There will always be a strong market for PC games as long as PCs are at the cutting edge of gaming hardware due to their upgradability and superior I/O capabilities (e.g., mice and monitors versus gamepads and televisions).
PC games can also be much, much bigger due to greater storage capacity. Yes, the XBox has a hard drive, but it's already been out a while and the rumor is that the XBox 2 won't have one. The PS2 just got a hard drive in the US, but that system is already passed the middle of its life-span, so fewer games will take full advantage of a hard drive.
In the more distant future though (say the next decade or two) I do ultimately see computers, gaming consoles, televisions and telephones merging. Already computers are used for all of those things, but not yet by everyone. Of course, this still means the PC will have won over consoles and not the other way around;)
Yeah, I've seen a half-dozen trailers in the past few years that use the Stargate theme. It annoys the crap out of me because Stargate was memorable enough to me (even before the TV series) for its theme song be instantly recognizable.
It's certianly nothing against India, at least from me. But check out how much is actually going on: http://www.fuckedcompany.com/
Half of the headlines there are for companies outsourcing to India. Damn.
I just got my BSCS about 6 months ago and I'm currently working at Taco Bell to pay the bills after failing to find even an entry-level position in the greater Seattle area. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to scrape together some contract jobs or a tech-support position to work my way into the industry, but I'm not holding my breath.
Yes, it was supposed to be: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for all Mankind."
But he accidentally left the "a" in "for a man" out and said: "That's one small step for Man, one giant leap for all Mankind," which doesn't really make sense...
It's like if you stole my bike, i goto your house prove to you it's my bike and you stole it. I then can ask you to give it back, and if you decline, then I call authorities who will force you to do so.
No, it's like if you stole my bike and I hire a bunch of ex-cops to dress up in police-looking gear and bust into your house to scare you into giving it back. Oh, and then they scare you into signing a piece of paper that says you gave back my bike because you felt sorry for stealing it and not because you just peed your pants in fear.
I saw an N-Gage display at my local Gamestop store today and couldn't help playing with it. It had two N-Gage devices, which I was able to link together via the built-in Bluetooth (either they didn't come connected, or someone fudged it up).
There was only a single game installed - some racing game (I guess - I never actually got it past the main menu) called Pandemonium. It had a multiplayer mode, but when I tried to host a multiplayer game on either N-Gage, the game would exit back to the games list.
I guess it's got some bugs that need to be worked out. I was never interested in it anyways - I'd rather have a cell and a GBA SP.
:D Thanks for chiming in everyone. I'm mystified that there are so few replies to every Games category article that I see, so I assume that they don't show up in the main list in the middle of the main slashdot.org page in AC mode (or maybe it's disabled in the default settings for registered users?). At any rate, something is amiss, but I'm glad to here that there are others out there (even if it cost me some karma to find them;)
This is really sad. Because the Games category is not on the default list of viewable Slashdot article categories, noone but me reads these - well, myself and the two other persons who posted here that is. TPTB should either add Games to the default category list, or stop wasting effort posting Games articles. If noone is going to read these, then the time is better spent bringing us other kinds of news, IMHO.
Are they going to randomly select the children surveyed? If not (i.e. if they hone in on video-game-playing kids), are they going to also have a control group of "normal" kids? If so, how do they decide what is "normal"? Randomly selecting the group and reducing video games to a factor seems to me to be the only remotely-valid way to conduct such a study.
On another note, this sounds exactly like the studies done on kida that watch TV a generation ago.
You can blame it on me for breaking down and deciding to update to Mozilla 1.4RC3 via my dialup just the other day... Of course they would release 1.4 so I have to download it again:/
Why does it have to be a race? Why can't we start some joint programs to pool our resources and perhaps even win some political brownie points along the way?
Personally, I think competition with China is scary. We'll probably clash with them eventually like we did with the USSR if the world doesn't change some more.
My first reaction was "that sucks!" because I'm always thinking about how many different EM signals are bombarding my head every second of every day, and I think it's cool that some people have tried to take advantage of it in different ways. Intending to sell the devices is probably where this guy went wrong.
Is there a legal way to reverse-engineer a form of communication and then either publish the results or plans for making a homemade device to decode the communication?
Running any software on my XBOX is *not* illegal. I own it.
Knowing Microsoft, I doubt that. They probably made you agree to a shrinkwrap EULA that said that you didn't own the physical console, but rather the right to use it in ways that they have determined are allowable.
While your post is definitely trollish and anonymous, you make some good points. I participated in Beta 3 for a couple of weeks right near the end, and I can tell you that there is next to no content. It felt like running around in a big, stale, random world doing nothing. I wanted to like it so bad, but it was just boring.
As for the 3 CDs, I think they did use a ton of textures (not that you would have noticed if they would have scaled things back). People with top-of-the-line 3 GHz computers and 1 GB of RAM complained of framerates of 5-10 FPS in towns, and I can tell you right now that it is due to loading massive amounts of textures from the hard disk into video RAM. Sloppy.
Overall, the game felt very uninnovative and non-entertaining. I feel very sorry for the developers who were pushed by Sony to rush SWG out the door before it was 6 months or more from being ready. The developers were very...patient with the beta testers and, while they may not have listened well to complaints and suggestions, they at least communicated with the testers as a group and never gave the testers a bad attitude.
I'm sure SWG will be better in 6 months, but I really don't think the base that they'll be building on is a good one and that there will be major flaws in the game that can never be fixed (e.g. overuse of textures and associated rendering algorithms).
As we speak, a NWN-engine RPG set in the Star Wars universe is being developed. Unless they really screw the pooch, it should allow cooperative multiplayer play.
I don't know though. I like sci-fi better than medieval fantasy, but Star Wars almost feels more like the latter. The light sabers and force powers are just like magic weapons and spells in fantasy games, and you never get to fly space ships in any of the Star Wars games that aren't solely about flying space ships.
If you want to scale back somewhere, try the CPUs. A smart move may be to scale back to 2 GHz or below (no sense in going too far below 1 GHz though unless you can get a really good deal) and buy bigger hard drives because you're going to run out of space eventually and either have to upgrade or more strictly ration disk space. 1 GB of RAM is good to have, especially since it's cheap and would be handy in case you decide to run a DBMS or X server or something in the future in addition to the web and email servers.
The nice thing about servers is that nothing much matters other than the hard drives, RAM, CPU(s), and networking hardware. Peripherals (if any) can often be any cheap old stuff that may be lying around already.
Gotta love how noone will see this post due to the fact that its category doesn't show up in the default list, and almost everyone is too lazy to change their preferences.
I'm glad to see that people are working with the NWN engine though. It got off to a slow start with the weak single-player module and lack of good online modules (the users were just beginning to make good ones when I lost my broadband connection a year ago). Now they're making a Star Wars RPG using the engine too, so I guess we'll be seeing the NWN engine around for a while.
I thought Bethesda Softworks had some kind of deal with whoever owns the Terminator franchise. They seem to have their name on every Terminator game, and they've put out quite a few themselves. Anyone know how they're going to factor into a T3 game? I was wondering the other day so I'm interested that this came up.
I also heard that Atari is only a label these days, so what does "published by Atari" actually mean?
No, I didn't think to look for prepackaged distros - sounds like a good idea, except I'm an obsessive tweaker (no not THAT kind!) who likes to play with the latest versions of everything.
Being able to start with a stable, working setup sounds like an excellent option though. Thanks for the idea.
I'll keep that in mind, although I think I can handle it. Here's my story:
At some point I decided to put up a web server on my Windows box (my only box actually), and since IIS was already installed, I decided to try it. It worked, but it was bulky, hard to configure, and resource consuming (and then there's always the security-hole-of-the-week)
Someone talked me into switching to Apache 1.3.x and PHP 4.1.2. I loved Apache. You only need to change a few lines in a config file to get it running, and it consumes less than 2MB of RAM (and no significant CPU time from what I've seen). PHP is another matter, however. I tried getting the Apache modules working with it to no avail. I tried the ISAPI extensions - same deal. So I had to fall back on the CGI executable, which worked but was disappointing.
Later I upgraded to a 2.0.x beta of Apache, and went through the same issues with PHP, although I found out that it wasn't anything that was my fault this time - Apache2 support for the aforementioned stuff was not in the PHP 4.1.x binaries.
I'm hoping that I won't go through the same thing now that there is both a new version and a new beta of PHP that are supposed to work together. What I really need it a clear set of instructions to follow, that also says what can go wrong during the setup and how to fix it.
Are you trying to tell me that Akira makes sense to Japanese viewers? W*T*F? I swear to God there isn't a coherent plot in there. After much more extensive research into the world of Japanese anime, I have come to accept the fact that Japanese viewers don't see coherent plots or consistent storytelling as a desired feature in anime.
Btw, what does "includes support for Apache 2.0..." mean? Is there an Apache 2 module? My problem before was that I couldn't get even the ISAPI modules working (hey I'm a n00b at setting up web servers, and the documentation on it REALLY isn't that good IMHO) with even the 1.x Apache releases.
Slashdot Mirror
There will always be a strong market for PC games as long as PCs are at the cutting edge of gaming hardware due to their upgradability and superior I/O capabilities (e.g., mice and monitors versus gamepads and televisions).
;)
PC games can also be much, much bigger due to greater storage capacity. Yes, the XBox has a hard drive, but it's already been out a while and the rumor is that the XBox 2 won't have one. The PS2 just got a hard drive in the US, but that system is already passed the middle of its life-span, so fewer games will take full advantage of a hard drive.
In the more distant future though (say the next decade or two) I do ultimately see computers, gaming consoles, televisions and telephones merging. Already computers are used for all of those things, but not yet by everyone. Of course, this still means the PC will have won over consoles and not the other way around
Yeah, I've seen a half-dozen trailers in the past few years that use the Stargate theme. It annoys the crap out of me because Stargate was memorable enough to me (even before the TV series) for its theme song be instantly recognizable.
It's certianly nothing against India, at least from me. But check out how much is actually going on: http://www.fuckedcompany.com/
Half of the headlines there are for companies outsourcing to India. Damn.
I just got my BSCS about 6 months ago and I'm currently working at Taco Bell to pay the bills after failing to find even an entry-level position in the greater Seattle area. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to scrape together some contract jobs or a tech-support position to work my way into the industry, but I'm not holding my breath.
Yes, it was supposed to be:
"That's one small step for a man,
one giant leap for all Mankind."
But he accidentally left the "a" in "for a man" out and said:
"That's one small step for Man,
one giant leap for all Mankind," which doesn't really make sense...
I saw an N-Gage display at my local Gamestop store today and couldn't help playing with it. It had two N-Gage devices, which I was able to link together via the built-in Bluetooth (either they didn't come connected, or someone fudged it up).
There was only a single game installed - some racing game (I guess - I never actually got it past the main menu) called Pandemonium. It had a multiplayer mode, but when I tried to host a multiplayer game on either N-Gage, the game would exit back to the games list.
I guess it's got some bugs that need to be worked out. I was never interested in it anyways - I'd rather have a cell and a GBA SP.
:D Thanks for chiming in everyone. I'm mystified that there are so few replies to every Games category article that I see, so I assume that they don't show up in the main list in the middle of the main slashdot.org page in AC mode (or maybe it's disabled in the default settings for registered users?). At any rate, something is amiss, but I'm glad to here that there are others out there (even if it cost me some karma to find them ;)
This is really sad. Because the Games category is not on the default list of viewable Slashdot article categories, noone but me reads these - well, myself and the two other persons who posted here that is. TPTB should either add Games to the default category list, or stop wasting effort posting Games articles. If noone is going to read these, then the time is better spent bringing us other kinds of news, IMHO.
Are they going to randomly select the children surveyed? If not (i.e. if they hone in on video-game-playing kids), are they going to also have a control group of "normal" kids? If so, how do they decide what is "normal"? Randomly selecting the group and reducing video games to a factor seems to me to be the only remotely-valid way to conduct such a study.
On another note, this sounds exactly like the studies done on kida that watch TV a generation ago.
Does this mean that Data East titles such as Heavy Barrel and Bad Dudes are now abandonware?
It's obvious: they depleted their gold mine and had to build a new base somewhere else.
You can blame it on me for breaking down and deciding to update to Mozilla 1.4RC3 via my dialup just the other day... Of course they would release 1.4 so I have to download it again :/
Why does it have to be a race? Why can't we start some joint programs to pool our resources and perhaps even win some political brownie points along the way?
Personally, I think competition with China is scary. We'll probably clash with them eventually like we did with the USSR if the world doesn't change some more.
My first reaction was "that sucks!" because I'm always thinking about how many different EM signals are bombarding my head every second of every day, and I think it's cool that some people have tried to take advantage of it in different ways. Intending to sell the devices is probably where this guy went wrong.
Is there a legal way to reverse-engineer a form of communication and then either publish the results or plans for making a homemade device to decode the communication?
Pipedot:
Straight-up news for Nerds. Stuff that [i]actually[/i] matters.
While your post is definitely trollish and anonymous, you make some good points. I participated in Beta 3 for a couple of weeks right near the end, and I can tell you that there is next to no content. It felt like running around in a big, stale, random world doing nothing. I wanted to like it so bad, but it was just boring.
As for the 3 CDs, I think they did use a ton of textures (not that you would have noticed if they would have scaled things back). People with top-of-the-line 3 GHz computers and 1 GB of RAM complained of framerates of 5-10 FPS in towns, and I can tell you right now that it is due to loading massive amounts of textures from the hard disk into video RAM. Sloppy.
Overall, the game felt very uninnovative and non-entertaining. I feel very sorry for the developers who were pushed by Sony to rush SWG out the door before it was 6 months or more from being ready. The developers were very...patient with the beta testers and, while they may not have listened well to complaints and suggestions, they at least communicated with the testers as a group and never gave the testers a bad attitude.
I'm sure SWG will be better in 6 months, but I really don't think the base that they'll be building on is a good one and that there will be major flaws in the game that can never be fixed (e.g. overuse of textures and associated rendering algorithms).
As we speak, a NWN-engine RPG set in the Star Wars universe is being developed. Unless they really screw the pooch, it should allow cooperative multiplayer play.
I don't know though. I like sci-fi better than medieval fantasy, but Star Wars almost feels more like the latter. The light sabers and force powers are just like magic weapons and spells in fantasy games, and you never get to fly space ships in any of the Star Wars games that aren't solely about flying space ships.
If you want to scale back somewhere, try the CPUs. A smart move may be to scale back to 2 GHz or below (no sense in going too far below 1 GHz though unless you can get a really good deal) and buy bigger hard drives because you're going to run out of space eventually and either have to upgrade or more strictly ration disk space. 1 GB of RAM is good to have, especially since it's cheap and would be handy in case you decide to run a DBMS or X server or something in the future in addition to the web and email servers.
The nice thing about servers is that nothing much matters other than the hard drives, RAM, CPU(s), and networking hardware. Peripherals (if any) can often be any cheap old stuff that may be lying around already.
Gotta love how noone will see this post due to the fact that its category doesn't show up in the default list, and almost everyone is too lazy to change their preferences.
I'm glad to see that people are working with the NWN engine though. It got off to a slow start with the weak single-player module and lack of good online modules (the users were just beginning to make good ones when I lost my broadband connection a year ago). Now they're making a Star Wars RPG using the engine too, so I guess we'll be seeing the NWN engine around for a while.
I thought Bethesda Softworks had some kind of deal with whoever owns the Terminator franchise. They seem to have their name on every Terminator game, and they've put out quite a few themselves. Anyone know how they're going to factor into a T3 game? I was wondering the other day so I'm interested that this came up.
I also heard that Atari is only a label these days, so what does "published by Atari" actually mean?
No, I didn't think to look for prepackaged distros - sounds like a good idea, except I'm an obsessive tweaker (no not THAT kind!) who likes to play with the latest versions of everything.
Being able to start with a stable, working setup sounds like an excellent option though. Thanks for the idea.
I'll keep that in mind, although I think I can handle it. Here's my story:
At some point I decided to put up a web server on my Windows box (my only box actually), and since IIS was already installed, I decided to try it. It worked, but it was bulky, hard to configure, and resource consuming (and then there's always the security-hole-of-the-week)
Someone talked me into switching to Apache 1.3.x and PHP 4.1.2. I loved Apache. You only need to change a few lines in a config file to get it running, and it consumes less than 2MB of RAM (and no significant CPU time from what I've seen). PHP is another matter, however. I tried getting the Apache modules working with it to no avail. I tried the ISAPI extensions - same deal. So I had to fall back on the CGI executable, which worked but was disappointing.
Later I upgraded to a 2.0.x beta of Apache, and went through the same issues with PHP, although I found out that it wasn't anything that was my fault this time - Apache2 support for the aforementioned stuff was not in the PHP 4.1.x binaries.
I'm hoping that I won't go through the same thing now that there is both a new version and a new beta of PHP that are supposed to work together. What I really need it a clear set of instructions to follow, that also says what can go wrong during the setup and how to fix it.
Are you trying to tell me that Akira makes sense to Japanese viewers? W*T*F? I swear to God there isn't a coherent plot in there. After much more extensive research into the world of Japanese anime, I have come to accept the fact that Japanese viewers don't see coherent plots or consistent storytelling as a desired feature in anime.
Btw, what does "includes support for Apache 2.0..." mean? Is there an Apache 2 module? My problem before was that I couldn't get even the ISAPI modules working (hey I'm a n00b at setting up web servers, and the documentation on it REALLY isn't that good IMHO) with even the 1.x Apache releases.