something much closer to the metal.
That said, I'm sure Linux *could* be ported. The Dreamcast boots an OS off the game disk, so different games will run under different OSs, and we may see all sorts of new OSs appear to enable quicker/better/easier-ported games. The PS2 may turn out the same.
--