That's right... all the bells and whistles are sold separately. Is that a weakness? I guess it depends on perspective. Some people are bound to hate paying the cost of an iPod for a whole desktop PC.
Actually, it's about matching the cable to the application. Of course you're not going to use a half-inch thick cable on your headphones.
On the other hand, when a friend of mine was in high school, he got 12gu cables for his car stereo. Why? Partially, for higher fidelity... partially because an audio "benchmark" disc I made for him resulted in the insulation melting off his 16gu wires. For a system operating on that power level, lower gauge wire would actually restrict the audio signal, and any capacitance effect caused by the heavy wire would be a non-issue.
The batteries are disposable, but these guys make a battery that can give you 9-18 hours of talk time in a Nokia. They cost $10-20 and store well, but will eventually expire on their own once activated.
No kidding... Hard drives should be made to better standards considering the value of the data on them. In 20 years, I've lost 3 hard drives. 2 WDs a few years ago, and a Quantum that still worked, but got so loud it was painful to use.
I have a 5.25" 40MB Seagate in my basement in an old XT, and it still runs like the day it was new.
Actually, Digimon came around 1996, as basically a Tamagotchi you could link and fight.
Even so, you're right about when Pokemon came out, so they could have been around the same time. It's mind-numbingly hard for some reason to track down the relase date of the Digimon virtual pets.
As I see it though, Digimon are Tamagotchi (same packaging in Japan, same interface on the units, same company.) Tamagotchi popularized creature-raising games, and Tamagotchi game at least a year before the Digimon versions.
Right with you on that one! I wouldn't be surprised if they tried unencrypted and uncompressed to start off with, considering the utter deficit of technical knowledge there.
I remember when you could buy a DSL hookup kit, then hook it up yourself, and use someone else's account, buy logging in with a common name and default password (i.e. "Mike25/Telus**"). You'd just register yourself as their second complimentary IP address and no one would ever be the wiser.
(Mind you, I never did this. I have a 2.5mbps business connection at home. A friend of mine was hijacked a year or two ago though.)
They also restrict your usage to a certain amount of bandwidth. I think 5GB/mo? Whatever. I don't know what they theoretically charge for going over, but I often use 30GB/month and they couldn't check it if they wanted to. No hacks from me or anything, they just suck. I have friends who use MUCH more.
Mark my words: they lack the expertise to do this, and they WILL fail, sadly enough.
I, too, think these games would be excellent. Sadly, it's only once in a blue moon that a learning game really hits the mark. Then again, how often are they made by the big companies?
As for the music games though, Konami truly owns the genre at the moment. Most people in America have likely only seen Dance Dance Revolution, but there is also my favorite game, Beatmania, which uses a 5 key/7 key keyboard + a turntable. Music plays, and predermined depending on how the level is written, at different times in the song, you tackle different instrumental parts. From complex winding piano parts, to white knuckled high-speed complex drum parts, to awkward and scarcely audible backup parts. It certainly doesn't teach one to read music, as it's all depicted though falling bars (http://www.telusplanet.net/public/wzrd/incidental/bemani.gif) but it does sharpen your ear for music tremendously. Now I can listen to something rich and miltitextured like newer things from Pop Will Eat Itself, where a song may even have 20-30+ layers of sound, and just isolate each instrument, enjoy it, then move on to the next. I can also listen to bizarre and cacaplonous music like Mouse on Mars and very readily find the musical merit and patterns to it, even if it's made up of something like a quacking duck, a squeaky hinge, and a sheet-metal thunking noise. I feel that the game has given me something that, while not terribly useful from a daily survival point of view, is still valuable and allows me greater enjoyment of something I do anyway.
There is also a game like Beatmania called Keyboardmania which uses a piano keyboard and falling bars. That could probably teach much better than even Beatmania, as Beatmania changes your instrument, and pitch of the buttons pressed. I've never played though, and AFAIK, it would be an ungodly hard game.
Originality in video games is always possible, but then again, the same holds true for TV and all we get is reality TV and sitcoms...
Since the discussion topic at top is somewhat open-ended, I'll just babble on a few points:
If every commercial game is made from a cookie-cutter template, I don't think it'll be that huge a blow. There are always independent shareware and freeware programmers ready to make something original even if it doesn't make a huge profit. If it really shines, it'll even have some viability on the commercial market. Look at Counter-Strike. Sure, it's another team-based fps, but it was so addictive, that now it's one of (if not THE?) most popular multiplayer game on the Internet. It was free when it started, and it's even free now, but you can still buy it in stores packaged with Half-Life (the game it runs as a mod for,) and it's even coming out for the Xbox in a while! I really don't think we're going to see a total death of originality in gaming... ever.
Video games are just like any other form of mass media. When they came out, they were all new and original (you wanna see some unique games? Get an old Intellivision or Atari!) but now that they've been around for a while, they've stabilized to the point where just like TV, movies, music, or any other mass media, they're 90%+ cookie-cutter fodder for the masses, and a few real gems that gather cult followings, or even widespread attention and longlasting recognition.
While it is true that the Dreamcast was a haven for original games with titles like Crazy Taxi, Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio, and a real model of originality, Seaman, I don't think that's what killed it.
[HISTORY CHUNK] Every time Sega made a system, there was an achilles heel that dragged it down. The Master System competed with the NES and it's myriad of games and already widespread acceptance. The Genesis had few colors and terrible FM-synthesized sound compared to the SNES (and it's leagues of game developers from back in the day of the NES!)
The Game Gear, compared to the GameBoy of the time, had lush color graphics, awesome sound, and some nice titles. The GameBoy was cheap at around $100 (CDN), and as grainy and colorless as the games were, with their bleepy sub-NES (stereo!) sound, they had some exceptional gameplay to them, and some winning developers licensed to make them. It also didn't hurt Nintendo any that while the Gameboy would use 2 batteries for a week, the Game Gear would use 6 batteries for a couple hours! More playing is more fun. 'nuff said. 11 years later, Nintendo finds it can make a color screen that doesn't need a hydroelectric dam to power it, and they OWN the handheld market, competing with truly nonthreatening offerings like the GP32, NeoGeo Pocket (and hastily-released Color version,), and the Bandai WonderSwan, which to my knowledge, didn't even make it to these shores (unlike the first Internet-ready console system, the Bandai/Apple "Pippin.")
The Saturn was a 2D 256 color (?) system that was tweaked at the last minute to compete with the PSX's 3D prowess. Truth told, it probably would have amounted to the greatest 2D system ever, beating out even the Turbographix 16 and the Neo Geo. However, they chose to instead make grainy-looking off-color versions of Playstation titles, and leave all the titles that really showed off the system's strength in Japan.
Wait, where is Nintendo now? Well, with the N64, they pulled a Sega and built in an insurmountable flaw. Being cartridge only, the games could be either low-detail, low-content, or expensive like Neo Geo games. Contrary to what you'd think though, that wasn't what killed them.
You see, they were working on a sort of CD-addon for the SNES to match the SegaCD. This system would include an additional processor to handle the next-generation CD games. However, they got partway though development, and decided it wasn't worth their while. They were working with SONY on this project, and legend has it, it was even going to be called the PLAY
I think hacking and pursuit of lost skills go hand in hand. After all, they're both (to me anyway,) about the pursuit of knowledge, preferrably handy knowledge.
Personally, I know some obscure things like miscellaneous bladesmithing info concerning metallurgy and blade geometry, soldering techniques, Japanese language, and operation/maintenance/repair info for a wide range of contemporary firearms (fairly obscure knowledge up here in Canada.)
It's all about better living through superior knowledge. There are so many things people don't bother to learn nowadays that are just HANDY at times. Hacking is just a modern day manifestation of "tinkering" with things to learn how they work, often to repair them. The only real difference is the transition from physical to virtual.:D
Interesting that they called it a "nuclear testing facility." Semipalatinsk was an inhabited area. There were also belowground tests according to accounts of people who lived there. (Detonations in abandoned mines.) Basically it was an area used to test the effects of extreme doses of radiation on an average community.
Having seen the environment there, I'm surprised that there's still life there in any form. It's a fairly barren-looking area, and at certain places (such as the lake,) Geiger counters essentially let out a steady buzz even all these years later. There is also a lab filled with stillborn, mutated fetuses.
I have seen many shocking instances of how depraved humanity can be. Public executions, nazi concentration camps, and similar things, but none stood out in my mind as boldly as Semipalatinsk. If nothing else makes it remarkable, it's the fact that this was done to their own people.
Here are some info sites:
http://www.isar.org/isar/archive/ST/Semipalatins k. html
http://www.well.com/user/fine/journalism/kazakh. ht ml (Select all text if you find it unreadable on the laft side)
http://www.newtimes.ru/eng/detail.asp?art_id=221
Don't expect one hard drive to last you 10 years, because 10 years from now, systems with 40-pin IDE won't exist.
You know, I bet that's what they said ten years ago. Even nowadays, we haven't entirely gotten rid of ISA. (Some boards have it, and cards were made for it a couple of years ago. i.e. "Y2K Upgrade cards")
I'm sure as long as it's possible to work tricks like UDMA33, 66, and 100, there will be a backwards-compatible standard. And when it's finally phased out, I expect at least one IDE connector to still come standard on most moptherboards.
Huh. The first thing I'm reminded of is the animal hybrids in Masamune Shirow's Appleseed books. Like other things he's written, they'll no doubt happen eventually.
Sometimes he's really like a more scholarly Japanese William Gibson.
Cool! I managed to get a little walking nekobus... that thing is so creepy.
Speaking of creepy:
"HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN!!
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US. YOU ARE ON THE WAY TO DESTRUCTION. YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE MAKE YOUR TIME. HA HA HA HA...."
Normally, I'm all for liberties on the internet, even when the case is somewhat questionable. (The only case I go against this is spam. That should carry capital punishment!;) )
But still... It's now illegal to write a virus in most countries.
It's also illegal to go into someone's house and plant a camera (or cameras) without their consent, then secretly watch them.
I count this "tracking software" that they wera mentioning in the article to be both things. Just last night I removed some spyware like this when I found it trying to connect to the internet EVEN THOUGH IT WASN'T RUNNING (not even the most thorough process list showed it), and the program that used it hadn't been opened in half a year.
(It was a banner loader for some software. C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\CD_LOAD.EXE)
Ah well. I'm still running Win95 OSR2, so this doesn't bother me yet. The only compatibility problem I've had was running Drakan, which was fixed by copying over a Win98 DLL to the game directory.
I really don't see why "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" doesn't apply to software for most people.
Just a short insight...
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 1
Take it and be Saved. Or ignore it and suffer the eternal consequences.
Just thought I'd point out something:
Why is it that if someone says "Do this, or we'll beat you up/kill you," they're a criminal (robber, rapist, toecutter, ad infinitum...)
But if they say "Do this, or you'll suffer eternal damnation, the likes of which you can't imagine," all of a sudden, they're a kind, thoughtful christian?
It seems that it's just a threat on a much bigger scale, and suddenly THEY're the good guys?
Haha! Cool. As soon as the poster brought up Time-Warner, I thought about it in terms of alignment!
Me? I'm chaotic neutral, so as much as I dislike Time-Warner (not much, but with AOL moving in, it gets worse,) I'm going to see the movie in the theatres. If it's cool, I'll download the DivX and burn it to a CD or 2.
(Actually, I'm afraid I may have to buy the DVD, but that's pretty unlikely. The only non-anime DVD I have is Evil Dead 2.)
Slashdot Mirror
oops... curse you, geocities!i ma/babes/mai .html
http://www.geocities.com/msfjoseph/an
http://www.geocities.com/msfjoseph/anima/babes/mai 1.gif
Oh no... the terror... Surely we will all be destroyed by this horrible scarring image...
@_@;
I'm in Alberta, and have a Glock 17 and a Desert Eagle... I got my license after the latest gun control increases.
They'd like you to think you can't have guns anymore, but it's merely a nuisance wading through the paperwork.
That's right... all the bells and whistles are sold separately. Is that a weakness? I guess it depends on perspective. Some people are bound to hate paying the cost of an iPod for a whole desktop PC.
Actually, it's about matching the cable to the application. Of course you're not going to use a half-inch thick cable on your headphones.
On the other hand, when a friend of mine was in high school, he got 12gu cables for his car stereo. Why? Partially, for higher fidelity... partially because an audio "benchmark" disc I made for him resulted in the insulation melting off his 16gu wires. For a system operating on that power level, lower gauge wire would actually restrict the audio signal, and any capacitance effect caused by the heavy wire would be a non-issue.
Not really. I think Ahead software in Germany (makers of Nero) make a program that can gear your drive down to 1x.
Eh, either way... They'll never get DRM implemented on HKDVDs. ^o^
The batteries are disposable, but these guys make a battery that can give you 9-18 hours of talk time in a Nokia. They cost $10-20 and store well, but will eventually expire on their own once activated.
No kidding... Hard drives should be made to better standards considering the value of the data on them. In 20 years, I've lost 3 hard drives. 2 WDs a few years ago, and a Quantum that still worked, but got so loud it was painful to use.
I have a 5.25" 40MB Seagate in my basement in an old XT, and it still runs like the day it was new.
Actually, Digimon came around 1996, as basically a Tamagotchi you could link and fight.
Even so, you're right about when Pokemon came out, so they could have been around the same time. It's mind-numbingly hard for some reason to track down the relase date of the Digimon virtual pets.
As I see it though, Digimon are Tamagotchi (same packaging in Japan, same interface on the units, same company.) Tamagotchi popularized creature-raising games, and Tamagotchi game at least a year before the Digimon versions.
Very true... In my ignorance, I always thought it WAS derived from the great circle/pure water method.
The thought that somewhere in France, they keep "THE KILOGRAM" kinda boggles my mind.
Right with you on that one! I wouldn't be surprised if they tried unencrypted and uncompressed to start off with, considering the utter deficit of technical knowledge there.
I remember when you could buy a DSL hookup kit, then hook it up yourself, and use someone else's account, buy logging in with a common name and default password (i.e. "Mike25/Telus**"). You'd just register yourself as their second complimentary IP address and no one would ever be the wiser.
(Mind you, I never did this. I have a 2.5mbps business connection at home. A friend of mine was hijacked a year or two ago though.)
They also restrict your usage to a certain amount of bandwidth. I think 5GB/mo? Whatever. I don't know what they theoretically charge for going over, but I often use 30GB/month and they couldn't check it if they wanted to. No hacks from me or anything, they just suck. I have friends who use MUCH more.
Mark my words: they lack the expertise to do this, and they WILL fail, sadly enough.
I, too, think these games would be excellent. Sadly, it's only once in a blue moon that a learning game really hits the mark. Then again, how often are they made by the big companies?
l /bemani.gif) but it does sharpen your ear for music tremendously. Now I can listen to something rich and miltitextured like newer things from Pop Will Eat Itself, where a song may even have 20-30+ layers of sound, and just isolate each instrument, enjoy it, then move on to the next. I can also listen to bizarre and cacaplonous music like Mouse on Mars and very readily find the musical merit and patterns to it, even if it's made up of something like a quacking duck, a squeaky hinge, and a sheet-metal thunking noise. I feel that the game has given me something that, while not terribly useful from a daily survival point of view, is still valuable and allows me greater enjoyment of something I do anyway.
As for the music games though, Konami truly owns the genre at the moment. Most people in America have likely only seen Dance Dance Revolution, but there is also my favorite game, Beatmania, which uses a 5 key/7 key keyboard + a turntable. Music plays, and predermined depending on how the level is written, at different times in the song, you tackle different instrumental parts. From complex winding piano parts, to white knuckled high-speed complex drum parts, to awkward and scarcely audible backup parts. It certainly doesn't teach one to read music, as it's all depicted though falling bars (http://www.telusplanet.net/public/wzrd/incidenta
There is also a game like Beatmania called Keyboardmania which uses a piano keyboard and falling bars. That could probably teach much better than even Beatmania, as Beatmania changes your instrument, and pitch of the buttons pressed. I've never played though, and AFAIK, it would be an ungodly hard game.
Originality in video games is always possible, but then again, the same holds true for TV and all we get is reality TV and sitcoms...
Since the discussion topic at top is somewhat open-ended, I'll just babble on a few points:
If every commercial game is made from a cookie-cutter template, I don't think it'll be that huge a blow. There are always independent shareware and freeware programmers ready to make something original even if it doesn't make a huge profit. If it really shines, it'll even have some viability on the commercial market. Look at Counter-Strike. Sure, it's another team-based fps, but it was so addictive, that now it's one of (if not THE?) most popular multiplayer game on the Internet. It was free when it started, and it's even free now, but you can still buy it in stores packaged with Half-Life (the game it runs as a mod for,) and it's even coming out for the Xbox in a while! I really don't think we're going to see a total death of originality in gaming... ever.
Video games are just like any other form of mass media. When they came out, they were all new and original (you wanna see some unique games? Get an old Intellivision or Atari!) but now that they've been around for a while, they've stabilized to the point where just like TV, movies, music, or any other mass media, they're 90%+ cookie-cutter fodder for the masses, and a few real gems that gather cult followings, or even widespread attention and longlasting recognition.
While it is true that the Dreamcast was a haven for original games with titles like Crazy Taxi, Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio, and a real model of originality, Seaman, I don't think that's what killed it.
[HISTORY CHUNK]
Every time Sega made a system, there was an achilles heel that dragged it down. The Master System competed with the NES and it's myriad of games and already widespread acceptance. The Genesis had few colors and terrible FM-synthesized sound compared to the SNES (and it's leagues of game developers from back in the day of the NES!)
The Game Gear, compared to the GameBoy of the time, had lush color graphics, awesome sound, and some nice titles. The GameBoy was cheap at around $100 (CDN), and as grainy and colorless as the games were, with their bleepy sub-NES (stereo!) sound, they had some exceptional gameplay to them, and some winning developers licensed to make them. It also didn't hurt Nintendo any that while the Gameboy would use 2 batteries for a week, the Game Gear would use 6 batteries for a couple hours! More playing is more fun. 'nuff said. 11 years later, Nintendo finds it can make a color screen that doesn't need a hydroelectric dam to power it, and they OWN the handheld market, competing with truly nonthreatening offerings like the GP32, NeoGeo Pocket (and hastily-released Color version,), and the Bandai WonderSwan, which to my knowledge, didn't even make it to these shores (unlike the first Internet-ready console system, the Bandai/Apple "Pippin.")
The Saturn was a 2D 256 color (?) system that was tweaked at the last minute to compete with the PSX's 3D prowess. Truth told, it probably would have amounted to the greatest 2D system ever, beating out even the Turbographix 16 and the Neo Geo. However, they chose to instead make grainy-looking off-color versions of Playstation titles, and leave all the titles that really showed off the system's strength in Japan.
Wait, where is Nintendo now? Well, with the N64, they pulled a Sega and built in an insurmountable flaw. Being cartridge only, the games could be either low-detail, low-content, or expensive like Neo Geo games. Contrary to what you'd think though, that wasn't what killed them.
You see, they were working on a sort of CD-addon for the SNES to match the SegaCD. This system would include an additional processor to handle the next-generation CD games. However, they got partway though development, and decided it wasn't worth their while. They were working with SONY on this project, and legend has it, it was even going to be called the PLAY
I think hacking and pursuit of lost skills go hand in hand. After all, they're both (to me anyway,) about the pursuit of knowledge, preferrably handy knowledge.
:D
Personally, I know some obscure things like miscellaneous bladesmithing info concerning metallurgy and blade geometry, soldering techniques, Japanese language, and operation/maintenance/repair info for a wide range of contemporary firearms (fairly obscure knowledge up here in Canada.)
It's all about better living through superior knowledge. There are so many things people don't bother to learn nowadays that are just HANDY at times. Hacking is just a modern day manifestation of "tinkering" with things to learn how they work, often to repair them. The only real difference is the transition from physical to virtual.
Actually, if the slideshow you're talking about is v0.02, it ran fairly nice on my PC without any tweaks.
Back when I was playing with it, I had a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 with 128MB ram, on an ASUS A7N266 with an Athlon XP 1700+ and 256MB ram. Nothing OC'ed.
Ran fairly nice at 800x600 fullscreen under Win98. Only real chop was when I'd get attacked, or shoot an enemy (hey, not bad for a pre-alpha...)
And I suppose in this era of hi-cap magazine bans, the MP3 player will only be able to legally hold 10 songs? :P
Interesting that they called it a "nuclear testing facility." Semipalatinsk was an inhabited area. There were also belowground tests according to accounts of people who lived there. (Detonations in abandoned mines.) Basically it was an area used to test the effects of extreme doses of radiation on an average community.
s k. html
. ht ml (Select all text if you find it unreadable on the laft side)
1
Having seen the environment there, I'm surprised that there's still life there in any form. It's a fairly barren-looking area, and at certain places (such as the lake,) Geiger counters essentially let out a steady buzz even all these years later. There is also a lab filled with stillborn, mutated fetuses.
I have seen many shocking instances of how depraved humanity can be. Public executions, nazi concentration camps, and similar things, but none stood out in my mind as boldly as Semipalatinsk. If nothing else makes it remarkable, it's the fact that this was done to their own people.
Here are some info sites:
http://www.isar.org/isar/archive/ST/Semipalatin
http://www.well.com/user/fine/journalism/kazakh
http://www.newtimes.ru/eng/detail.asp?art_id=22
You know, I bet that's what they said ten years ago. Even nowadays, we haven't entirely gotten rid of ISA. (Some boards have it, and cards were made for it a couple of years ago. i.e. "Y2K Upgrade cards") I'm sure as long as it's possible to work tricks like UDMA33, 66, and 100, there will be a backwards-compatible standard. And when it's finally phased out, I expect at least one IDE connector to still come standard on most moptherboards.
Huh. The first thing I'm reminded of is the animal hybrids in Masamune Shirow's Appleseed books. Like other things he's written, they'll no doubt happen eventually.
Sometimes he's really like a more scholarly Japanese William Gibson.
Cool! I managed to get a little walking nekobus... that thing is so creepy.
...."
Speaking of creepy:
"HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN!!
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US. YOU ARE ON THE WAY TO DESTRUCTION. YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE MAKE YOUR TIME. HA HA HA HA
Normally, I'm all for liberties on the internet, even when the case is somewhat questionable. (The only case I go against this is spam. That should carry capital punishment! ;) )
But still... It's now illegal to write a virus in most countries.
It's also illegal to go into someone's house and plant a camera (or cameras) without their consent, then secretly watch them.
I count this "tracking software" that they wera mentioning in the article to be both things. Just last night I removed some spyware like this when I found it trying to connect to the internet EVEN THOUGH IT WASN'T RUNNING (not even the most thorough process list showed it), and the program that used it hadn't been opened in half a year.
(It was a banner loader for some software. C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\CD_LOAD.EXE)
Ah well. I'm still running Win95 OSR2, so this doesn't bother me yet. The only compatibility problem I've had was running Drakan, which was fixed by copying over a Win98 DLL to the game directory.
I really don't see why "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" doesn't apply to software for most people.
Take it and be Saved. Or ignore it and suffer the eternal consequences.
Just thought I'd point out something:
Why is it that if someone says "Do this, or we'll beat you up/kill you," they're a criminal (robber, rapist, toecutter, ad infinitum...)
But if they say "Do this, or you'll suffer eternal damnation, the likes of which you can't imagine," all of a sudden, they're a kind, thoughtful christian?
It seems that it's just a threat on a much bigger scale, and suddenly THEY're the good guys?
No thanks.
Haha! Cool. As soon as the poster brought up Time-Warner, I thought about it in terms of alignment!
Me? I'm chaotic neutral, so as much as I dislike Time-Warner (not much, but with AOL moving in, it gets worse,) I'm going to see the movie in the theatres. If it's cool, I'll download the DivX and burn it to a CD or 2.
(Actually, I'm afraid I may have to buy the DVD, but that's pretty unlikely. The only non-anime DVD I have is Evil Dead 2.)