I was just using the game as a recent example. I've had many crashes from business apps. I've even had wordpad crash the machine.
I understand that, but I still believe games should be considered separately because of their unique requirements. As well, aside from games your experiences differ from mine. Granted, I've only been doing Windows development for roughly 5 years, but I've been running Windows much longer.
As far as games accessing the hardware directly, DirectX is supposed to provide access to the hardware through the OS. Sure it's more intense on the hardware, but it's supposed to work.
Of course DirectX abstracts the hardware, but it does so through drivers. If the drivers are buggy, then they can cause major crashes. It just so happens that video and sound drivers tend to be more volatile than SCSI drivers, for instance, and games stress the former much harder than your everyday business applications.
Device drivers are another matter, but still one within MS's control in a way; MS is the one that created the culture of every device having its own drivers, instead of the linux way where drivers are included in the kernel distribution and are written for devices generically. For instance, if you download the newest kernel, there's a driver in there for the RTL3019 NIC chipset. So all cards based on this chipset (which is a lot; it's a common low-cost chipset for NICs) use the same driver, unlike the Windows world where all those cards are about the same from a hardware POV, but the drivers are all different, and some may be better than others.
Where do you draw the line? With a thriving hardware economy, you can't expect the OS developers to write all of the drivers for every different piece of hardware out there. As well, if you only write generic drivers then you rob the hardware manufacturers of the capabilty to customize their hardware offerings even if they are based on a common platform. Finally, if drivers have to be written by the OS developers, then new hardware is much less attractive. Hardware developers would have to jump through hoops, either getting the OS developers to write drivers or adding some sort of compatibility mode to their hardware, because otherwise you couldn't use the hardware. And that's saying nothing of making drivers open source, since drivers often contain intellectual property. I don't care what you think about open source, but wrong or right, most companies that own some sort of IP are generally not willing to give that away to everybody. If you want your platform to be seen as desirable to hardware developers, you need to keep that in mind.
Microsoft tries to work within these constraints in several ways. Most generic hardware items have generic drivers available from Microsoft. As well, Microsoft tries to build confidence by certifying drivers, as you mentioned. However, since certification takes a while, you'll notice that companies like nVidia, which try to rev their drivers every six months or so, generally have an older version that's Microsoft-certified. You won't be using that version, because it doesn't have the latest and greatest enhancements and fixes.
There's surely a better way to balance between "completely open and generic (and thus unattractive to hardware developers)" and "completely closed black box drivers", but I don't know what it is. In the meantime, gamers will generally accept less stability for more performance in their games, and thus games should be judged separately from other apps in terms of stability.
have been using W2K for 3 years now and I have third party applications crash the OS daily. One current example is Eve-Online. That game is so buggy that I don't even get the BSOD, it just simply freezes to the point where only a hard boot will fix it.
So now you're talking about games. Sorry, but they're in a class of their own. Crashes in games that take down the entire OS are not uncommon, because games are accessing hardware at a lower level than most other applications. As well, mostly the problem is related to hardware or drivers, neither of which is under the control of the OS developer. I've crashed Windows 2000 and XP many times simply by playing games, because nVidia's drivers were buggy. I've yet to crash Windows 2000 or XP, or even have them go flaky, simply by crashing something like Internet Explorer or Winamp.
That is all good and all, but my experience has been that when an app crashes in windows, the entire system usually becomes unstable in some way (might not crash then, but something is almost always messed up as a result and the only way to fix it is with a 3 finger salute).
Perhaps you should get with the times and realize that the win9x line has been end-of-lifed, making all of Microsoft's operating systems based on the NT kernel. While what you said may have been true about win95/98/ME, it's certainly not true of 2000/XP/2003. Of course, there are still quite a few people using even win95, but that number will only continue to decrease.
Or maybe I am just hyper-sensitive to this issue since I usually use Unix which I have NEVER had this happen to me . ..
I've had application crashes take down X, which is functionally equivalent to taking down the entire machine for the average computer user. Sure, you don't have to spend time waiting for the computer to reboot, but you just lost every GUI app that was running, including anything with important data that didn't have a periodic auto-save.
Sorry, but no. Half-Life was based on the Quake 1 engine, though Valve did have access to the Quake 2 code and did port some Quake 2 concepts to Half-Life. They also did a major overhaul on the Quake 1 codebase, so much that Half-Life is hardly recognizeable as a Quake 1 game, but that still doesn't change the fact that it was ultimately based on Quake 1. But don't take my word for it. Find out from id directly.
One word: Bugs. Oh, and two more: ION Storm. I bought the game, and enjoyed what little I was able to play of it, but damned if it wouldn't crash on me all the time. It got to the point where I was afraid to change levels, because it crashed so often on loading screens. I know, chronic saving will help this, but it's still damn annoying. Patches helped some, but ION Storm went belly-up before Anachronox could reach satisfactory stability. I know that there have been post-ION Storm patches, but there are too many good games out there now to bother going back at the moment (in the XBox right now: Knights of the Old Republic). One of these days, I'll go back and try it again. Then again, I've been saying that about Deus Ex as well (seems ION Storm and I don't get along, eh?), and still haven't. I'll just wait for Deus Ex 2 on my XBox.
The game was fun, but the presentation was flawed. They did pull off a major feat with the Quake 2 engine, even if it was outdated by the time Anachronuts^H^H^H^ox was finally released.
a couple mod groups have started to modify Quake into something quite different from a FPS (I remember a racing game).
Have started? Quake Rally is really old. That's the first racing game based off of a FPS engine that I know of (mod for Q1). I believe Quake Rally skipped Quake2, and there was a project to make a Quake Rally for Q3a, though I don't know whatever happened to it. There's also a racing mod for UT2K3.
Of course, Id engines have been used in many different game types, both from mods and commercial games. Racing, Flying (AirQuake), the first real class-based FPS (TeamFortress, FvF), Side-scroller platforming (don't remember the name of that mod, sadly), Japanese-style RPG (Anachronox), RTS (Q2War), even Tetris (based on Quake 1). If anyone is worthy of being called a god, it's theCarmack. Certainly id games don't have much in the way of story or gameplay in general, but the modding community and third-party developers have always loved id engines.
I'm not trying to ignore Epic's contributions with Unreal, either. They run a very close parallel to id, and both are moving much more towards providing engines and letting others develop the games. id works closely with Raven, Nerve, and Gray Matter on games like RTCW, Raven's Hexen/Heretic series, the upcoming Quake IV, and so on; Unreal works closely with Digital Extreme and Legend for games like Wheel of Time, Unreal 2, and DE even made large contributions to Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and UT2K3. And that's saying nothing of UBI Soft's current love affair with the Unreal engine, or the myriad of developers using the Quake 3 engine for games these days.
Of course, if you really want to see the links that the parent article refers to, it can be done. I would tell you how here but it would kind of defeat the reasons for hometheaterforum.com's clever anti-slashdotting defence. Besides, it's not as if isn't bleeding obvious how to look at those pages if you really want to.
Absolutely. That's exactly why I didn't mention the "workaround" either. Of course, since the links were posted in a comment and not on the front page, and the Slashdot editors are stubborn, nothing's going to change. Unfortunately.
So I'd think there's substantial difference between nitrous and forced induction.
Of course there is. I didn't mean to imply they were the same, only that they work on the same principle. More oxygen means more fuel can be burned. They go about it in different methods, but the goal is the same. And of course you're right in that if you don't increase your fuel injection when you increase your oxygen intake, you don't get more power. However, most modern cars have O2 sensors that will detect if you're passing more oxygen through the engine, and adjust the fuel mixture to suit, meaning that adding this ozone thing will make your engine run richer unless you intervene.
Ostensibly the idea is that it has the same effect as nitrous oxide injection; You squirt N2O in there and it breaks up and you get more available oxygen. However I don't see how it could make anything more efficient; The best it should be able to do is improve your emissions.
See how Nitrous Oxide works in engines. You're not quite right. By introducing more oxygen, you're able to burn more fuel, which means more power. It's not about efficiency, because you're not saving fuel or reducing emissions. It's about power. It's the same principle on which a turbocharger or supercharger operates, except those work by introducing more air (and thus oxygen), rather than NO2. As well, since NO2 helps to cool the intake air, it's denser, which means you can get in even more oxygen (same principle as an intercooler on a turbo/supercharger, or a cold air intake on a NA engine).
What game genres are you interested in? Fighting games? Soul Calibur 2 will be best on XBox. Sure, you don't get link, but you will get the best audio and graphical experience on the XBox, and the XBox controller is better suited to a fighter than the GameCube controller. As well, Team Ninja is quite dedicated to the XBox, so you'll see plenty more Dead or Alive XBox-exclusive titles. Speaking of Team Ninja, if action is your thing then you can't miss Ninja Gaiden. And don't forget the upcoming Crimson Skies. That should be a killer title. If you're into Japanese-style RPGs, how about Sudeki or True Fantasy Live Online? Also, Knights of the Old Republic just shipped, and is quite good (yes, it's more PC-style, being from Bioware, and it will be available on the PC later this year, but it's nice to sit on a comfy couch and play it on a big TV with dolby digital audio). How about shooters? Rainbow Six 3 will be first on XBox. Ubi Soft screwed up the naming, here. The console version of Rainbow Six 3 is different than the PC version of the same name. However, it will be first and best on XBox. XIII will also make it to XBox (though it'll be everywhere). Stealth games? How about Starcraft: Ghost? If you're into NHL sports games, EA's franchise is on the 'Box but Live-less. Sega's franchise is also there, but with online play. And Microsoft has their own hockey title in the works, also with live play. If you're into platformer/action games, two new Rare titles are coming soon: Grabbed by the Ghoulies and Voodoo Vince. And let's not forget the venerable Conker (the single player quest will be mostly the same as it was on the N64, but the game has an all-new multi-player aspect).
On the Cube side of things, there's really nothing I'm looking forward to. The new Mario Kart should be fun, but if it's anything like Mario Sunshine it's not going to be worth the money. The first game I really enjoyed on the Cube (also the last one I thoroughly enjoyed) was the latest Zelda. That one was good. Nothing else has really grabbed me (Metroid Prime was annoying as hell, Mario Sunshine was a rehash of Mario 64, Rogue Leader a rehash of Rogue Squadron). I recently picked up Skies of Arcadia used, and it's decent, but it's little different than it was on the Dreamcast. As well, since I just picked up KOTOR for the Box, Skies of Arcadia is going on the back-burner.
And just to round things out, I don't own a PS2, and perhaps the only title that may make me consider buying one would be Gran Turismo 4. However, GT3 wasn't enough to make me buy a PS2, so I can't see GT4 being sufficiently better to warrant buying a PS2. I'm still happy playing GT2 on my PSOne.
I didn't see any mention of how they plan to reconcile development assumptions between LAN games (relatively secure environment, lag-free) and online games. From what I gather, this is not an officially supported project, and few (no?) developers will be writing games with this particularly in mind. Instead, they seem to to be planning to rely on developers writing LAN-capable games, and then tunneling those over the net like what's been done with XBox LAN-capable games. However, because they games will be designed with LAN play in mind, they most likely won't properly handle lagging connections or untrusted clients.
I'm skeptical, and on the fence. On the one hand, I'd love to be able to play the new Mario Kart online, but on the other I don't think this will provide a satisfying online experience. And given the lack of Gamecube titles, I may find myself Cube-less within a year. Ah for the good old days of the NES, when you could rely on third parties to write awesome games for a Nintendo platform. <removes rose-colored glasses>
See, that's what bugs me when everyone says that Nintendo doesn't have an online strategy. At least with Nintendo's strategy of giving gamespy the information in return for creating the software (though technically unsupported) is very smart. Online gaming ability, only ever costing the consumer $35 out of pocket specifically (for the broadband adaptor) where as the consumer never has to pay the cost of developing online cost for a game, a monthly service charge to access a game, and no yearly charge to have online features.
It all depends on what you want. For example, XBox Live provides you with services for your dollar, not just online games. They provide an official channel for downloadable content and game updates, a cheat-free environment (free from exploiting the network environment, not from exploiting bugs in games), voice chat in all games, friends lists, cross-game invites, etc. And of course most games don't charge anything more on top of the XBox Live subscription fee (which is really reasonably priced, after all). Yes, some games do charge more, but those are generally games that require some sort of infrastructure, like MMORPGs.
As well, unlike Verant and Sony, XBox Live doesn't seem to be a vehicle to pay developers to finish a game that was shipped in a beta state. Yes, you can patch, but there have been relatively few patches pushed out through the service. Perhaps we'll see more of that when more MMOGs show up on XBox Live (right now there's only PSO, but there are others coming like True Fantasy Online, and supposedly Star Wars: Galaxies), but having a controlling authority that has some say in quality control is a good thing in my opinion.
Sure, it's not the rough and tumble free-for-all of games like the Quake series, but it's also a far cry from the various mismanagements of MMORPGs like Evercrack or Ultima Online. I for one think XBox Live has struck a pretty good balance, and will be renewing my subscription come November.
Hmm. I'm sure there's a printf function in C#, although I wouldn't know.
Nope. C# is closer to Java than C/C++. Thus, you'd use "System.Console.WriteLine" or "System.Console.Write", depending on whether or not you want the newline.
cout "Hello, World" endl;
Silly HTML. Try "std::cout << "Hello, World" << std::endl" (because I don't like to use "using namespace std;").
You think the choice is between releasing as non-free and not releasing at all. The choice, for many, is probably between releasing as non-free and releasing as Free. Certainly forcing it to be released as Free would be more viral.
I think the better assumption is the first one. Perhaps you've not worked in the professional world, but any firm that would be inclined to choose BSD over GPL because of GPL's "Free"ness would certainly choose not to release over releasing as GPL. However, that's still missing the point. In a world where no BSD licensed code exists, the code consumers you're talking about would sooner write the functionality themselves and put a correspondingly higher price tag on their work to make up for the development costs than they would choose to use GPLed code.
Of course there are exceptions, but in most cases those exceptions are not people whose livelihood depends on selling software. For example, a hardware and service provider like TiVO has no problem using GPLed code, because they don't make their money off of the software. A company like Oracle, however, would not because they make their money off of selling their software as well as service contracts. They'll support GPLed code like Linux, but they won't incorporate that into their own product.
Doesn't "doesn't" equal 2 words? That's what I used to do back in school when I was counting how many words my essay had.
I've never counted contractions as their separate word components for purposes of word counting. If I ever needed to pad out an essay's word count (not usually necessary, as I generally found myself over the limit rather than under), I would just skip the contractions and write out "does not" instead.
I'm sure it depends on your goal, of course. Whichever way of counting a contraction gets you to your desired goal is the acceptable way of counting it for that piece. Or something like that.
The Outlook interface was bad anyway. I can understand making an UNIX-version of Outlook to make it easier for Windows-users to migrate to UNIX, but from an usability standpoint, it's unbelievable.
Care to expand on that point? I assume you have other issues besides, "The vertically-stacked mailbox/preview window view makes it difficult to read mails in the preview window because mails are generally longer than they are wide?" The usability issues I've had with Outlook have stemmed from problems with Exchange, and not Outlook itself.
Even Microsoft has come to understand this: the upcoming Outlook will be quite different.
It won't be that different. It's still just an evolutionary version (pardon the pun), not a revolutionary interface change.
Others have already pointed out how silly your argument is, but there's one item that you list that is just completely wrong and nobody has noticed yet:
Gave away SQL for small apps, in the form of MSDE.
I don't think so. Where does it say that MSDE is free? Yes, you can redistribute it with your applications, but only if you've purchased a license to do so. Such a license is included in the cost of such things as Visual Studio or Office XP Developer. You can't just download MSDE and be on your way without paying Microsoft for some other product.
And now we are praying that ONE "distro" (Microsoft that is) is secure enough. Prolifiration of Linux will result in possibly hundreds od small specialized distros(media, document management,etc)
I believe you just missed my point. You keep insinuating that people will move from a single general-purpose operating system on a single general purpose PC to several specialized operating systems on several specialized pieces of hardware. While that's true to some extent (mp3 players, PVR boxes), I don't believe that's truly going to happen in a broader sense. Look at the number of failed "web devices" for example. They were designed to do one thing (browse the web and/or read e-mail), and yet failed pretty miserably because nobody wanted a $200 device (or even $100 device!) that just browsed the web. In that same vein, nobody wants a device that only edits and manages documents (we used to have those, they were called typewriters and later word processors -- guess what happened to them?). While people may buy one or two specialized devices, they're still going to have their main PC, and that's going to be running a general purpose OS that can do many things.
That brings us back to my point. Consumers like choice only in so far as they can pick between two or three options (and sometimes not even that). We've already seen Mandrake have problems, and Lindows only seems to be surviving by OEM deals (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). In other words, in this "Linux replaces Windows" world, an average consumer may have a realistic choice between Redhat or SuSE (for example), not between "hundreds of small specialized distros". And that brings us right back into the monoculture of which you complain. And that's my point. Switching operating systems to eliminate a perceived monoculture will generally only end up causing its own monoculture, thus only solving the problem in the short term during the switching period. The real solution is to emphasize security as the most important aspect of an operating system or application suite. That's the only long-term solution, and it doesn't matter whether it's Windows or Linux.
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I understand that, but I still believe games should be considered separately because of their unique requirements. As well, aside from games your experiences differ from mine. Granted, I've only been doing Windows development for roughly 5 years, but I've been running Windows much longer.
Of course DirectX abstracts the hardware, but it does so through drivers. If the drivers are buggy, then they can cause major crashes. It just so happens that video and sound drivers tend to be more volatile than SCSI drivers, for instance, and games stress the former much harder than your everyday business applications.
Where do you draw the line? With a thriving hardware economy, you can't expect the OS developers to write all of the drivers for every different piece of hardware out there. As well, if you only write generic drivers then you rob the hardware manufacturers of the capabilty to customize their hardware offerings even if they are based on a common platform. Finally, if drivers have to be written by the OS developers, then new hardware is much less attractive. Hardware developers would have to jump through hoops, either getting the OS developers to write drivers or adding some sort of compatibility mode to their hardware, because otherwise you couldn't use the hardware. And that's saying nothing of making drivers open source, since drivers often contain intellectual property. I don't care what you think about open source, but wrong or right, most companies that own some sort of IP are generally not willing to give that away to everybody. If you want your platform to be seen as desirable to hardware developers, you need to keep that in mind.
Microsoft tries to work within these constraints in several ways. Most generic hardware items have generic drivers available from Microsoft. As well, Microsoft tries to build confidence by certifying drivers, as you mentioned. However, since certification takes a while, you'll notice that companies like nVidia, which try to rev their drivers every six months or so, generally have an older version that's Microsoft-certified. You won't be using that version, because it doesn't have the latest and greatest enhancements and fixes.
There's surely a better way to balance between "completely open and generic (and thus unattractive to hardware developers)" and "completely closed black box drivers", but I don't know what it is. In the meantime, gamers will generally accept less stability for more performance in their games, and thus games should be judged separately from other apps in terms of stability.
So now you're talking about games. Sorry, but they're in a class of their own. Crashes in games that take down the entire OS are not uncommon, because games are accessing hardware at a lower level than most other applications. As well, mostly the problem is related to hardware or drivers, neither of which is under the control of the OS developer. I've crashed Windows 2000 and XP many times simply by playing games, because nVidia's drivers were buggy. I've yet to crash Windows 2000 or XP, or even have them go flaky, simply by crashing something like Internet Explorer or Winamp.
Perhaps you should get with the times and realize that the win9x line has been end-of-lifed, making all of Microsoft's operating systems based on the NT kernel. While what you said may have been true about win95/98/ME, it's certainly not true of 2000/XP/2003. Of course, there are still quite a few people using even win95, but that number will only continue to decrease.
I've had application crashes take down X, which is functionally equivalent to taking down the entire machine for the average computer user. Sure, you don't have to spend time waiting for the computer to reboot, but you just lost every GUI app that was running, including anything with important data that didn't have a periodic auto-save.
Sorry, but no. Half-Life was based on the Quake 1 engine, though Valve did have access to the Quake 2 code and did port some Quake 2 concepts to Half-Life. They also did a major overhaul on the Quake 1 codebase, so much that Half-Life is hardly recognizeable as a Quake 1 game, but that still doesn't change the fact that it was ultimately based on Quake 1. But don't take my word for it. Find out from id directly.
One word: Bugs. Oh, and two more: ION Storm. I bought the game, and enjoyed what little I was able to play of it, but damned if it wouldn't crash on me all the time. It got to the point where I was afraid to change levels, because it crashed so often on loading screens. I know, chronic saving will help this, but it's still damn annoying. Patches helped some, but ION Storm went belly-up before Anachronox could reach satisfactory stability. I know that there have been post-ION Storm patches, but there are too many good games out there now to bother going back at the moment (in the XBox right now: Knights of the Old Republic). One of these days, I'll go back and try it again. Then again, I've been saying that about Deus Ex as well (seems ION Storm and I don't get along, eh?), and still haven't. I'll just wait for Deus Ex 2 on my XBox.
The game was fun, but the presentation was flawed. They did pull off a major feat with the Quake 2 engine, even if it was outdated by the time Anachronuts^H^H^H^ox was finally released.
And to head off the trolls, yes I misspelled "palette". Please note that my post was not about spelling, but proper word usage. Thank you.
The proper turn of phrase you were looking for is, "Whet my palate," because you want Carmack to stimulate the upper surface of your mouth that separates the oral and nasal cavities . Of course, you might be a watercolor artist, in which case you should wet your own pallete.
Have started? Quake Rally is really old. That's the first racing game based off of a FPS engine that I know of (mod for Q1). I believe Quake Rally skipped Quake2, and there was a project to make a Quake Rally for Q3a, though I don't know whatever happened to it. There's also a racing mod for UT2K3.
Of course, Id engines have been used in many different game types, both from mods and commercial games. Racing, Flying (AirQuake), the first real class-based FPS (TeamFortress, FvF), Side-scroller platforming (don't remember the name of that mod, sadly), Japanese-style RPG (Anachronox), RTS (Q2War), even Tetris (based on Quake 1). If anyone is worthy of being called a god, it's theCarmack. Certainly id games don't have much in the way of story or gameplay in general, but the modding community and third-party developers have always loved id engines.
I'm not trying to ignore Epic's contributions with Unreal, either. They run a very close parallel to id, and both are moving much more towards providing engines and letting others develop the games. id works closely with Raven, Nerve, and Gray Matter on games like RTCW, Raven's Hexen/Heretic series, the upcoming Quake IV, and so on; Unreal works closely with Digital Extreme and Legend for games like Wheel of Time, Unreal 2, and DE even made large contributions to Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and UT2K3. And that's saying nothing of UBI Soft's current love affair with the Unreal engine, or the myriad of developers using the Quake 3 engine for games these days.
Absolutely. That's exactly why I didn't mention the "workaround" either. Of course, since the links were posted in a comment and not on the front page, and the Slashdot editors are stubborn, nothing's going to change. Unfortunately.
Lovely! Those links are referred right back to Slashdot. That's one way to avoid a slashdotting.
Other good home theater sites:
Of course there is. I didn't mean to imply they were the same, only that they work on the same principle. More oxygen means more fuel can be burned. They go about it in different methods, but the goal is the same. And of course you're right in that if you don't increase your fuel injection when you increase your oxygen intake, you don't get more power. However, most modern cars have O2 sensors that will detect if you're passing more oxygen through the engine, and adjust the fuel mixture to suit, meaning that adding this ozone thing will make your engine run richer unless you intervene.
See how Nitrous Oxide works in engines. You're not quite right. By introducing more oxygen, you're able to burn more fuel, which means more power. It's not about efficiency, because you're not saving fuel or reducing emissions. It's about power. It's the same principle on which a turbocharger or supercharger operates, except those work by introducing more air (and thus oxygen), rather than NO2. As well, since NO2 helps to cool the intake air, it's denser, which means you can get in even more oxygen (same principle as an intercooler on a turbo/supercharger, or a cold air intake on a NA engine).
What game genres are you interested in? Fighting games? Soul Calibur 2 will be best on XBox. Sure, you don't get link, but you will get the best audio and graphical experience on the XBox, and the XBox controller is better suited to a fighter than the GameCube controller. As well, Team Ninja is quite dedicated to the XBox, so you'll see plenty more Dead or Alive XBox-exclusive titles. Speaking of Team Ninja, if action is your thing then you can't miss Ninja Gaiden. And don't forget the upcoming Crimson Skies. That should be a killer title. If you're into Japanese-style RPGs, how about Sudeki or True Fantasy Live Online? Also, Knights of the Old Republic just shipped, and is quite good (yes, it's more PC-style, being from Bioware, and it will be available on the PC later this year, but it's nice to sit on a comfy couch and play it on a big TV with dolby digital audio). How about shooters? Rainbow Six 3 will be first on XBox. Ubi Soft screwed up the naming, here. The console version of Rainbow Six 3 is different than the PC version of the same name. However, it will be first and best on XBox. XIII will also make it to XBox (though it'll be everywhere). Stealth games? How about Starcraft: Ghost? If you're into NHL sports games, EA's franchise is on the 'Box but Live-less. Sega's franchise is also there, but with online play. And Microsoft has their own hockey title in the works, also with live play. If you're into platformer/action games, two new Rare titles are coming soon: Grabbed by the Ghoulies and Voodoo Vince. And let's not forget the venerable Conker (the single player quest will be mostly the same as it was on the N64, but the game has an all-new multi-player aspect).
On the Cube side of things, there's really nothing I'm looking forward to. The new Mario Kart should be fun, but if it's anything like Mario Sunshine it's not going to be worth the money. The first game I really enjoyed on the Cube (also the last one I thoroughly enjoyed) was the latest Zelda. That one was good. Nothing else has really grabbed me (Metroid Prime was annoying as hell, Mario Sunshine was a rehash of Mario 64, Rogue Leader a rehash of Rogue Squadron). I recently picked up Skies of Arcadia used, and it's decent, but it's little different than it was on the Dreamcast. As well, since I just picked up KOTOR for the Box, Skies of Arcadia is going on the back-burner.
And just to round things out, I don't own a PS2, and perhaps the only title that may make me consider buying one would be Gran Turismo 4. However, GT3 wasn't enough to make me buy a PS2, so I can't see GT4 being sufficiently better to warrant buying a PS2. I'm still happy playing GT2 on my PSOne.
I didn't see any mention of how they plan to reconcile development assumptions between LAN games (relatively secure environment, lag-free) and online games. From what I gather, this is not an officially supported project, and few (no?) developers will be writing games with this particularly in mind. Instead, they seem to to be planning to rely on developers writing LAN-capable games, and then tunneling those over the net like what's been done with XBox LAN-capable games. However, because they games will be designed with LAN play in mind, they most likely won't properly handle lagging connections or untrusted clients.
I'm skeptical, and on the fence. On the one hand, I'd love to be able to play the new Mario Kart online, but on the other I don't think this will provide a satisfying online experience. And given the lack of Gamecube titles, I may find myself Cube-less within a year. Ah for the good old days of the NES, when you could rely on third parties to write awesome games for a Nintendo platform. <removes rose-colored glasses>
It all depends on what you want. For example, XBox Live provides you with services for your dollar, not just online games. They provide an official channel for downloadable content and game updates, a cheat-free environment (free from exploiting the network environment, not from exploiting bugs in games), voice chat in all games, friends lists, cross-game invites, etc. And of course most games don't charge anything more on top of the XBox Live subscription fee (which is really reasonably priced, after all). Yes, some games do charge more, but those are generally games that require some sort of infrastructure, like MMORPGs.
As well, unlike Verant and Sony, XBox Live doesn't seem to be a vehicle to pay developers to finish a game that was shipped in a beta state. Yes, you can patch, but there have been relatively few patches pushed out through the service. Perhaps we'll see more of that when more MMOGs show up on XBox Live (right now there's only PSO, but there are others coming like True Fantasy Online, and supposedly Star Wars: Galaxies), but having a controlling authority that has some say in quality control is a good thing in my opinion.
Sure, it's not the rough and tumble free-for-all of games like the Quake series, but it's also a far cry from the various mismanagements of MMORPGs like Evercrack or Ultima Online. I for one think XBox Live has struck a pretty good balance, and will be renewing my subscription come November.
Because as we all know, the key to success is having a good graphic designer on your team.
Nope. C# is closer to Java than C/C++. Thus, you'd use "System.Console.WriteLine" or "System.Console.Write", depending on whether or not you want the newline.
Silly HTML. Try "std::cout << "Hello, World" << std::endl" (because I don't like to use "using namespace std;").
You've just made a compelling argument for universities to switch to C# for computer science classes!
I think the better assumption is the first one. Perhaps you've not worked in the professional world, but any firm that would be inclined to choose BSD over GPL because of GPL's "Free"ness would certainly choose not to release over releasing as GPL. However, that's still missing the point. In a world where no BSD licensed code exists, the code consumers you're talking about would sooner write the functionality themselves and put a correspondingly higher price tag on their work to make up for the development costs than they would choose to use GPLed code.
Of course there are exceptions, but in most cases those exceptions are not people whose livelihood depends on selling software. For example, a hardware and service provider like TiVO has no problem using GPLed code, because they don't make their money off of the software. A company like Oracle, however, would not because they make their money off of selling their software as well as service contracts. They'll support GPLed code like Linux, but they won't incorporate that into their own product.
I've never counted contractions as their separate word components for purposes of word counting. If I ever needed to pad out an essay's word count (not usually necessary, as I generally found myself over the limit rather than under), I would just skip the contractions and write out "does not" instead.
I'm sure it depends on your goal, of course. Whichever way of counting a contraction gets you to your desired goal is the acceptable way of counting it for that piece. Or something like that.
Care to expand on that point? I assume you have other issues besides, "The vertically-stacked mailbox/preview window view makes it difficult to read mails in the preview window because mails are generally longer than they are wide?" The usability issues I've had with Outlook have stemmed from problems with Exchange, and not Outlook itself.
It won't be that different. It's still just an evolutionary version (pardon the pun), not a revolutionary interface change.
If you're willing to go for one more word, you could actually sound intelligent. How about, "Mozilla doesn't have a calendar," instead? Also, since it's irrelevant (and impossible?) for Mozilla to have or be a machine in which cloth or paper is made smooth and glossy by being pressed through rollers, I fixed your misspelling of "calendar".
Others have already pointed out how silly your argument is, but there's one item that you list that is just completely wrong and nobody has noticed yet:
I don't think so. Where does it say that MSDE is free? Yes, you can redistribute it with your applications, but only if you've purchased a license to do so. Such a license is included in the cost of such things as Visual Studio or Office XP Developer. You can't just download MSDE and be on your way without paying Microsoft for some other product.
I believe you just missed my point. You keep insinuating that people will move from a single general-purpose operating system on a single general purpose PC to several specialized operating systems on several specialized pieces of hardware. While that's true to some extent (mp3 players, PVR boxes), I don't believe that's truly going to happen in a broader sense. Look at the number of failed "web devices" for example. They were designed to do one thing (browse the web and/or read e-mail), and yet failed pretty miserably because nobody wanted a $200 device (or even $100 device!) that just browsed the web. In that same vein, nobody wants a device that only edits and manages documents (we used to have those, they were called typewriters and later word processors -- guess what happened to them?). While people may buy one or two specialized devices, they're still going to have their main PC, and that's going to be running a general purpose OS that can do many things.
That brings us back to my point. Consumers like choice only in so far as they can pick between two or three options (and sometimes not even that). We've already seen Mandrake have problems, and Lindows only seems to be surviving by OEM deals (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). In other words, in this "Linux replaces Windows" world, an average consumer may have a realistic choice between Redhat or SuSE (for example), not between "hundreds of small specialized distros". And that brings us right back into the monoculture of which you complain. And that's my point. Switching operating systems to eliminate a perceived monoculture will generally only end up causing its own monoculture, thus only solving the problem in the short term during the switching period. The real solution is to emphasize security as the most important aspect of an operating system or application suite. That's the only long-term solution, and it doesn't matter whether it's Windows or Linux.