The game itself is banned--banned from sale, and probably from rental too. The title did not specify in what manner the game was banned.
Concise OAD:
ban 1 |ban| verb (banned, ban-ning) [trans.] (often be banned) officially or legally prohibit : he was banned from driving for a year | a proposal to ban all trade in ivory.
So "...ban all trade in..." is in fact one of the examples Oxford gives for the primary definition of the word.
You underestimate the dumbness of the GTA controversy.
The game already had sex in it. In fact, it had a mission where you rescued a prostitute from being raped and murdered by two Johns, and allowed you to have sex with bikini-clad hookers (with sound effects, steamed-up car windows and bouncing suspension), then kill them with a chainsaw.
The game already had a strip club where you could get a private lap dance.
Previous iterations of GTA had lesbian S&M.
But suddenly there's a scene where two consenting adults have fully-clothed sex, and that is the thing everyone freaks out about. Stupid doesn't begin to describe this particular manufactured controversy.
I think the biggest problem with SA is that the size of the game makes it hard to find things. You're a lot less likely to chance on something interesting, including the various races and side missions. It also feels as though more of the scenery is just scenery, rather than potentially interesting stuff to explore. Yet at the same time, there are building interiors that are only encountered in a single mission, after which you can't revisit them...
I'd just like to say that I bought a Zodiac, and you're completely correct.
I use it as a Palm PDA first and foremost, because it was the only Palm device with a 320x480 screen, Bluetooth, a speaker you could actually hear, and vibro mode for silent alarms.
It was a kickass Palm PDA. But as a game console, it really sucked. The best games were the ones available for other Palm PDAs anyway.
SA was really not worth it. Not much new, worse missions (less driving, what the hell. Edgy content doth not a replayable game make.)
Actually, San Andreas has much more driving than previous GTA games, especially if you do the side missions. The large map leads to some really long driving missions. (Speaking as someone who has played it thru as far as Los Venturas.)
I bought the PS2 for Burnout 3, and so far, thats the only thing thats been worth it. I regret buying the PS2.
Get Ico, Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando, Rez, and Ace Combat 04.
Ico is the only thing I've seen on the PS2 that comes close to the beauty of Metroid Prime.
Not true. The IBM internal standards require that all web applications be cross-platform and work with Firefox as well as IE. You need special management approval to deploy a web site that's IE only, let alone start work on a new one.
(Yes, I'm an IBM web site developer. Opinions mine, not IBMs, blah blah.)
Well, The Handmaid's Tale was a very good movie, everything else of Gartner's is so-so.
On the other hand, Roven's career really looks like it went down the toilet around 2000. A godawful German Rollerball remake, the Scooby-Doo movie, and the sequel to the Scooby-Doo movie? I'd kill myself.
I also think Perl 6 is a mistake, and I'm not going to post anonymously. After years of writing Perl, I've switched to Ruby after seeing the direction Perl 6 was going in.
I always felt that Perl 5 needed some drastic cleanup and simplification. I never got the hang of writing proper OO libraries, because it was so painful and non-obvious. While that's somewhat fixed in Perl 5, there's a whole new load of complexity being introduced.
I don't want variables to have different syntax depending on whether they're object variables or normal variables. I don't want method dispatch to maybe follow different rules to inheritance. I don't need MetaClass and Class to be separate things in the language; I'm quite happy for it to be turtles all the way down. And most of all, I don't need full regular expression interpolation in freakin' package names!
I realized that not only is it really hard to make something complicated and powerful into something simple and powerful, it's also not Larry Wall's direction for Perl 6. A new piece of syntax for private methods as well as a private trait, and they work slightly differently? Methods which are either class methods or object methods depending on what the calling code does? The man certainly has a talent for introducing gratuitous complexity.
Nice conspiracy theory. Except it's obvious from the iTunes Music Store and the iPod that Apple understands that CONSUMERS WILL NOT BUY SECURE AND/OR INVASIVE DRM.
How many people have DVD-Audio? How many have SACD? Even though almost every DVD player now sold seems to play them?
How many people buy Windows Media DRMed audio, versus the iTunes store and MP3s?
How many people buy Sony DRMed portables, versus the iPod with its complete lack of required DRM?
If HD-DVD has all the DRM crap I've been reading about, it'll die just as rapidly. I know I for one won't bother with it; DVD is good enough, I'll stick with that.
[...] the future of media management is central to their strategy and was one of the driving forces behind the move.
I don't see any evidence for that being a driving force. I mean, there's zero evidence that any of the new Intel DRMed-to-hell stuff will get anywhere in the marketplace; just look at how well DVD-Audio and SACD have done versus CD, and how well Windows Media audio has done versus the iTunes Music Store, let alone MP3. Or how well Sony's portables have done versus the iPod.
The market doesn't want secure and burdensome DRM, and has said so over and over again. I'm confident it'll say so again to whatever crap Intel come up with; and if HD-DVD goes ahead with some of the crap I've been reading about (revocable player keys to make your player stop working, and forced player firmware upgrades), it'll die a speedy death too.
I think it's purely about getting the best possible CPUs for portables for the next 5 years. Portables are where Apple sells best, and where PowerPC is weakest. End of mystery.
hmm, sounds like a programmer just lost the "it" that he acuses other of not getting
[...] the smoother way would be to separate mechanism and policy, concentrate your programming-fu on the mechanism and let the users twiddle the policy bits as they see fit.
No, you're the one who doesn't get it. Configurable options and keystrokes are the ultimate cop-out for bad application design. People don't want to sit and spend a couple of hours configuring the program to have a sensible interface; they want it to have the right interface from the start. And adding configurability to the interface both dramatically increases the complexity of the code and documentation, and increases the cognitive load on the user even if they decide not to take advantage of the configurability.
To put it in two concrete examples: Apple's applications are almost universally praised for their interface. *None* of them have configurable menus and keystrokes, in fact they have very few options for changing the UI behavior at all.
CorelDraw, on the other hand, takes the "allow the user to reconfigure everything" approach. And guess what? It's a nightmare to use and slow as hell.
In fact, the game features a mission where you rescue a hooker while she's being raped and murdered, and allows you to kill hookers with a chainsaw. That was OK, but the fact that you can modify the game to show fully clothed concensual sex is the big no-no.
Slashdot Mirror
The game itself is banned--banned from sale, and probably from rental too. The title did not specify in what manner the game was banned.
Concise OAD:
ban 1 |ban|
verb (banned, ban-ning) [trans.] (often be banned)
officially or legally prohibit : he was banned from driving for a year | a proposal to ban all trade in ivory.
So "...ban all trade in..." is in fact one of the examples Oxford gives for the primary definition of the word.
It's banned from sale. Apparently you're easily confused.
You underestimate the dumbness of the GTA controversy.
The game already had sex in it. In fact, it had a mission where you rescued a prostitute from being raped and murdered by two Johns, and allowed you to have sex with bikini-clad hookers (with sound effects, steamed-up car windows and bouncing suspension), then kill them with a chainsaw.
The game already had a strip club where you could get a private lap dance.
Previous iterations of GTA had lesbian S&M.
But suddenly there's a scene where two consenting adults have fully-clothed sex, and that is the thing everyone freaks out about. Stupid doesn't begin to describe this particular manufactured controversy.
There are a lot of races, in fact.
I think the biggest problem with SA is that the size of the game makes it hard to find things. You're a lot less likely to chance on something interesting, including the various races and side missions. It also feels as though more of the scenery is just scenery, rather than potentially interesting stuff to explore. Yet at the same time, there are building interiors that are only encountered in a single mission, after which you can't revisit them...
Let me put it this way:
I bought a Zodiac.
I think the DRM sucked balls. I didn't buy any Tapwave-only games.
Perhaps you might want to ponder that when thinking about why you're out of business.
And Super Monkey Ball isn't Cube-exclusive any more.
I have the GameCube for Metroid Prime, Pikmin and Zelda. If I didn't like those, I wouldn't bother with a GameCube.
I'd just like to say that I bought a Zodiac, and you're completely correct.
I use it as a Palm PDA first and foremost, because it was the only Palm device with a 320x480 screen, Bluetooth, a speaker you could actually hear, and vibro mode for silent alarms.
It was a kickass Palm PDA. But as a game console, it really sucked. The best games were the ones available for other Palm PDAs anyway.
Actually, San Andreas has much more driving than previous GTA games, especially if you do the side missions. The large map leads to some really long driving missions. (Speaking as someone who has played it thru as far as Los Venturas.)
Get Ico, Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando, Rez, and Ace Combat 04.
Ico is the only thing I've seen on the PS2 that comes close to the beauty of Metroid Prime.
Not true. The IBM internal standards require that all web applications be cross-platform and work with Firefox as well as IE. You need special management approval to deploy a web site that's IE only, let alone start work on a new one.
(Yes, I'm an IBM web site developer. Opinions mine, not IBMs, blah blah.)
Well, The Handmaid's Tale was a very good movie, everything else of Gartner's is so-so.
On the other hand, Roven's career really looks like it went down the toilet around 2000. A godawful German Rollerball remake, the Scooby-Doo movie, and the sequel to the Scooby-Doo movie? I'd kill myself.
A bounced check can prevent you from obtaining US citizenship.
(It's pretty amusing watching Americans talk about how awful Japanese immigration and citizenship laws are...)
I also think Perl 6 is a mistake, and I'm not going to post anonymously. After years of writing Perl, I've switched to Ruby after seeing the direction Perl 6 was going in.
I always felt that Perl 5 needed some drastic cleanup and simplification. I never got the hang of writing proper OO libraries, because it was so painful and non-obvious. While that's somewhat fixed in Perl 5, there's a whole new load of complexity being introduced.
I don't want variables to have different syntax depending on whether they're object variables or normal variables. I don't want method dispatch to maybe follow different rules to inheritance. I don't need MetaClass and Class to be separate things in the language; I'm quite happy for it to be turtles all the way down. And most of all, I don't need full regular expression interpolation in freakin' package names!
I realized that not only is it really hard to make something complicated and powerful into something simple and powerful, it's also not Larry Wall's direction for Perl 6. A new piece of syntax for private methods as well as a private trait, and they work slightly differently? Methods which are either class methods or object methods depending on what the calling code does? The man certainly has a talent for introducing gratuitous complexity.
Nice conspiracy theory. Except it's obvious from the iTunes Music Store and the iPod that Apple understands that CONSUMERS WILL NOT BUY SECURE AND/OR INVASIVE DRM.
How many people have DVD-Audio? How many have SACD? Even though almost every DVD player now sold seems to play them?
How many people buy Windows Media DRMed audio, versus the iTunes store and MP3s?
How many people buy Sony DRMed portables, versus the iPod with its complete lack of required DRM?
If HD-DVD has all the DRM crap I've been reading about, it'll die just as rapidly. I know I for one won't bother with it; DVD is good enough, I'll stick with that.
Don't forget how well it worked for BeOS.
I don't see any evidence for that being a driving force. I mean, there's zero evidence that any of the new Intel DRMed-to-hell stuff will get anywhere in the marketplace; just look at how well DVD-Audio and SACD have done versus CD, and how well Windows Media audio has done versus the iTunes Music Store, let alone MP3. Or how well Sony's portables have done versus the iPod.
The market doesn't want secure and burdensome DRM, and has said so over and over again. I'm confident it'll say so again to whatever crap Intel come up with; and if HD-DVD goes ahead with some of the crap I've been reading about (revocable player keys to make your player stop working, and forced player firmware upgrades), it'll die a speedy death too.
I think it's purely about getting the best possible CPUs for portables for the next 5 years. Portables are where Apple sells best, and where PowerPC is weakest. End of mystery.
No, you're the one who doesn't get it. Configurable options and keystrokes are the ultimate cop-out for bad application design. People don't want to sit and spend a couple of hours configuring the program to have a sensible interface; they want it to have the right interface from the start. And adding configurability to the interface both dramatically increases the complexity of the code and documentation, and increases the cognitive load on the user even if they decide not to take advantage of the configurability.
To put it in two concrete examples: Apple's applications are almost universally praised for their interface. *None* of them have configurable menus and keystrokes, in fact they have very few options for changing the UI behavior at all.
CorelDraw, on the other hand, takes the "allow the user to reconfigure everything" approach. And guess what? It's a nightmare to use and slow as hell.
Because some of us had 68000-based Macs when PowerPC was introduced, and watched as software quickly ceased to be available for mono 68K machines.
In fact, the game features a mission where you rescue a hooker while she's being raped and murdered, and allows you to kill hookers with a chainsaw. That was OK, but the fact that you can modify the game to show fully clothed concensual sex is the big no-no.
America is certifiably insane.
Yes, if you can get me an MPEG2 or MPEG4 camcorder that uses it for storage and costs well under a grand.
Pity you mentioned Windows, if you were running Linux on your T41 I could probably have helped you out.
Yes, but I want a tablet that'll run an operating system, and I don't know yet whether it'll be possible to hack OS X to run on a ThinkPad.
The word "slate" had me thinking for a moment that Apple was finally introducing a tablet-format portable.
Ah well, I can dream.
Dear retard: Want to push the second mouse button on your Mac laptop? Simply hold down the Ctrl key.
Yeah, last week I tried to set up what I thought ought to be a fairly straightforward setup:
Apache
SSL
WebDAV
with user having authenticated WebDAV access to their public_html directory.
I still haven't sorted out how to do the general case; fortunately the number of users is small enough that I can hack it manually...
(Yes, go ahead, show me how trivial it actually is, I dare you.)
http://make.rubyforge.org/