I just googled it. Top 10 games of 2005, by sales.
ONE movie tie-in (Spiderman, which some gamers insist did not suck)
TWO other licensed properties (Madden, which definitely did not suck, and Pokemon.)
The other seven, while almost all sequels, were popular for the game itself, not for being tied to some summer blockbuster.
1 - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - PS2 - Take II Interactive 2 - Halo 2* - XBX - Microsoft 3 - Madden NFL 2005* - PS2 - Electronic Arts 4 - ESPN NFL 2K5 - PS2 - Take II Interactive 5 - Need For Speed: Underground 2 - PS2 - Electronic Arts 6 - Pokemon Fire Red W/ Adapter - GBA - Nintendo of America 7 - NBA Live 2005 - PS2 - Electronic Arts 8 - Spider-Man: The Movie 2 - PS2 - Activision 9 - Halo - XBX - Microsoft 10 - ESPN NFL 2K5 - XBX - Take II Interactive
Could it be that the Madden franchise does well because it's one of the best sports titles ever made, rather than because there's a picture of a fat retired coach on the box?
GTA had no "license" to exploit, but I dare say it sold considerably better than the "Lord of the Rings" games.
Want to make a lot of money on a game? Design one that's fun to play.
Sure, Microsoft encourages writing easy code, but don't blame them because some MS shop decided to hire an MCSE/D who learnt to write a few lines of ASP and VB code and called himself a "programmer".
But MS is selling their product by telling you that you don't need those expensive, slow-poke engineers to write code for you. Just get a college drop-out who has been fully certified (by us) to whip out a quick VB script in the afternoon, and have it in place by the following morining when you come in to evaluate why your Help Desk budget has been running so high lately.
If following this advice leads to code which costs more time than it saves, I would agree that the blame doesn't lie entirely on Microsoft. It also lies on the CFO who actually bought in to that bullshit.
While the lack of some of these titles from the compatable Japan list is regretable, I just noticed that not even the more-complete US list has "DOA: eXtreme Beach Volleyball" on the list of compatible games.
This new console is dead to me now. It hurts too much to even talk about. *sniff*
Thank goodness I still have the original X-Box, which allows The Greatest Console Game Evar to run just fine. Ah, Kasumi... I haven't bought you anything lately, have I? No matter, a couple days of playing The Hopping Game at the pool, and I can get you those sunglasses you like. *twitch* *twitch*
They are not talking about the time to deploy the server itself.
From the Summary (because who bothers to RTFA anymore?):
"...claimed that Linux administrators took 68 per cent longer to implement new business requirements than their Windows counterparts..."
That much is probably true. Implementing some new process on a Linux box probably does take a bit longer. But here's the thing: Once it's done, it's done.
I've seen enough gawd-awful in-house software and scripts in Microsoft shops to know better than to be impressed by how much "faster" it is to adapt their shit. If you count all the down-time and set-backs which can happen after implementation, you probably ultimtely save a lot of time by going with a Linux-based enterprise.
But then, I'm not some kick-ass consulting firm which a big astroturfing... er... I mean independent study commission to put in the bank.
I personally found it to be one of the more funny uses of moderation I've seen in a while. I'm certain that their moderation was no more serious than the post itself.
Okay, modding that post, which was posted at 1 and never moderated, as "overrated" was almost as funny.
Then again, maybe it wasn't intended as wit, but part of a larger bitchslap. Too bad there's no way for the mod who did it to let me know.:/
I know you were probably just being an ass, but can't you mimic something that is fictional?
At least somebody caught on to the fact that I was being an ass. Sheesh! How far has Slashdot fallen that my making fun of a parent post which reads like he believes in aliens gets mistaken by some people as typical discussion?
You can mimic something that's fictional, but not if it's your creation, any more than you can cheat on a test by copying answers from your imaginary friend.
What Vonnegut did was pretend to mimic the style of his fictional aliens, as a means to illustrate the exotic way he imagined them to be thinking (which was obviously meant to be a reflection of the way we actually think, and a subtle indictment of the traditional narrative story-telling format.)
And props to whoever modded that post "informative" -- you actually found it informative that we don't have any real alien books to study.
I personally found it to be one of the more funny uses of moderation I've seen in a while. I'm certain that their moderation was no more serious than the post itself.
More accurately, I called attention to the fact that reading novels has always been a pastime of the super-rich. It's just that these days, there's a massive middle-class who is prosperous enough to buy books, but not really interested in sitting down with an unabridged copy of "Moby Dick" anytime soon.
If "intellectualism" is to be defined as reading a lot of verbose prose on a regular basis, then yes. I'm too busy to be what you consider an intellectual.
I'd rather pay my mortgage and live the American Dream than ponder Steinbeck's critique of it.
Sorry if you think that means the Vandal hordes are storming the gates, but your city is due for a good razing anyway.
In the 18th and 19th Centuries, the only people who had any time at all for reading was the idle rich. Writers of the time wrote specifically for that audience, meeting the demand for massive, flowery novels and lengthy all-encompassing screeds of political philosophy which the brightest and the best (by which I mean the very rich) could while away their long summer afternoons burying their noses into as they ate their picnic lunches on the riverbanks.
Today, nearly everybody is literate, including those of us who work 40-60 hours each week and don't have nannies, maids, and butlers to take care of our children and homes for us. We are very lucky to have time to keep up with a subscription to the Atlantic Monthly or National Review, let alone read "Anna Karenina" or "The Wealth of Nations."
So "light reading" is very popular right now.
Longer works are probably read at a much higher rate than they used to be. Meaning 1% of the population buys them, and far fewer actually ever finish reading them. At least these days we force our High School kids to get through "Animal Farm", "Huckleberry Finn", and maybe a Shakespear play or two. That's more reading than the average 18th Century factory-town kid ever got exposed to.
A new collection of Dilbert strips to read in the bathroom? Terrific! A new novel by Anne Rice based on the 7-year old Jesus Christ? Dude, I don't have time to read a review of it, let alone the whole book. Maybe I'll put it on my list of Things To Read After I Retire... but there will be a lot of other works way ahead of it on that list.
Did you ever notice... The people who bitch the most about Windows own Xboxes?
So what are you saying? That it's somehow impossible for a lousy product and a good product to come from the same company?
I think that the majority of Ford cars and trucks are total pieces of shit, but I'm a big fan of both the Cobra and the Crown Victoria. That doesn't make my some kind of hypocrite, it just means I'm not completely hung up on brand identity.
I don't know if I'm going to ever get an X-Box 360, but my experience with the previous X-Box was that it was a very, very good game console. The only edge the PS2 ever had over it, as far as I was concerned, was the GTA series... and all of those games were eventually ported. (Although I must say that GTA:SA was not worth the wait.
Look at it this way. Mac users represent about 3 - 4 percent of the total computer market, depending on who you ask.
Almost none of those Macs are office computers, and cubicle farms gotta represent more than half of all the computers out there, right?
So, if you are just looking at the home market, Macs could well be a good 6 - 8 percent.
Just to make the math easier, let's call it 6.666666... (recursive).
In other words about 1 home user out of 15 is a Mac user.
When you consider that even a gamer is likely to have at least 15 friends, the odds are very good that any given gamer has at least one friend who uses a Mac, and possibly even two or three.
Being able to game with those friends will not be the only factor in deciding which MMORPG to play, but it will be a factor.
I have 1 GB of RAM on my 1.42 GHz mini (which made a HUGE difference)
I play at 1280x720 (the native resolution of my wide-screen TV projector), and on a relatively crowded server, I can stroll through Ironforge without much more choppiness than my friend gets on his uber game PC with a GPU card that cost more than my entire mini.
Granted, he's running with all the pretty special effects at full-throttle resolution, but that's what he bought that hot-shit graphics card for. I'm simply happy that I find the game playable on cheap hardware like the Mac mini and the iBook.
1. Ascheron's Call is a game from several years ago, and was considered a "low spec" game way back then.
2. Ironforge can be perfectly fine, even on a Mac mini, even during a very busy hour on a crowded server, as long as you turn off the floating character names and dial down some of the lighting effects and what-not. I've been there many times on just such a system.
If Bill Gates made the same offer, would your response be similar?
He did say "nice." I've heard Windows described a lot of ways, but never like that.
Giving Windows to poor kids is something Marie Antionette might do, were she alive today.
Here's the thing, if the people behind this program were truly interested in helping people, why not accept the free copies of OS X (and heck, even free copies of Windows, if they are ever offered) and let the recipients use whichever one they want.
If I were Steve Jobs, I would make the very same offer directly to anybody who gets one of these laptops. Put out an ad that says they can bring their free Red Hat laptops in to any Apple Store Genius Bar, and the techie working there will gladly install OS X on it for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Um... only if you count "ESPN" as a "license" which makes kids go "mommy mommy, I want the ESPN hockey game!!!!"
That "licensing" tie-in is about using the game to promote ESPN, not vice versa.
I just googled it. Top 10 games of 2005, by sales.
ONE movie tie-in (Spiderman, which some gamers insist did not suck)
TWO other licensed properties (Madden, which definitely did not suck, and Pokemon.)
The other seven, while almost all sequels, were popular for the game itself, not for being tied to some summer blockbuster.
1 - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - PS2 - Take II Interactive
2 - Halo 2* - XBX - Microsoft
3 - Madden NFL 2005* - PS2 - Electronic Arts
4 - ESPN NFL 2K5 - PS2 - Take II Interactive
5 - Need For Speed: Underground 2 - PS2 - Electronic Arts
6 - Pokemon Fire Red W/ Adapter - GBA - Nintendo of America
7 - NBA Live 2005 - PS2 - Electronic Arts
8 - Spider-Man: The Movie 2 - PS2 - Activision
9 - Halo - XBX - Microsoft
10 - ESPN NFL 2K5 - XBX - Take II Interactive
Could it be that the Madden franchise does well because it's one of the best sports titles ever made, rather than because there's a picture of a fat retired coach on the box?
GTA had no "license" to exploit, but I dare say it sold considerably better than the "Lord of the Rings" games.
Want to make a lot of money on a game? Design one that's fun to play.
Fewer than two or three dozen motion pictures will turn a profit this year. What's your point?
Sure, Microsoft encourages writing easy code, but don't blame them because some MS shop decided to hire an MCSE/D who learnt to write a few lines of ASP and VB code and called himself a "programmer".
But MS is selling their product by telling you that you don't need those expensive, slow-poke engineers to write code for you. Just get a college drop-out who has been fully certified (by us) to whip out a quick VB script in the afternoon, and have it in place by the following morining when you come in to evaluate why your Help Desk budget has been running so high lately.
If following this advice leads to code which costs more time than it saves, I would agree that the blame doesn't lie entirely on Microsoft. It also lies on the CFO who actually bought in to that bullshit.
If you don't have enough room next to your TV for an xbox and a 360 then you probably can't afford a 360 anyway...
Hello? We're talking about Japan here. They probably turned the case of their old X-Box into a hide-a-bed for visiting relatives.
While the lack of some of these titles from the compatable Japan list is regretable, I just noticed that not even the more-complete US list has "DOA: eXtreme Beach Volleyball" on the list of compatible games.
This new console is dead to me now. It hurts too much to even talk about. *sniff*
Thank goodness I still have the original X-Box, which allows The Greatest Console Game Evar to run just fine. Ah, Kasumi... I haven't bought you anything lately, have I? No matter, a couple days of playing The Hopping Game at the pool, and I can get you those sunglasses you like. *twitch* *twitch*
He built it himself, after that wretched Simpson girl stole his idea for Linguo.
They are not talking about the time to deploy the server itself.
From the Summary (because who bothers to RTFA anymore?):
"...claimed that Linux administrators took 68 per cent longer to implement new business requirements than their Windows counterparts..."
That much is probably true. Implementing some new process on a Linux box probably does take a bit longer. But here's the thing: Once it's done, it's done.
I've seen enough gawd-awful in-house software and scripts in Microsoft shops to know better than to be impressed by how much "faster" it is to adapt their shit. If you count all the down-time and set-backs which can happen after implementation, you probably ultimtely save a lot of time by going with a Linux-based enterprise.
But then, I'm not some kick-ass consulting firm which a big astroturfing... er... I mean independent study commission to put in the bank.
That's all very nice, but could you please break it down to a 3-bullet PowerPoint slide for me?
Too bad there's not a "+1, Unstuck in Time" mod. :)
I personally found it to be one of the more funny uses of moderation I've seen in a while. I'm certain that their moderation was no more serious than the post itself.
:/
Okay, modding that post, which was posted at 1 and never moderated, as "overrated" was almost as funny.
Then again, maybe it wasn't intended as wit, but part of a larger bitchslap. Too bad there's no way for the mod who did it to let me know.
Had to be done.
"But then again I haven't turned on my TV for 3 months, and have started limiting my online times, because they were taking away from intellectual activities."
I know you were probably just being an ass, but can't you mimic something that is fictional?
At least somebody caught on to the fact that I was being an ass. Sheesh! How far has Slashdot fallen that my making fun of a parent post which reads like he believes in aliens gets mistaken by some people as typical discussion?
You can mimic something that's fictional, but not if it's your creation, any more than you can cheat on a test by copying answers from your imaginary friend.
What Vonnegut did was pretend to mimic the style of his fictional aliens, as a means to illustrate the exotic way he imagined them to be thinking (which was obviously meant to be a reflection of the way we actually think, and a subtle indictment of the traditional narrative story-telling format.)
And props to whoever modded that post "informative" -- you actually found it informative that we don't have any real alien books to study.
I personally found it to be one of the more funny uses of moderation I've seen in a while. I'm certain that their moderation was no more serious than the post itself.
More accurately, I called attention to the fact that reading novels has always been a pastime of the super-rich. It's just that these days, there's a massive middle-class who is prosperous enough to buy books, but not really interested in sitting down with an unabridged copy of "Moby Dick" anytime soon.
If "intellectualism" is to be defined as reading a lot of verbose prose on a regular basis, then yes. I'm too busy to be what you consider an intellectual.
I'd rather pay my mortgage and live the American Dream than ponder Steinbeck's critique of it.
Sorry if you think that means the Vandal hordes are storming the gates, but your city is due for a good razing anyway.
Right back atcha, kid.
I think you have it exactly backwards.
In the 18th and 19th Centuries, the only people who had any time at all for reading was the idle rich. Writers of the time wrote specifically for that audience, meeting the demand for massive, flowery novels and lengthy all-encompassing screeds of political philosophy which the brightest and the best (by which I mean the very rich) could while away their long summer afternoons burying their noses into as they ate their picnic lunches on the riverbanks.
Today, nearly everybody is literate, including those of us who work 40-60 hours each week and don't have nannies, maids, and butlers to take care of our children and homes for us. We are very lucky to have time to keep up with a subscription to the Atlantic Monthly or National Review, let alone read "Anna Karenina" or "The Wealth of Nations."
So "light reading" is very popular right now.
Longer works are probably read at a much higher rate than they used to be. Meaning 1% of the population buys them, and far fewer actually ever finish reading them. At least these days we force our High School kids to get through "Animal Farm", "Huckleberry Finn", and maybe a Shakespear play or two. That's more reading than the average 18th Century factory-town kid ever got exposed to.
A new collection of Dilbert strips to read in the bathroom? Terrific! A new novel by Anne Rice based on the 7-year old Jesus Christ? Dude, I don't have time to read a review of it, let alone the whole book. Maybe I'll put it on my list of Things To Read After I Retire... but there will be a lot of other works way ahead of it on that list.
Vonnegut tried to mimic this style by
Uh...
He didn't really mimic anything, because there's no such place as planet Tralfamadore. He made it all up.
Sorry I had to be the one to tell you.
Did you ever notice... The people who bitch the most about Windows own Xboxes?
So what are you saying? That it's somehow impossible for a lousy product and a good product to come from the same company?
I think that the majority of Ford cars and trucks are total pieces of shit, but I'm a big fan of both the Cobra and the Crown Victoria. That doesn't make my some kind of hypocrite, it just means I'm not completely hung up on brand identity.
I don't know if I'm going to ever get an X-Box 360, but my experience with the previous X-Box was that it was a very, very good game console. The only edge the PS2 ever had over it, as far as I was concerned, was the GTA series... and all of those games were eventually ported. (Although I must say that GTA:SA was not worth the wait.
Look at it this way. Mac users represent about 3 - 4 percent of the total computer market, depending on who you ask.
Almost none of those Macs are office computers, and cubicle farms gotta represent more than half of all the computers out there, right?
So, if you are just looking at the home market, Macs could well be a good 6 - 8 percent.
Just to make the math easier, let's call it 6.666666... (recursive).
In other words about 1 home user out of 15 is a Mac user.
When you consider that even a gamer is likely to have at least 15 friends, the odds are very good that any given gamer has at least one friend who uses a Mac, and possibly even two or three.
Being able to game with those friends will not be the only factor in deciding which MMORPG to play, but it will be a factor.
"Blu-ray Will Win a Pyrrhic Victory Over HD-DVD."
So, they will win the platform war, but so many Sony employees will be killed in the process that it will be judged to have not been worth it?
Bold prediction there.
Was the main exercise that tought me English pretty early.
You must be a lot of fun around the office.
"Hey, which way is it to the bathroom in this building?"
"Get up; go left; y; y; door; light; use stall."
"Uh... thanks."
I have 1 GB of RAM on my 1.42 GHz mini (which made a HUGE difference)
I play at 1280x720 (the native resolution of my wide-screen TV projector), and on a relatively crowded server, I can stroll through Ironforge without much more choppiness than my friend gets on his uber game PC with a GPU card that cost more than my entire mini.
Granted, he's running with all the pretty special effects at full-throttle resolution, but that's what he bought that hot-shit graphics card for. I'm simply happy that I find the game playable on cheap hardware like the Mac mini and the iBook.
1. Ascheron's Call is a game from several years ago, and was considered a "low spec" game way back then.
2. Ironforge can be perfectly fine, even on a Mac mini, even during a very busy hour on a crowded server, as long as you turn off the floating character names and dial down some of the lighting effects and what-not. I've been there many times on just such a system.
If Bill Gates made the same offer, would your response be similar?
He did say "nice." I've heard Windows described a lot of ways, but never like that.
Giving Windows to poor kids is something Marie Antionette might do, were she alive today.
Here's the thing, if the people behind this program were truly interested in helping people, why not accept the free copies of OS X (and heck, even free copies of Windows, if they are ever offered) and let the recipients use whichever one they want.
If I were Steve Jobs, I would make the very same offer directly to anybody who gets one of these laptops. Put out an ad that says they can bring their free Red Hat laptops in to any Apple Store Genius Bar, and the techie working there will gladly install OS X on it for them.