AlphaHelix wrote: and I generally eschew the fantasy and science fiction genres for their immaturity, prefering works with more developed characters
While not really on-topic, I have to say that this is a pretty gross generalization. While there are alot of pulpy sci-fi/fantasy writers, the same can be held true for every other genre under the sun. You can find just about anything you're looking for in F/SF, if you catch on the right authors... excellent character development, fascinating plots, philosophical discourses, humor, the list goes on and on.
M$ isn't considering that without 100% backward compatibility, they are putting alot of people in a bind, especially if they are using apps/systems that are tuned to specific OS's (like Win98)
True, but you can only take backward compatibility so far, after all... it keeps old and broken cruft around long after it's needed. At some point, it just becomes pointless to support it. *shrug* I hate playing this tune, but it's the truth. Also, good application/system design should minimise this type of platform dependence.
Why doesn't anyone make cheap, fast, small (3-6gig) HDs?
No kidding... I've always thought that this would make for excellent gaming rigs... you have a nice, small-ish fast SCSI drive for OS & swap space, and then a larger IDE drive for storage and applications.
That's why you (as a stockholder) want to pay the officers of your company with stock and stock options rather than cash. That way, executives who make the albatross acquisitions end up with worthless underwater options.
Ahh, but the execs are in a position to see things ahead of time that will allow them to dump their stocks and "resign", while Joe Stockholder & the employees are left holding the bag. With enough creative fudging, you can keep the big block investors & fund managers with the wool pulled over their eyes (apparently!) long enough to get out of Dodge before the poop hits the fan...
The only problem with this is that obviously stock prices aren't at all linked to performance at all... certainly not in any direct and psychologically meaningful way... If I'm over at division X of the company, kicking ass and taking names, revenue and sales wise, but some corporate PHB buys another company that turns into Colerige's freakin albatross around our corporate necks, haemorraging money faster than we can make it, what "inscentive" is there for me? I get to sit here and watch my "employee inscentive" turn to so much toilet paper, in spite of division-wide good financial and technical performance, because some PHB can't admit to his mistakes and chop off the dead wood dragging us down?
This isn't even taking into account random fluctuations in the market, or dot-bomb-esque scenarios... so now my pay is tied to market scares caused by Arthur Anderson, Enron, WorldCom,
and every other two-bit schmuck who does the wall street equivalent of a smash n' grab?
Not to mention you're actually wrong. Let me know when consoles have even half of the top PC games of the last year - CS, RtCW, Tribes2, SoF2, the Sim/Civ games, MoH:AA, Dungeon Siege... and all the RTS type games. Heard any news of Warcraft 3 or Neverwinter Nights or Morrowind making it to console? No. they just don't work there.
Uhh... Counter-Strike and RtCW are both headed to Xbox, RtCW is also hitting PS2 and possibly gamecube... Morrowind: The Elder Scrolls is already out for Xbox, and is ranked number one by traffic on Gamespot, MoH:AA is appearing on PS2 as Medal of Honor: Frontline (and it's hella fun) The original SoF is already out for PS2, (as SoF Gold) and has been out for a while... I've seen RTS's for several consoles as well, such as Commandos 2, and SimCity2k was also available for the regular PlayStation. Saying that consoles do X and PC's do Y is rapidly becoming an invalid argument. While PC's still do some things better than consoles, and vice verca, I think that this line is going to become increasingly blurry as time goes on.
From someone else's point of view, the other guy may as well be me, However, from my point of view, I've been murdered, my body vaporized, and some other guy is now walking around with my memories.
A little offtopic, but Orson Scott Card has a short story very similar to this exact scenario called "Fat Farm", in his Maps in a Mirror collection...
The part about the Enrico Fermi I power plant at Detroit Edision is inaccurate. The plant is still alive and functioning today.
From what I read, they never said that the Fermi reactor shut down... just that it was too damned expensive to be practical... the other two, however...
Christopher Thomas wrote: RTS games like Starcraft, Total Annihilation, and so forth are always popular, and shouldn't raise too much concern with parents.
Why is it that running around on a space station and shooting people (a la UT or Q3) is frowned upon by parents, but building up a small army and slaughtering opponents by the hundres (a la Starcraft/TA) is ok? Don't get me wrong, I like all the games mentioned above (except TA, only because I haven't played it yet). The irony of that statement just had to make me comment.
My biggest beef with the previous two (three, if you count London) was the forced top-down perspective. While it's ok for low-speed navigation and running around the city, the fact is that just about any vehicle was near impossible to drive at high speeds anywhere, because you don't get enough of a view of the road ahead of you to avoid slow-moving or stopped traffic. The chasecam style perspective in GTA3 helps an immense amount in making those high speed getaways and running roadblocks, while maintaining consistent physics and handling of the vehicles.
grinwell wrote: Oracle/Ellison don't show up in the top 25.
Just because it's not listed under Oracle/Ellison doesn't mean he's not in there... donating money through a PAC or another front (law firm?) seems easy enough. Add to this there are numerous other "favors" that Oracle/Ellison could have done that didn't involve handing Davis a big sack with dollar signs on it... with the added bonus that they don't have to appear on any financial disclosure statements. I'm not saying it happened, I'm just saying that because Oracle didn't directly contribute doesn't mean they didn't contribute at all.
Shoulda guessed. Too many 'junk' characters in an HTTP header? Damn that stupid lameness filter... I'd hate to try posting source code snippets now. Ugh!
I have to agree with Carbonite... due to financial constraints (I was in college at the time:-) ) I missed out on the last generation or two of consoles... last one I had was a Sega Genesis way back in high school. There were alot of decent games that I missed out on during that hiatus, that I can now enjoy, as well as the latest and greatest titles for the PS2.
As for the backwards compatibility issue... I don't think that we'll see the issues with backwards compatibility similar to those in the PC realm that were/are holding back OS development, the main reason being that consoles are much less mission-critical to many businesses (other than retail outlets and Sony, of course;) than say, an operating system or an office applications suite... we're talking about two different realms here. Game developers are pushing the limits of the software and hardware... if people want to play the games, they'll buy a system that can run the game, or not. If you break backwards compatibility in an OS or office suite and one of your major business contracts can't use the new OS/app because it breaks their multi-million dollar inventorying system, on the other hand... you're gonna have problems. To summarise, since PC's are used for a lot more than simple entertainment, it makes good business sense to support legacy applications. With gaming, it's not necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear gods, have mercy! It's only monday, for crying out loud... ;)
Sos The Rope, Var The Stick...
There's a reason for that... in a word... 'meh'.
AlphaHelix wrote:
and I generally eschew the fantasy and science fiction genres for their immaturity, prefering works with more developed characters
While not really on-topic, I have to say that this is a pretty gross generalization. While there are alot of pulpy sci-fi/fantasy writers, the same can be held true for every other genre under the sun. You can find just about anything you're looking for in F/SF, if you catch on the right authors... excellent character development, fascinating plots, philosophical discourses, humor, the list goes on and on.
M$ isn't considering that without 100% backward compatibility, they are putting alot of people in a bind, especially if they are using apps/systems that are tuned to specific OS's (like Win98)
True, but you can only take backward compatibility so far, after all... it keeps old and broken cruft around long after it's needed. At some point, it just becomes pointless to support it. *shrug* I hate playing this tune, but it's the truth. Also, good application/system design should minimise this type of platform dependence.
That's because there stupid.
My kingdom for some moderator points!
Why doesn't anyone make cheap, fast, small (3-6gig) HDs?
No kidding... I've always thought that this would make for excellent gaming rigs... you have a nice, small-ish fast SCSI drive for OS & swap space, and then a larger IDE drive for storage and applications.
That's why you (as a stockholder) want to pay the officers of your company with stock and stock options rather than cash. That way, executives who make the albatross acquisitions end up with worthless underwater options.
Ahh, but the execs are in a position to see things ahead of time that will allow them to dump their stocks and "resign", while Joe Stockholder & the employees are left holding the bag. With enough creative fudging, you can keep the big block investors & fund managers with the wool pulled over their eyes (apparently!) long enough to get out of Dodge before the poop hits the fan...
The only problem with this is that obviously stock prices aren't at all linked to performance at all... certainly not in any direct and psychologically meaningful way... If I'm over at division X of the company, kicking ass and taking names, revenue and sales wise, but some corporate PHB buys another company that turns into Colerige's freakin albatross around our corporate necks, haemorraging money faster than we can make it, what "inscentive" is there for me? I get to sit here and watch my "employee inscentive" turn to so much toilet paper, in spite of division-wide good financial and technical performance, because some PHB can't admit to his mistakes and chop off the dead wood dragging us down?
This isn't even taking into account random fluctuations in the market, or dot-bomb-esque scenarios... so now my pay is tied to market scares caused by Arthur Anderson, Enron, WorldCom, and every other two-bit schmuck who does the wall street equivalent of a smash n' grab?
Many democratic countries have laws restricting hate-speech... it's not like this is anything new.
Not to mention you're actually wrong. Let me know when consoles have even half of the top PC games of the last year - CS, RtCW, Tribes2, SoF2, the Sim/Civ games, MoH:AA, Dungeon Siege... and all the RTS type games. Heard any news of Warcraft 3 or Neverwinter Nights or Morrowind making it to console? No. they just don't work there.
Uhh... Counter-Strike and RtCW are both headed to Xbox, RtCW is also hitting PS2 and possibly gamecube... Morrowind: The Elder Scrolls is already out for Xbox, and is ranked number one by traffic on Gamespot, MoH:AA is appearing on PS2 as Medal of Honor: Frontline (and it's hella fun) The original SoF is already out for PS2, (as SoF Gold) and has been out for a while... I've seen RTS's for several consoles as well, such as Commandos 2, and SimCity2k was also available for the regular PlayStation. Saying that consoles do X and PC's do Y is rapidly becoming an invalid argument. While PC's still do some things better than consoles, and vice verca, I think that this line is going to become increasingly blurry as time goes on.
From someone else's point of view, the other guy may as well be me, However, from my point of view, I've been murdered, my body vaporized, and some other guy is now walking around with my memories.
A little offtopic, but Orson Scott Card has a short story very similar to this exact scenario called "Fat Farm", in his Maps in a Mirror collection...
The part about the Enrico Fermi I power plant at Detroit Edision is inaccurate. The plant is still alive and functioning today.
From what I read, they never said that the Fermi reactor shut down... just that it was too damned expensive to be practical... the other two, however...
Christopher Thomas wrote:
RTS games like Starcraft, Total Annihilation, and so forth are always popular, and shouldn't raise too much concern with parents.
Why is it that running around on a space station and shooting people (a la UT or Q3) is frowned upon by parents, but building up a small army and slaughtering opponents by the hundres (a la Starcraft/TA) is ok? Don't get me wrong, I like all the games mentioned above (except TA, only because I haven't played it yet). The irony of that statement just had to make me comment.
New moderation category? (-1, god, you need to get laid) Or maybe it should be (+1, god, you need to get laid). :)
My biggest beef with the previous two (three, if you count London) was the forced top-down perspective. While it's ok for low-speed navigation and running around the city, the fact is that just about any vehicle was near impossible to drive at high speeds anywhere, because you don't get enough of a view of the road ahead of you to avoid slow-moving or stopped traffic. The chasecam style perspective in GTA3 helps an immense amount in making those high speed getaways and running roadblocks, while maintaining consistent physics and handling of the vehicles.
Someone mod this funny, for crying out loud!
Or, knowing slashdot.... insightful...
grinwell wrote:
Oracle/Ellison don't show up in the top 25.
Just because it's not listed under Oracle/Ellison doesn't mean he's not in there... donating money through a PAC or another front (law firm?) seems easy enough. Add to this there are numerous other "favors" that Oracle/Ellison could have done that didn't involve handing Davis a big sack with dollar signs on it... with the added bonus that they don't have to appear on any financial disclosure statements. I'm not saying it happened, I'm just saying that because Oracle didn't directly contribute doesn't mean they didn't contribute at all.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 20:34:30 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Unix)
Content-Type: text/troll
Shoulda guessed. Too many 'junk' characters in an HTTP header? Damn that stupid lameness filter... I'd hate to try posting source code snippets now. Ugh!
Bands don't need middlemen who have turned into fat cats.
:)
Ah ha, but if you get out from under the RIAA's thumb, you still have to cough up to ASCAP/BMI.
Ambrosia's a neat company... I just wish they'd release EV, EVO or EV:N for some other platform besides Mac :-P *sigh*
Solaris, SCO, SunOS, AIX, IRIX, BSD, Tru64, HP-UX... there's probably a few I missed.
I wouldn't consider coding as "trying to get the software sold".... that's marketing's job :)
I have to agree with Carbonite... due to financial constraints (I was in college at the time :-) ) I missed out on the last generation or two of consoles... last one I had was a Sega Genesis way back in high school. There were alot of decent games that I missed out on during that hiatus, that I can now enjoy, as well as the latest and greatest titles for the PS2.
;) than say, an operating system or an office applications suite. .. we're talking about two different realms here. Game developers are pushing the limits of the software and hardware... if people want to play the games, they'll buy a system that can run the game, or not. If you break backwards compatibility in an OS or office suite and one of your major business contracts can't use the new OS/app because it breaks their multi-million dollar inventorying system, on the other hand... you're gonna have problems. To summarise, since PC's are used for a lot more than simple entertainment, it makes good business sense to support legacy applications. With gaming, it's not necessary.
As for the backwards compatibility issue... I don't think that we'll see the issues with backwards compatibility similar to those in the PC realm that were/are holding back OS development, the main reason being that consoles are much less mission-critical to many businesses (other than retail outlets and Sony, of course
But the real question is, did you feed the sandwitch to the dog before you got kicked out?
Correction... you WERE a moderator ;)