Obviously I don't want to just see old tedious content re-hashed, but many games with great storylines (like this one) could benifit greatly from something as simple as updated 3D models.
Obviously with titles like DN3D, Marathon, Dark Forces, Doom, etc you can't simply inject new full 3D models, but for existing older fully 3D titles, games like Jedi Knight, Driver, System Shock 2, etc., then adding new models and high resolution textures needent require any additional programming and could make an older game attractive again.
If you wanted to take things a little further, with a little map work to smooth things out and some additional coding to take advantage of lighting effects/bumpmapping then you can have a great looking-great playing title again with much less work (and cost) than creating a game from scratch, and you can reach out to all those who didn't play it (or finish it) first time round, and who maybe those who really enjoyed it and would love to play it again.
I'd love to play Jedi Knight again with Doom III quality models for example.
With the current speed of advancements in 3D hardware (and the future advancements still to come for quite a few years) I'm surprised firms aren't looking to capitalise on their existing assets.
It's tended (particulary in the past) to be easy to modify reasorce application forks to get around this sort of thing - using Apple's own freely downloadable reasource editing tool, ResEdit (or using a similar 3rd party reasource editing tool).
Years ago I once took a game demo off a cover disk (some sort of Global-Thermonuclear-Warfare-WWIII-type-stragegy sim) and made it into the full version by just tweaking around in a reasource editor, enabling hidden and disabled menus and options (so you could save games, and start other levels).
The same sort of thing is true of Mac OS X apps (though in a slightly different manner). A few months ago I downloaded a USB Alcatel Modem driver from a US web site.
The installer refused to installed because this was version 2.0 of the installer, and it required 1.0 to be installed first (which was no longer avalible). I opened up the installer, hacked the file which did the checking for this existing version (it turned out to be a bash script embedded in the installer) and installed it. Once it was installed I found I had to find the driver (it was somewhere like/System/Libraries/Extensions/Driver/Foo/Bar.ktext) and alter the hard coded line data to work with UK ADSL lines, but it was just an XML file being used for the driver definitions so was fairly trivial).
This is where the 'Macs are easier to use' idea comes from - it's not just easier on the surface (obviously Microsoft have made quite a few gains in this department, as has free software) - it's that they are nice to work with from a developer standpoint.
If your coding your program 'normally', using Reasource Forks (OS 9 and lower) or XML files (OS X and above) in the usual way, then you'd normally impliment something like time limiting in this manner, though obviously, as it's realatively easy to work around so many developers use obfuscation.
It's just to do with alternative paradigm for development that makes everything easy to open and edit. For example, with ResEdit, you can edit any applications menus and change the names, layout and shortcuts for a menu, colour the menus, graphically redesign the applications dialog boxes, change the layout and graphics for tool bars, even change all the spites, text and sound in a game and have it still function perfectly.
Obviously, this approach has big advantages for developers and users, I know many non technical users who just like to be able to add/customise menu shortcuts.
You could even hack the Finder to change the Window Manager style or trash can icons, most fun was hacking an actively running copy of the Finder!:)
That can cause *very* funky and amazingly weird things to happen!
I'd much rather run a busy ecommerce site under Zeus on a Solaris Sparc system than on Apache. Apache is the best all round web server IYAM (even cost aside), but Zeus is really quick. As for Solaris - it's not a great desktop platform (as a desktop OS, it's slower than Rain Main) but there is entirely no competition hardware wise in the high end server market.
It wouldn't be cost effective for any company other than Apple to use Xserver's in this way, I see the market as a good one for those who have altivec optimised software, or who need to run Mac OS specific software (including groups like web designers who may not be familer with Unix).
Everybody else is better off with lots of cheap x86 hardware, or a few decent multi processor Sun systems. To be honest, I have a hard time thinking that anyone would be better off with a cluster of Xserver's versus a slower but cheaper cluster of x86 clones or a more expensive but faster cluster of Sparc's.
I would certainly recommend Xserver's to design shops looking to host clients content, or to non technical commercial users looking to host commercial web sites, but that's it really.
Cisco's run an OS called IOS, most ISP's have Cisco Routers.
It could be that they have a seperate firewall, or that they are using Cisco PIX Firewalls (which are very standard, but not very good). Having a seperate firewall is very common.
I was being disparaging about dedicated commercial Firewalls because many are not very good (ipfw, ipchains, and iptables are all implimentations of free firwall tools that are more powerful than most commercial alternatives). This is not really important, but I mentioned it just as a suggestion why it might not work.
They may not have a seperate firewall (you can limit access to ports on a Cisco using IOS quite happily), so if they say 'we have no firewall' then it's likely to be a misconfiguration on one of their routers.
You say you have an IP address of 203.192.xxx.xxx, this is good, this an in2cable.com (India) address.
If your computers address is 10.xxx.xxx.xxx, 192.168.xxx.xxx or 172.16.xxx.xxx (e.g. 10.0.1.4 or 192.168.1.23, etc) then your more likely to have problems (these are 'private' addresses that are used by many organisations world wide, they are able to communicate with computers on the outside world using a router that handles Network Address Translation (NAT). Using NAT is okay for web surfing and email, but can stop you from using other protocols, like video converencing and some online games (as mentioned).
But if your PC has a dedicate address then this is not an issue.
As you can acess games on lower ports I think its got to be a configuration issue with either your or your ISP's configuration.
I suggest you call your ISP, make sure they know that you can connect to lower ports, but explain that it fails on higher ones. Usually you only get to speak to technical support staff, but you need to try and get to speak to a network engineer.
In2Cable have a lot of IP address assigned to them so I would expect them to be quite large, which means they probably have quite a bit of equipment, which means they probably have a good support contact.
They may only have a small number of people in the company who knows enough about the network to be able to resolve your fault (this is usually the case). I would ask them to raise a ticket with Cisco if they can't identify the issue. Cisco have excellent support and should be able to identify the misconfiguration on in2cables connection and resolve it for them.
Keep hassling them and ask them to try and reproduce the problem at their end! If you can get your call escalated to one of their network engineers, someone their will take a look (getting a problem escallated can be quite an effort though!). You've done everything you can to identify the problem, it's not really possible for you to do any more now, you'll need in2cable to inspect their network configuration.
Hmm, I've heard this I-can-see-game-servers-but-can't-log-on scenario before.
I think the most likely cause of this is either:
a) That your ISP is actually blocking these ports (possibly because they inadvertently because have a crappy firewall than mangles packets, which sadly happens quite a bit as a lot of 'standard industry equipment', like Check Point Firewall, is in fact utterly annoying and less powerful than ipchains (let alone iptables, or ipfw for that matter)).
or:
b) That you have an a non routable private IP for your home connection. 99% of dialup's have a real, internet routable IP, as do 99% of all DSL connections.
However, many (if not most) *cable* internet connections use private, non-routable IP's (in the range 10.X.X.X, 192.168.X.X or 172.16.X.X). This is generally because it makes life easier for them, unfortunately if you need to use a service which *requires* a dedicated IP because of the limitations of the protocol (like say, video conferencing, or online gaming) then you are out of luck.:(
I assume this is the case (if you check your network adapter, see if you have a 10.X.X.X, 192.168.X.X or 172.16.X.X address). If you do I don't think you will be able to play counter strike at all with your current ISP (unless they set-up a Counter Strike server on the same network, e.g. with a 10.X.X.X address and a real internet address (so external networks could also connect, giving you someone to play against;)).
I could be wrong about (b) in this case, because I don't know if CS requires these ports (I know the server does, but I don't know about the client). Someone who knows more about CS would be able to tell you for sure:)
HTH!
(If you'd like some more help, if you could post the name of your cable provider, that would help a lot.)
British Telecom pull the same kind of dirty tricks in the UK.
I had a friend try to get Easynet ADSL - BT still do the end user installs and testing, they said his line quality was too poor.
So he phoned BT to come round and do an ADSL install for BT's own BT OpenWorld install, which they did.
He then logged on to his BT supplied ADSL router (via their web based interface) and simply put in his Easynet authentication details and he was instantly routed through Easynet (I actually watched him do this, and saw it worked fine).
He called BT and obtained a full refund for his BT service (on the grounds they are lying weasles).
There service (even commercial ADSL) is awful in any case, they do all sorts of rate limiting and obvious firewalling and stupid routing tricks (even on coporate accounts with externally accessible IP's!) and then lie about it for months. They denied flat out rate limiting P2P clients, until hordes of P2P users got together, did network through put reports and went public with it (thus forcing BT to admit they had been lying to comsumers).
At another company, I worked on a software development contract where they broke our routing for two weeks due to a routing loop are were too utterly stupid to admit there service was broken, even though of other users in the same subnet were effected and I sent them endless trace routes.
Once they refused to open a ticket because 'routing loop' was not a valid fault type in their help desk software!
The next time I complained it turned out they simply closed right away without saying anything or getting in touch (after pretending it was still open for days, which I later was told was not true, by BT) - it was closed with the comment - 'insufficent data supplied'!
They had a routing loop for two weeks, I'd sent traceroutes, time and date stamped for the last four days, they have source, destination, time, and the two addresses on their network that were looping the traffic, as well as a working traceroute to the destiation via another provider, what did they want me to do? Log on to their router and fix it for them?
In response I sent them a URL to a technical article on 'How to trouble shoot BGB routing loops on a Cisco router', just to make a point.
Anyway, ultimately, the company I was working for refused to pay for the service, BT sent a nasty leagal letter back, saying they'd take the company to court for non payment and said we hadn't reported any faults, and that we were lying. The company I was working for fortunately had kept copies of all correspondance (letters and faxes, as well as emails) and sent an even nastier legal letter back, and untilately secured a grovelling apology from BT (and they were able to cancel the contract).
They are an utter disgrace and oftel ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Disclaimer: I now work for Easynet UK, though I didn't at the time of either of these (in fact for the latter I was able to presuade them to swtich to Easynet).
Actually quite a few stores - like GAME - take games back for a full refund (e.g. GAME take any game back within 10 days for *any* reason).
Depending on the game, they may be required to give you a refund under existing consumer protection laws - I took 'Need For Speed' for the Game Cube back because it was unfit for the purpose for which it was sold, namely the frame rate was so low it was utterly unplayable. I explained this to the store where I bought it and they said, yeah, okay, and I got my refund.
This is true of any game with glaring gameplay flaws or that performs poorly on a system which is recommened on the box.
If it's really not fit for purpose, take it back (within a reasonable, timely period, like 48 hours) state your reason and demand a refund.
It still hasn't been released for Solaris
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I note that Ximian Desktop 2.0 still hasn't been released for Solaris, despite Ximian claming it has been (see Press Release)>
Quote:
Red Carpet version 2.0 is available on a variety of Linux distributions, including:
* Red Hat 7.3, 8.0, 9
* SuSE 8.2
* Mandrake 9.1
* Solaris 8
Obviously Solaris is not a 'Linux distribution' but I would like to know when it (and if) it will actually be released for Solaris.
Building Gnome on Linux & FreeBSD is relatively painless compared to the non trivial task of building it on Solaris. Sadly, the avalible builds for Solaris, including Sun's own Gnome 2.0 build, are either very out dated or very limited (or a mixture of both). And it's not as if KDE is a viable alternative either, many of the applications, such as KDE's mail application are actually useable on Solaris (e.g. it does not display messages in the preview window).
I'd been looking forward to Ximan Desktop 2.0 as Ximain's 1.4 Desktop is much faster than Sun's 1.4 Desktop, which I've assumed are down to Ximian using GCC rather than Forte (as I've found that everything I've used compiled with Forte rather than GCC is much slower, for example, Mozilla).
So even if Sun are interested in releasing an up-to-date Gnome desktop (which despite promises, they don't seem to be), I can't see it being nearly as good a Ximian Desktop.
I would have thought that Solaris users are far more likely to be corporate users willing to shell out for such a package (and any support options) - particularly in environments that have a lot invested in low end Sparc Stations or Sun Ray environments. I wouldn't bother with it on Linux as most Linux distributions have good Gnome desktops in any case (and it's become trivial to build on Linux).
Does anyone know if it will actually be coming out for Solaris? Can Ximian comment?
Isn't your sig quote attributable to Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) rather than Douglas Adams?
Agree with Morrowind, it's a good and really engrossing game, but it has too many broken areas (uncompleteable missions) that could have been fixed with a little testing (and what's with the poorly limited draw distance? Even without optimisation most gaming systems can cope with more polys than the default gives you - power users should be able to increase it as far as their system can bear).
I'd rather have waited till till the bugs were gone and the engine had been a tweaked a little (the draw distance really being too poor, with some optimisation the XBox can do much beter) and had another 10 UKP slapped on the price (after all this game has *amazing* amounts of gameplay time and genuine replay value, I wouldn't have cared if it had been 80 UKP).
I'd love to see a new Morrowing with theses issues fixed - with that kind of game you could even simply increase the texture resolution and model detail (up the polygons, add a few more T&L effects), fix a few bugs and re-release the game in a a couple of years.
Only an idiot would state that 3D is the best thing about games
Nobody did, your just spoiling for a fight.
Lots of games have 2D prerendered background-- predrawn. Did you forget about Resident Evil?
No, but it seems like you did...Redident Evil's level and style of interaction would not be possible if the environment was 2D - the player has 3D movement avalible to them - can you imagine how much atmosphere would be lossed if the entire game was isomentric 2D?
Sure, Manic Mansion was great but it's hardly as atmostpheric (or, I'd argue as much fun as) as Resident Evil.
Erm you've got confused, I didn't mention Rampage. Your refering to another poster/thread.
I would take a game with acceptable graphics and good game play over great graphics and crap game play, but there are so many games with good graphics and good gameplay it's not as if it's a choice gamers have to make (something lost on the dolts round here who wouldn't know a decent video game if they played it).
There are quite a few decent games on the Palm OS and Pocket PC platform, 'Dope Wars'? If you think that's the be-all and end all of gaming on the Palm OS and PPC platform your better off with your mouth shut. 'Last you checked'? When the hell was that? 1996?
Companies like Hexacto make great games for mobile devices and there are loads of titles for Pocket PC like Sim City Origional & 2000, Need For Speed and origional titles like Mini Sports Bike (which has very rich 3D graphics), and that's not to mention Sega titles like Sonic.
If all the graphics are pre-drawn isometric 2D, you have a seriously limited level of interaction and immersion, for a start you can only face and move in directions that have been predrawn for you. This goes for every element in the game.
Which is the obvious point you don't seem to grasp, you also don't seem to understand how much this limits gameplay.
That's why new games tend to be in 3D, if you hadn't noticed.
But if you think this game looks like winner don't let me stop you! You must be one of those smucks that hang around the bargin bins in PC World looking for 4.99 stragegy games ('Yeah, the graphics are 10 years out of date but I love the gameplay!' 'Why no actually I don't play many games, why do you ask?').
I disagree entirely the the idea that screen shots don't mean very much 'these days' (as if they ment more in the past? - I think they are more relevent than ever), a game with great graphics might play poorly, but a game with lousy graphics will almost certainly suck.
Since when have was lousy graphics been a hall mark of a good game? If someone can't be bothered to make sure something looks good it's doubtful they have spent much time on the bit's you can't see. This is true of a lot of software, not just games.
You don't have to have the best graphics, but the engine does need to be sufficently complex to provide enough depth.
How many recent Good Titles with Bad Graphics can you think of?
A lot of people tout the idea that it's gameplay and not graphics that count as if graphics don't matter - if you don't have a good graphics engine in a game that relies on graphical interaction between the player and their surroundings you can't immerse the player in the game and you can't provide a deep enough level of interaction to keep them entertained.
You can easily tell a lot about the intended gameplay from looking at screen shots of a game, that should be blatantly obvious, and there are quite a lot of screen shots avalible on the site (as well as from the gameplay movies provided on that site).
Even the developers of this game think it's possible to get an idea of the gameplay from looking at images of the game (that's why they have 'gameplay movies' on the site).
You can see what the player is being asked to do and the type of objectives they will be asked to meet, what obstacle's they will face, and what the good and bad points of the game will likely be, simply by paying careful attention to the information avalible to you.
For example, you'll take the form of various B-Movie monsters and have to destroy a series of buildings and mouments (outlined at the start of the level) before you get killed by various helicopters, planes and other assorted defense forces. You'll be able to destory other buildings and vehicles and use special charecter specific moves along the way. You won't have complete freedom of movement as all graphics are pre-rendered, and you won't be able to switch to a first person viewpoint. The gameplay will be limited as the potential for havock will be constrained to what's possible in a 2D isometric game. It doesn't look like you'll be able to zoom in or out, or fly above builings. Other mission types may well be avalible.
Look at the Half Life 2 screen shots and movies, you don't have to have played or even know about the previous title to see from the information avalible how much time, thought, and creativity has been put into this game and that if even a small proportion of what's been shown is present in the finished title that it's shaping up to be a really good game, and there is arguably much less information about Half Life 2 avalible than about this game.
So how can you tell what something will be like from still images and movies? By looking and using your noodle
From looking at the screen shots both the graphics and gameplay (and you can get a good idea of the gameplay from looking at the screen grabs provided) seem to be extremly poor.
It looks like they have spent quite a bit of time on the roads/buildings/people, which is good, but I'm certain there are a lot of alternative ideas for gameplay that would be able to sell this underlying engine better than the idea they currently have.
I think it's perfectly possible to come up with good ideas that don't rely on 3D, but for a game with the concept this one has (which relies largley on the coolness factor of destroying things) it would seem to cry out for cool 3D graphics and alpha blended explosions - *something* to keep the player entertained (as I think the minor amusement of destorying things as a big monster in the current environment will wear off before the first level is complete).
There are hundreds of small time developer outfits producing great games (like Ambrosia Software), I fail to see the point of an article about a game that, quite frankly, is crap, when there are plenty of small time developers turning out good low budget shareware and freeware titles (in particular there are many excellent games in this category for Palm OS and Pocket PC).
I appreciate that harsh critisim is hard for the developers to hear, but:
There are free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech games out there that have more appealing graphics and gameplay premises.
I think that when people spend time writing god awful software it's only fair to call it as it is, it's crap and no one in their right mind is going to want to buy it.
How many non A/C account holders think this game is cool and would buy it, really?
I don't think that many people bought it in the first place for that to work. A better tactic would be to inundate
BUT those individuals and corporations who did buy it can sue for being missold a product which they are unable to use and which subsequently cost them money to resolve (i.e. by noting that they had to purchase new operating systems, or even operating platforms, they can even cite costs in the form of reasources, like time spent by staff installing new operating systems or distributions).
Even if SCO decided to grant a limited license to these customers, they can claim to have been forced to take action because of the confusion caused by SCO and their inaction to resolve the issue. It would be advisable for these companies and individuals to formally request comment by SCO now, so they have something to help bolster their case in court (as no dobut, SCO will stall them too).
I would think customers who purchased AFTER SCO made these allegations would stand a particularly good chance.
Of course, the current events (as has already been speculated in reputable financial press) are merely a ruse to increase Caldera's IP value in order to expediate a buy out, initialy by IBM (who they have probably pissed off far to much by now), but ultimately by somebody (anybody, quick before we go into administration!).
This is why the exact details of the code have not been released (again, as as already been speculated in the finiancial & business media) - it is purely to protract the proceedings for as long as possible, thus increasing their chances of being acquired.
I think however, their goods are now so tained the only company that might be interested in purchasing them are Microsoft..
The current version Graffiti 2 (which uses Jot) does not infringe on any Xerox patents.
Thumbboards are popular because consumers like them.
Most people, long term palm owners included, find no difference in speed between a Graffiti system and a thumbboard, the added advantage of a thumbboard being that you don't need to learn how to use it. Plenty of reviews on Palm sites, like PalmInfoCenter, have come to this conclusion.
I think good hand writing recongnition (as found in on later Newtons) is faster however, but to use it effectively you need a physically larger (Newton-)sized screen, which current PDA's do not have.
I can't remember what the CX=0 error was exactly, or what the '???'s were (hindsight being 20/20 I wish I had been paying more attention). I was a distinctly odd error though, and it did happen identically, twice, between valid returns of a.com.
I totally agree that it doesn't seem to have ever been a problem at PIR.
A transiant problem, such as a network outage might be a good explanation and something I did speculate to myself (if the origional whois server (or even client) wasn't able to get/return valid data, and it wasn't trapping errors correctly, the output might be munged).
I see The Register have now said there definately was a problem with.net domains - has anyone else substantiated that..?
Actually I belive their was a real 'issue' (I hesitate to use the word 'problem') this afernoon (at least at around 12:47 BST), and it was fixed at that time.
It seems there is disagreement and confusion around what the problem was, but there was one, and something was done to aleviate it not much more than a minute after this article was posted. I think a lot of people where confused as to what was, but I think I might be able to shed a rather dim light on it. Unhelpfully, I can't tell you what the issue was but I can give you the symptoms..
I tried the following series of lookups from FreeBSD (using the default FreeBSD whois) all in the space of a minute:
whois slashdot.org - Returned Broken Entry whois slashdot.com - Worked whois slashdot.org - Returned Broken Entry whois slashdot.com - Worked whois slashdot.org - Worked
All further lookups for *.org using the default whois server on FreeBSD's whois return fine. I didn't retype these commands (used the UP arrow to cyle through the previous command in my history) so it's not as if I made a spelling mistake.
The 'Broken Entries' had the domain but did not return any contact information, and instead stopped short and returned what looked like an error code at the end.
As I've said this appeared to be fixed just after this article was posted (almost immediately so), so it's evident to me that the status of something was changed (and someone is not owning up to it).
Sadly, you'll have to take my word on this, my scroll buffer in gnome-terminal was too short (due to it eating up memory and processor speed for reasons I'm too lazy to investigate) and the buffer is gone for ever (thanks the the overly long disclamiers present on whois lookups).
Still, the ps2 is more powerful than the dc (albeit not to the extent that everyone at first thought)
Sure I'd certainly agreee with that (I'm not - for the most part - a ditractor of Sony's, I own a lot of Sony equipment).
DOA2 was a straight port from the dc (in fact the dc version looked a little better cos of the AA) and was rushed out in the first couple of months of ps2's life,
This is true, but I really don't feel they should have needed to turn off certain effects and trim down the number of poloygons used just to get an old port to play at a reasonable frame rate on a much newer whizz bang console.
a fairer comparison might be between GT3 and Project Gotham (xbos still wins but by a consderably smaller margin).
I thought GT3 was actually quite a bit more accomplished than Project Gotham (which I felt was little more than a straight port of the engine from the Dreamcasts MSR). I didn't even feel the engine in Project Gotham was much better than the one in MSR, there was enough for it to be noticeable when you look, but not enough that it would alter the engjoyment of the game.
As for super mario 64 not being well received, I've never heard such rubbish, it was the first truly brilliant adaptation of a conventional genre into 3d and is still widely regarded as the worlds best 3d platformer (yes better than mario sunshine which I admit was a disappointement).
I guess we differ on that one.
I honestly think that Super Mario 64 was not great, though part of that might be my overwhelming frustration at the low resolution of the N64. Though as I've said I found the actual level design/progression in Mario Sunshine annoying and poor, I loved the control mechanim and thought it was much better than Mario 64 (though I think that the levels in Mario 64 were better, dispite being rendered so badly by the N64).
Personally, my vote for best 3D platformer, which I appreciate is a little unconventional (and that most people would vote for Mario 64), is DC:Sonic Adventure, I found it stunning and I think it's my second most memorable gaming experience after Doom II.
Using Ceefax/Teletext for online chat (and stuff)
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Yes that sounds exactly like the CeeFax service in UK (I wonder if Holland were one of the companies to use it or if they had their own service?).
It has basically news, some local events (cinema listings), forecast, horoscopes, share price information, newsletters, jokes, that kind of thing. In the pre-www days (when Gopher and BBS's were all the rage) there used to be quite a few online magazines and jokes and kids stuff, and a few online quizzes, which have died out (they were really quite good at the time).
The service was entirely non ineractive, there were a few quizzes and things, where you could press a button depending on what you thought the answer was (Red, Green, Yellow or Blue, buttons you will see on almost every UK TV set to this day, as they are also useful for Ceefax/Teletext's digital sucessor, which is a bit more interactive and renders a bit like IE 3.0). These systems used a bit of 'URL trikery' to achive this though (pages are refered to with three digit numbers, not URLs, but you get the idea).
e.g. Page 100 for the index, page 200 for News, page 121 for 'TV: Now and Next' (followed by a list of channels). For the benifit of those who've never seen it the screen can be opaque on appear super-imposed on the TV image (ala TiVo, but as if the text was rendered by some not much more powerful than an Intellivision).
I remeber I used it for something stupid a couple of times, people could log onto the Gamesmaster BBS in London and go into a chat room, then the conversation from that chatroom was avalible super-imposed on the screen in real time all over the country (as with close captioning), via the Subtitles IIRC (most UK handsets also have a button marked 'Subtitles' which is page 888 of the Ceefax/Telext service). This was early 90's I think.
Typing on a computer in real time and watching what you typed come up on the TV where millions of people would be able to see it was amazingly cool (though I think about 10 people probably saw it;-), especially when you only have 4 TV channels in the country (as was the case at the time).
Ah memories (and a stupid hack wasted on many:-). I wonder who thought that up...
Re:French using out dated technology, Film at 11!
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This is certainly very true, as a business it was in the end a bomb; a terminal cost three times a much as a TV, (though the more basic origional Ceefax element was widely used thanks to the BBC's Oracle service (the idea having been a development from the BBC's R&D department), a feature supported by all most all UK TV's). It was simply the technology that was the star.
I think it was partly being too early, partly too expensive and partly poor marketing. I'd be interested to hear what any origional Prestel employees thought were the reasons (it's always interesting for me to hear why seeminly good technologies fail).
Re:French using out dated technology, Film at 11!
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It was created and controlled by one company. That's it. Nothing xenophobic about it.
No, it was created and funded by the French government.
their Import and Export policies
Is the same as any member of the Schengen treaty.
I have no quarrel with the handling of the Schengen Agreement by the French government. I do have a problem with their government frequently and consistantly flaunt EU directives on importing and exporting goods in order to suit their own ends - in a manner unlike all other EU members.
If you can show me that for years MILLIONS of people have used BBS's then you are right
How about I point out that over a dozen other nations used the Ceefax service and have been using it for longer than anyone has been using Minitel?
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I'd like to see game developers do this more.
Obviously I don't want to just see old tedious content re-hashed, but many games with great storylines (like this one) could benifit greatly from something as simple as updated 3D models.
Obviously with titles like DN3D, Marathon, Dark Forces, Doom, etc you can't simply inject new full 3D models, but for existing older fully 3D titles, games like Jedi Knight, Driver, System Shock 2, etc., then adding new models and high resolution textures needent require any additional programming and could make an older game attractive again.
If you wanted to take things a little further, with a little map work to smooth things out and some additional coding to take advantage of lighting effects/bumpmapping then you can have a great looking-great playing title again with much less work (and cost) than creating a game from scratch, and you can reach out to all those who didn't play it (or finish it) first time round, and who maybe those who really enjoyed it and would love to play it again.
I'd love to play Jedi Knight again with Doom III quality models for example.
With the current speed of advancements in 3D hardware (and the future advancements still to come for quite a few years) I'm surprised firms aren't looking to capitalise on their existing assets.
It's tended (particulary in the past) to be easy to modify reasorce application forks to get around this sort of thing - using Apple's own freely downloadable reasource editing tool, ResEdit (or using a similar 3rd party reasource editing tool).
/System/Libraries/Extensions/Driver/Foo/Bar.ktext) and alter the hard coded line data to work with UK ADSL lines, but it was just an XML file being used for the driver definitions so was fairly trivial).
:)
Years ago I once took a game demo off a cover disk (some sort of Global-Thermonuclear-Warfare-WWIII-type-stragegy sim) and made it into the full version by just tweaking around in a reasource editor, enabling hidden and disabled menus and options (so you could save games, and start other levels).
The same sort of thing is true of Mac OS X apps (though in a slightly different manner). A few months ago I downloaded a USB Alcatel Modem driver from a US web site.
The installer refused to installed because this was version 2.0 of the installer, and it required 1.0 to be installed first (which was no longer avalible). I opened up the installer, hacked the file which did the checking for this existing version (it turned out to be a bash script embedded in the installer) and installed it. Once it was installed I found I had to find the driver (it was somewhere like
This is where the 'Macs are easier to use' idea comes from - it's not just easier on the surface (obviously Microsoft have made quite a few gains in this department, as has free software) - it's that they are nice to work with from a developer standpoint.
If your coding your program 'normally', using Reasource Forks (OS 9 and lower) or XML files (OS X and above) in the usual way, then you'd normally impliment something like time limiting in this manner, though obviously, as it's realatively easy to work around so many developers use obfuscation.
It's just to do with alternative paradigm for development that makes everything easy to open and edit. For example, with ResEdit, you can edit any applications menus and change the names, layout and shortcuts for a menu, colour the menus, graphically redesign the applications dialog boxes, change the layout and graphics for tool bars, even change all the spites, text and sound in a game and have it still function perfectly.
Obviously, this approach has big advantages for developers and users, I know many non technical users who just like to be able to add/customise menu shortcuts.
You could even hack the Finder to change the Window Manager style or trash can icons, most fun was hacking an actively running copy of the Finder!
That can cause *very* funky and amazingly weird things to happen!
I'd much rather run a busy ecommerce site under Zeus on a Solaris Sparc system than on Apache. Apache is the best all round web server IYAM (even cost aside), but Zeus is really quick. As for Solaris - it's not a great desktop platform (as a desktop OS, it's slower than Rain Main) but there is entirely no competition hardware wise in the high end server market.
It wouldn't be cost effective for any company other than Apple to use Xserver's in this way, I see the market as a good one for those who have altivec optimised software, or who need to run Mac OS specific software (including groups like web designers who may not be familer with Unix).
Everybody else is better off with lots of cheap x86 hardware, or a few decent multi processor Sun systems. To be honest, I have a hard time thinking that anyone would be better off with a cluster of Xserver's versus a slower but cheaper cluster of x86 clones or a more expensive but faster cluster of Sparc's.
I would certainly recommend Xserver's to design shops looking to host clients content, or to non technical commercial users looking to host commercial web sites, but that's it really.
Cisco's run an OS called IOS, most ISP's have Cisco Routers.
.
It could be that they have a seperate firewall, or that they are using Cisco PIX Firewalls (which are very standard, but not very good). Having a seperate firewall is very common.
I was being disparaging about dedicated commercial Firewalls because many are not very good (ipfw, ipchains, and iptables are all implimentations of free firwall tools that are more powerful than most commercial alternatives). This is not really important, but I mentioned it just as a suggestion why it might not work
They may not have a seperate firewall (you can limit access to ports on a Cisco using IOS quite happily), so if they say 'we have no firewall' then it's likely to be a misconfiguration on one of their routers.
You say you have an IP address of 203.192.xxx.xxx, this is good, this an in2cable.com (India) address.
If your computers address is 10.xxx.xxx.xxx, 192.168.xxx.xxx or 172.16.xxx.xxx (e.g. 10.0.1.4 or 192.168.1.23, etc) then your more likely to have problems (these are 'private' addresses that are used by many organisations world wide, they are able to communicate with computers on the outside world using a router that handles Network Address Translation (NAT). Using NAT is okay for web surfing and email, but can stop you from using other protocols, like video converencing and some online games (as mentioned).
But if your PC has a dedicate address then this is not an issue.
As you can acess games on lower ports I think its got to be a configuration issue with either your or your ISP's configuration.
I suggest you call your ISP, make sure they know that you can connect to lower ports, but explain that it fails on higher ones. Usually you only get to speak to technical support staff, but you need to try and get to speak to a network engineer.
In2Cable have a lot of IP address assigned to them so I would expect them to be quite large, which means they probably have quite a bit of equipment, which means they probably have a good support contact.
They may only have a small number of people in the company who knows enough about the network to be able to resolve your fault (this is usually the case). I would ask them to raise a ticket with Cisco if they can't identify the issue. Cisco have excellent support and should be able to identify the misconfiguration on in2cables connection and resolve it for them.
Keep hassling them and ask them to try and reproduce the problem at their end! If you can get your call escalated to one of their network engineers, someone their will take a look (getting a problem escallated can be quite an effort though!). You've done everything you can to identify the problem, it's not really possible for you to do any more now, you'll need in2cable to inspect their network configuration.
Good Luck!
Hmm, I've heard this I-can-see-game-servers-but-can't-log-on scenario before.
:(
;)).
:)
I think the most likely cause of this is either:
a) That your ISP is actually blocking these ports (possibly because they inadvertently because have a crappy firewall than mangles packets, which sadly happens quite a bit as a lot of 'standard industry equipment', like Check Point Firewall, is in fact utterly annoying and less powerful than ipchains (let alone iptables, or ipfw for that matter)).
or:
b) That you have an a non routable private IP for your home connection. 99% of dialup's have a real, internet routable IP, as do 99% of all DSL connections.
However, many (if not most) *cable* internet connections use private, non-routable IP's (in the range 10.X.X.X, 192.168.X.X or 172.16.X.X). This is generally because it makes life easier for them, unfortunately if you need to use a service which *requires* a dedicated IP because of the limitations of the protocol (like say, video conferencing, or online gaming) then you are out of luck.
I assume this is the case (if you check your network adapter, see if you have a 10.X.X.X, 192.168.X.X or 172.16.X.X address). If you do I don't think you will be able to play counter strike at all with your current ISP (unless they set-up a Counter Strike server on the same network, e.g. with a 10.X.X.X address and a real internet address (so external networks could also connect, giving you someone to play against
I could be wrong about (b) in this case, because I don't know if CS requires these ports (I know the server does, but I don't know about the client). Someone who knows more about CS would be able to tell you for sure
HTH!
(If you'd like some more help, if you could post the name of your cable provider, that would help a lot.)
British Telecom pull the same kind of dirty tricks in the UK.
I had a friend try to get Easynet ADSL - BT still do the end user installs and testing, they said his line quality was too poor.
So he phoned BT to come round and do an ADSL install for BT's own BT OpenWorld install, which they did.
He then logged on to his BT supplied ADSL router (via their web based interface) and simply put in his Easynet authentication details and he was instantly routed through Easynet (I actually watched him do this, and saw it worked fine).
He called BT and obtained a full refund for his BT service (on the grounds they are lying weasles).
There service (even commercial ADSL) is awful in any case, they do all sorts of rate limiting and obvious firewalling and stupid routing tricks (even on coporate accounts with externally accessible IP's!) and then lie about it for months. They denied flat out rate limiting P2P clients, until hordes of P2P users got together, did network through put reports and went public with it (thus forcing BT to admit they had been lying to comsumers).
At another company, I worked on a software development contract where they broke our routing for two weeks due to a routing loop are were too utterly stupid to admit there service was broken, even though of other users in the same subnet were effected and I sent them endless trace routes.
Once they refused to open a ticket because 'routing loop' was not a valid fault type in their help desk software!
The next time I complained it turned out they simply closed right away without saying anything or getting in touch (after pretending it was still open for days, which I later was told was not true, by BT) - it was closed with the comment - 'insufficent data supplied'!
They had a routing loop for two weeks, I'd sent traceroutes, time and date stamped for the last four days, they have source, destination, time, and the two addresses on their network that were looping the traffic, as well as a working traceroute to the destiation via another provider, what did they want me to do? Log on to their router and fix it for them?
In response I sent them a URL to a technical article on 'How to trouble shoot BGB routing loops on a Cisco router', just to make a point.
Anyway, ultimately, the company I was working for refused to pay for the service, BT sent a nasty leagal letter back, saying they'd take the company to court for non payment and said we hadn't reported any faults, and that we were lying. The company I was working for fortunately had kept copies of all correspondance (letters and faxes, as well as emails) and sent an even nastier legal letter back, and untilately secured a grovelling apology from BT (and they were able to cancel the contract).
They are an utter disgrace and oftel ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Disclaimer: I now work for Easynet UK, though I didn't at the time of either of these (in fact for the latter I was able to presuade them to swtich to Easynet).
Actually quite a few stores - like GAME - take games back for a full refund (e.g. GAME take any game back within 10 days for *any* reason).
Depending on the game, they may be required to give you a refund under existing consumer protection laws - I took 'Need For Speed' for the Game Cube back because it was unfit for the purpose for which it was sold, namely the frame rate was so low it was utterly unplayable. I explained this to the store where I bought it and they said, yeah, okay, and I got my refund.
This is true of any game with glaring gameplay flaws or that performs poorly on a system which is recommened on the box.
If it's really not fit for purpose, take it back (within a reasonable, timely period, like 48 hours) state your reason and demand a refund.
I note that Ximian Desktop 2.0 still hasn't been released for Solaris, despite Ximian claming it has been (see Press Release)>
Quote:
Red Carpet version 2.0 is available on a variety of Linux distributions, including:
* Red Hat 7.3, 8.0, 9
* SuSE 8.2
* Mandrake 9.1
* Solaris 8
Obviously Solaris is not a 'Linux distribution' but I would like to know when it (and if) it will actually be released for Solaris.
Building Gnome on Linux & FreeBSD is relatively painless compared to the non trivial task of building it on Solaris. Sadly, the avalible builds for Solaris, including Sun's own Gnome 2.0 build, are either very out dated or very limited (or a mixture of both). And it's not as if KDE is a viable alternative either, many of the applications, such as KDE's mail application are actually useable on Solaris (e.g. it does not display messages in the preview window).
I'd been looking forward to Ximan Desktop 2.0 as Ximain's 1.4 Desktop is much faster than Sun's 1.4 Desktop, which I've assumed are down to Ximian using GCC rather than Forte (as I've found that everything I've used compiled with Forte rather than GCC is much slower, for example, Mozilla).
So even if Sun are interested in releasing an up-to-date Gnome desktop (which despite promises, they don't seem to be), I can't see it being nearly as good a Ximian Desktop.
I would have thought that Solaris users are far more likely to be corporate users willing to shell out for such a package (and any support options) - particularly in environments that have a lot invested in low end Sparc Stations or Sun Ray environments. I wouldn't bother with it on Linux as most Linux distributions have good Gnome desktops in any case (and it's become trivial to build on Linux).
Does anyone know if it will actually be coming out for Solaris? Can Ximian comment?
Hi,
Isn't your sig quote attributable to Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) rather than Douglas Adams?
Agree with Morrowind, it's a good and really engrossing game, but it has too many broken areas (uncompleteable missions) that could have been fixed with a little testing (and what's with the poorly limited draw distance? Even without optimisation most gaming systems can cope with more polys than the default gives you - power users should be able to increase it as far as their system can bear).
I'd rather have waited till till the bugs were gone and the engine had been a tweaked a little (the draw distance really being too poor, with some optimisation the XBox can do much beter) and had another 10 UKP slapped on the price (after all this game has *amazing* amounts of gameplay time and genuine replay value, I wouldn't have cared if it had been 80 UKP).
I'd love to see a new Morrowing with theses issues fixed - with that kind of game you could even simply increase the texture resolution and model detail (up the polygons, add a few more T&L effects), fix a few bugs and re-release the game in a a couple of years.
Only an idiot would state that 3D is the best thing about games
Nobody did, your just spoiling for a fight.
Lots of games have 2D prerendered background-- predrawn. Did you forget about Resident Evil?
No, but it seems like you did...Redident Evil's level and style of interaction would not be possible if the environment was 2D - the player has 3D movement avalible to them - can you imagine how much atmosphere would be lossed if the entire game was isomentric 2D?
Sure, Manic Mansion was great but it's hardly as atmostpheric (or, I'd argue as much fun as) as Resident Evil.
Erm you've got confused, I didn't mention Rampage. Your refering to another poster/thread.
I would take a game with acceptable graphics and good game play over great graphics and crap game play, but there are so many games with good graphics and good gameplay it's not as if it's a choice gamers have to make (something lost on the dolts round here who wouldn't know a decent video game if they played it).
There are quite a few decent games on the Palm OS and Pocket PC platform, 'Dope Wars'? If you think that's the be-all and end all of gaming on the Palm OS and PPC platform your better off with your mouth shut. 'Last you checked'? When the hell was that? 1996?
Companies like Hexacto make great games for mobile devices and there are loads of titles for Pocket PC like Sim City Origional & 2000, Need For Speed and origional titles like Mini Sports Bike (which has very rich 3D graphics), and that's not to mention Sega titles like Sonic.
If all the graphics are pre-drawn isometric 2D, you have a seriously limited level of interaction and immersion, for a start you can only face and move in directions that have been predrawn for you. This goes for every element in the game.
Which is the obvious point you don't seem to grasp, you also don't seem to understand how much this limits gameplay.
That's why new games tend to be in 3D, if you hadn't noticed.
But if you think this game looks like winner don't let me stop you! You must be one of those smucks that hang around the bargin bins in PC World looking for 4.99 stragegy games ('Yeah, the graphics are 10 years out of date but I love the gameplay!' 'Why no actually I don't play many games, why do you ask?').
They have gameplay movies demo'ing the game play.
I disagree entirely the the idea that screen shots don't mean very much 'these days' (as if they ment more in the past? - I think they are more relevent than ever), a game with great graphics might play poorly, but a game with lousy graphics will almost certainly suck.
Since when have was lousy graphics been a hall mark of a good game? If someone can't be bothered to make sure something looks good it's doubtful they have spent much time on the bit's you can't see. This is true of a lot of software, not just games.
You don't have to have the best graphics, but the engine does need to be sufficently complex to provide enough depth.
How many recent Good Titles with Bad Graphics can you think of?
A lot of people tout the idea that it's gameplay and not graphics that count as if graphics don't matter - if you don't have a good graphics engine in a game that relies on graphical interaction between the player and their surroundings you can't immerse the player in the game and you can't provide a deep enough level of interaction to keep them entertained.
You can easily tell a lot about the intended gameplay from looking at screen shots of a game, that should be blatantly obvious, and there are quite a lot of screen shots avalible on the site (as well as from the gameplay movies provided on that site).
Even the developers of this game think it's possible to get an idea of the gameplay from looking at images of the game (that's why they have 'gameplay movies' on the site).
You can see what the player is being asked to do and the type of objectives they will be asked to meet, what obstacle's they will face, and what the good and bad points of the game will likely be, simply by paying careful attention to the information avalible to you.
For example, you'll take the form of various B-Movie monsters and have to destroy a series of buildings and mouments (outlined at the start of the level) before you get killed by various helicopters, planes and other assorted defense forces. You'll be able to destory other buildings and vehicles and use special charecter specific moves along the way. You won't have complete freedom of movement as all graphics are pre-rendered, and you won't be able to switch to a first person viewpoint. The gameplay will be limited as the potential for havock will be constrained to what's possible in a 2D isometric game. It doesn't look like you'll be able to zoom in or out, or fly above builings. Other mission types may well be avalible.
Look at the Half Life 2 screen shots and movies, you don't have to have played or even know about the previous title to see from the information avalible how much time, thought, and creativity has been put into this game and that if even a small proportion of what's been shown is present in the finished title that it's shaping up to be a really good game, and there is arguably much less information about Half Life 2 avalible than about this game.
So how can you tell what something will be like from still images and movies? By looking and using your noodle
From looking at the screen shots both the graphics and gameplay (and you can get a good idea of the gameplay from looking at the screen grabs provided) seem to be extremly poor.
It looks like they have spent quite a bit of time on the roads/buildings/people, which is good, but I'm certain there are a lot of alternative ideas for gameplay that would be able to sell this underlying engine better than the idea they currently have.
I think it's perfectly possible to come up with good ideas that don't rely on 3D, but for a game with the concept this one has (which relies largley on the coolness factor of destroying things) it would seem to cry out for cool 3D graphics and alpha blended explosions - *something* to keep the player entertained (as I think the minor amusement of destorying things as a big monster in the current environment will wear off before the first level is complete).
There are hundreds of small time developer outfits producing great games (like Ambrosia Software), I fail to see the point of an article about a game that, quite frankly, is crap, when there are plenty of small time developers turning out good low budget shareware and freeware titles (in particular there are many excellent games in this category for Palm OS and Pocket PC).
I appreciate that harsh critisim is hard for the developers to hear, but:
There are free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech games out there that have more appealing graphics and gameplay premises.
I think that when people spend time writing god awful software it's only fair to call it as it is, it's crap and no one in their right mind is going to want to buy it.
How many non A/C account holders think this game is cool and would buy it, really?
I don't think that many people bought it in the first place for that to work. A better tactic would be to inundate
BUT those individuals and corporations who did buy it can sue for being missold a product which they are unable to use and which subsequently cost them money to resolve (i.e. by noting that they had to purchase new operating systems, or even operating platforms, they can even cite costs in the form of reasources, like time spent by staff installing new operating systems or distributions).
Even if SCO decided to grant a limited license to these customers, they can claim to have been forced to take action because of the confusion caused by SCO and their inaction to resolve the issue. It would be advisable for these companies and individuals to formally request comment by SCO now, so they have something to help bolster their case in court (as no dobut, SCO will stall them too).
I would think customers who purchased AFTER SCO made these allegations would stand a particularly good chance.
Of course, the current events (as has already been speculated in reputable financial press) are merely a ruse to increase Caldera's IP value in order to expediate a buy out, initialy by IBM (who they have probably pissed off far to much by now), but ultimately by somebody (anybody, quick before we go into administration!).
This is why the exact details of the code have not been released (again, as as already been speculated in the finiancial & business media) - it is purely to protract the proceedings for as long as possible, thus increasing their chances of being acquired.
I think however, their goods are now so tained the only company that might be interested in purchasing them are Microsoft..
That's not the correct answer, that's nonsense.
The current version Graffiti 2 (which uses Jot) does not infringe on any Xerox patents.
Thumbboards are popular because consumers like them.
Most people, long term palm owners included, find no difference in speed between a Graffiti system and a thumbboard, the added advantage of a thumbboard being that you don't need to learn how to use it. Plenty of reviews on Palm sites, like PalmInfoCenter, have come to this conclusion.
I think good hand writing recongnition (as found in on later Newtons) is faster however, but to use it effectively you need a physically larger (Newton-)sized screen, which current PDA's do not have.
This model has Sony's 'high powered' ir port.
:/
I'm pretty sure all Sony models in the last 3 years had this feature, my year old NR70 does.
An OmniRemote dongle to boost IR has been avalible for years too.
I agree, this is a really dumb article.
Interesting.
.com.
.net domains - has anyone else substantiated that..?
FWIW the 'broken' entry wasn't NONAUTHORITATIVE, it was something (and I use the term loosely) like:
>whois slashdot.org
usual discalimer was here...
Domain: slashdot.org
???: ????
???: CX=0
???: ????
I can't remember what the CX=0 error was exactly, or what the '???'s were (hindsight being 20/20 I wish I had been paying more attention). I was a distinctly odd error though, and it did happen identically, twice, between valid returns of a
I totally agree that it doesn't seem to have ever been a problem at PIR.
A transiant problem, such as a network outage might be a good explanation and something I did speculate to myself (if the origional whois server (or even client) wasn't able to get/return valid data, and it wasn't trapping errors correctly, the output might be munged).
I see The Register have now said there definately was a problem with
Actually I belive their was a real 'issue' (I hesitate to use the word 'problem') this afernoon (at least at around 12:47 BST), and it was fixed at that time.
It seems there is disagreement and confusion around what the problem was, but there was one, and something was done to aleviate it not much more than a minute after this article was posted. I think a lot of people where confused as to what was, but I think I might be able to shed a rather dim light on it. Unhelpfully, I can't tell you what the issue was but I can give you the symptoms..
I tried the following series of lookups from FreeBSD (using the default FreeBSD whois) all in the space of a minute:
whois slashdot.org - Returned Broken Entry
whois slashdot.com - Worked
whois slashdot.org - Returned Broken Entry
whois slashdot.com - Worked
whois slashdot.org - Worked
All further lookups for *.org using the default whois server on FreeBSD's whois return fine. I didn't retype these commands (used the UP arrow to cyle through the previous command in my history) so it's not as if I made a spelling mistake.
The 'Broken Entries' had the domain but did not return any contact information, and instead stopped short and returned what looked like an error code at the end.
As I've said this appeared to be fixed just after this article was posted (almost immediately so), so it's evident to me that the status of something was changed (and someone is not owning up to it).
Sadly, you'll have to take my word on this, my scroll buffer in gnome-terminal was too short (due to it eating up memory and processor speed for reasons I'm too lazy to investigate) and the buffer is gone for ever (thanks the the overly long disclamiers present on whois lookups).
My 2c.
Still, the ps2 is more powerful than the dc (albeit not to the extent that everyone at first thought)
Sure I'd certainly agreee with that (I'm not - for the most part - a ditractor of Sony's, I own a lot of Sony equipment).
DOA2 was a straight port from the dc (in fact the dc version looked a little better cos of the AA) and was rushed out in the first couple of months of ps2's life,
This is true, but I really don't feel they should have needed to turn off certain effects and trim down the number of poloygons used just to get an old port to play at a reasonable frame rate on a much newer whizz bang console.
a fairer comparison might be between GT3 and Project Gotham (xbos still wins but by a consderably smaller margin).
I thought GT3 was actually quite a bit more accomplished than Project Gotham (which I felt was little more than a straight port of the engine from the Dreamcasts MSR). I didn't even feel the engine in Project Gotham was much better than the one in MSR, there was enough for it to be noticeable when you look, but not enough that it would alter the engjoyment of the game.
As for super mario 64 not being well received, I've never heard such rubbish, it was the first truly brilliant adaptation of a conventional genre into 3d and is still widely regarded as the worlds best 3d platformer (yes better than mario sunshine which I admit was a disappointement).
I guess we differ on that one.
I honestly think that Super Mario 64 was not great, though part of that might be my overwhelming frustration at the low resolution of the N64. Though as I've said I found the actual level design/progression in Mario Sunshine annoying and poor, I loved the control mechanim and thought it was much better than Mario 64 (though I think that the levels in Mario 64 were better, dispite being rendered so badly by the N64).
Personally, my vote for best 3D platformer, which I appreciate is a little unconventional (and that most people would vote for Mario 64), is DC:Sonic Adventure, I found it stunning and I think it's my second most memorable gaming experience after Doom II.
Yes that sounds exactly like the CeeFax service in UK (I wonder if Holland were one of the companies to use it or if they had their own service?).
;-), especially when you only have 4 TV channels in the country (as was the case at the time).
:-). I wonder who thought that up...
It has basically news, some local events (cinema listings), forecast, horoscopes, share price information, newsletters, jokes, that kind of thing. In the pre-www days (when Gopher and BBS's were all the rage) there used to be quite a few online magazines and jokes and kids stuff, and a few online quizzes, which have died out (they were really quite good at the time).
The service was entirely non ineractive, there were a few quizzes and things, where you could press a button depending on what you thought the answer was (Red, Green, Yellow or Blue, buttons you will see on almost every UK TV set to this day, as they are also useful for Ceefax/Teletext's digital sucessor, which is a bit more interactive and renders a bit like IE 3.0). These systems used a bit of 'URL trikery' to achive this though (pages are refered to with three digit numbers, not URLs, but you get the idea).
e.g. Page 100 for the index, page 200 for News, page 121 for 'TV: Now and Next' (followed by a list of channels). For the benifit of those who've never seen it the screen can be opaque on appear super-imposed on the TV image (ala TiVo, but as if the text was rendered by some not much more powerful than an Intellivision).
I remeber I used it for something stupid a couple of times, people could log onto the Gamesmaster BBS in London and go into a chat room, then the conversation from that chatroom was avalible super-imposed on the screen in real time all over the country (as with close captioning), via the Subtitles IIRC (most UK handsets also have a button marked 'Subtitles' which is page 888 of the Ceefax/Telext service). This was early 90's I think.
Typing on a computer in real time and watching what you typed come up on the TV where millions of people would be able to see it was amazingly cool (though I think about 10 people probably saw it
Ah memories (and a stupid hack wasted on many
This is certainly very true, as a business it was in the end a bomb; a terminal cost three times a much as a TV, (though the more basic origional Ceefax element was widely used thanks to the BBC's Oracle service (the idea having been a development from the BBC's R&D department), a feature supported by all most all UK TV's). It was simply the technology that was the star.
I think it was partly being too early, partly too expensive and partly poor marketing. I'd be interested to hear what any origional Prestel employees thought were the reasons (it's always interesting for me to hear why seeminly good technologies fail).
It was created and controlled by one company. That's it. Nothing xenophobic about it.
No, it was created and funded by the French government.
their Import and Export policies
Is the same as any member of the Schengen treaty.
I have no quarrel with the handling of the Schengen Agreement by the French government. I do have a problem with their government frequently and consistantly flaunt EU directives on importing and exporting goods in order to suit their own ends - in a manner unlike all other EU members.
If you can show me that for years MILLIONS of people have used BBS's then you are right
How about I point out that over a dozen other nations used the Ceefax service and have been using it for longer than anyone has been using Minitel?
Oh, and as regards:
Does that mean the French are xenophobic? No.
I think that 9 of 22 regions voting to elect the French National Front as the next government during the first round of elections last year is a pretty good sign though.
What @madeus says is that the brits have much better technology than the french and bigger cojones too. Now wait for him to sing Jerusalem.
Mwahahaha... lol