Sorry about not posting sooner, I post when I can.
The sad thing is that my post is absolutely true. I do use Dvorak and am not a good typist.
What makes it even worse is when the layout is changed on me. Mac OS (Panther) doesn't even show what the current layout is when resuming and Windows XP shows "EN" for Qwerty and "EN" for Dvorak. Very helpful indeed. At least with the Mac it alternates between a "DV" and an American flag on the menubar.
Then again, the flag only has 9 stars and 11 stripes. Meh, nothing is perfect.
OK, we shouldn't educate users at all, huh? Yea I think that business users should never have admin rights to their business machines but for everything you can't nail down, you're either going to have to have smart users or have the IT folks hold the users' hands constantly.
My belief is that users should be as educated as possible but it should never be a business requirement. Feel free to lock things down; you should restrict access but also let your users know why they are that way. Hell, maybe it will help them with their home systems. Maybe they'll even pass good habits onto others. I can't see that as being a bad thing.
Publishers want people to buy a game before any reviews can negatively affect sales and also to show retailers that this is a quick moving item that needs to be restocked. They push for pre-orders and limited editions to make that first week's sales as high as possible because that is what is most important.
I've seen it backfire though. If it's a game that I'm really interested in, I'll likely shell out the extra bucks for the LE version but if it's a game that's not on my must-have list, then I won't buy it at all although I would've bought it if it didn't have an LE version.
I would've purchased MK:DA and Halo 2 if they hadn't had an LE bonus. I also will not buy Guild Wars should it ever be released for the Mac if they don't also re-release the LE version.
WoW runs OK on it. It's nothing great but it gets the job done. The bottleneck in the Mini is the R9200.
Actually I have a friend who comes over to play it on the Mini because it's much better than the "high end" intel integrated craphics adapter on her PC. I really hope that Apple doesn't start putting those things in their systems.
If the next game will be the beginning of a new Zelda era, than wouldn't it make sense for it to be because of the new control mechanism that will be part of Revolution?
Think about it, of the non-handheld Zelda games, the last transition was from 2D to 3D and was marked with the series moving to the N64. This wasn't done out of malice, but it did represent a new era for the Zelda series; arguably one that was very beneficial.
The core of the franchise will probably be unchanged; Link will still battle Gannon over golden triangles while Zelda looks on from her cage, but the gameplay will change significantly.
I'm personally hoping that they keep the "sandbox" style intact but make it a bit less linear.
I want to start my own set of free servers only for friends and friends of friends invitation only. Should I be allowed to create a server side application that Blizzard's WoW client can connect to and invite my friends to play?
Boy that'd be nice... that's also what this was really about. Blizzard didn't want anyone making a WoW version of bnetd so they nipped it in the bud before it could even start. They also have several lines in their EULA about not making your own server. You do read these things, don't you? Here's what you should pay attention to:
4. Responsibilities of End User.
B. You agree that you shall not, under any circumstances,
(iii) host, provide or develop matchmaking services for the Game or intercept, emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by Licensor in any way, including, without limitation, through protocol emulation, tunneling, packet sniffing, modifying or adding components to the Game, use of a utility program or any other techniques now known or hereafter developed, for any purpose, including, but not limited to, unauthorized network play over the Internet, network play utilizing commercial or non-commercial gaming networks or as part of content aggregation networks;
I've paid for the client. I'm just not using their monthly service anymore.
You should know better than that. You did not buy anything but a box with shiny discs in them. The software is 0wned by Blizzard and not you.
3. Ownership.
A. All title, ownership rights and intellectual property rights in and to the Game and all copies thereof (including, but not limited to, any titles, computer code, themes, objects, characters, character names, stories, dialog, catch phrases, locations, concepts, artwork, character inventories, structural or landscape designs, animations, sounds, musical compositions, audio-visual effects, storylines, character likenesses, methods of operation, moral rights, any related documentation, and "applets" incorporated into the Game) are owned or expressly licensed by Licensor. The Game is protected by the copyright laws of the United States, international copyright treaties and conventions, and other laws. All rights are reserved. The Game may contain certain licensed materials, and the licensors of those materials may enforce their rights in the event of any violation of this License Agreement.
Although I had been running betas of Chicago dual booting with OS/2 for a while before launch, most of my geek friends stuck with DOS/WFWG311. I remember a lot of people who had put off upgrading until Blizzard's Diablo hit the scene and required Windows 95 to run.
That game more than any other program was the biggest reason that I saw for most people to upgrade.
Alright class, your homework for this weekend is to finish Squaresoft's Final Math Fantasy. It's an 80+ hour game with plenty of repetitious "math battles" and I want your Memory Card (8MB) (for Playstation 2) on my desk Monday morning.
We had this sort of thing in my time. We called it edutainment and it wasn't that popular then either.
By the time 3rd strike came out, all of the local arcades had gone bye-bye or decided that they would only carry driving/shooting/fishing/ddr style games. Playing any fighting game on the Dreamcast controller makes my thumbs bleed.
Vampire Saviour
I'd agree with you here except for the lifebar problem; it changed the game too much. I prefer the second one (Vampire Hunter) out of the Vampire games.
Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo
You are referring to just Street Fighter II Turbo without the super nonsense, right? No one I've known, and I used to play with true SF fanatics, liked either Super Stereotype Fighter games.
and to a lesser extent, Street Fighter Alpha 3
I loved SFA2 and 3. I would probably put Street Fighter Zero 2 ' (please note the ') on the top of the list but no one ever seems to have heard about that one. SFA3 would have to be the fall back for "Best Capcom Fighting Game" but it still has it's flaws; V-ism Cody's dodge makes people scream "imbalance".
Actually, your boss will have a grey question mark above his head signifying that you still have work to do for this quest.
A bunch of guildies were planning to do a PUG raid on a high level instance but the tank couldn't go; his mom wouldn't let him. I immediately piped in the guild chat with:
Huh? From a self professed Sega fanboy, I'd expect a little better. The Saturn wasn't buggy or prone to crashing... unless you meant something else with the word "death".
The Saturn failed because of engineering mistakes that made it hard to program and expensive to make. Sega was building a great 2D machine, saw what Sony was doing with the PS and 3D, and stuck some more processors into the mix.
This beast was so hard to program that Sega's own Dev teams had difficulty with the system when putting together the SDK.
When Sega of America decided to release it three months early and didn't tell third party developers who were still struggling with the dev kits, they doomed the system to it's place in history.
The only really buggy part of the hardware was the cartridge port. That thing was worse than the NES's. The rest of the system was solid. My original JP release grey Saturn, under heavy use (including a running for a 3 day weekend non-stop) has survived 2 Playstatons, a PS2 and an Xbox.
The system did decently enough in Japan. Both Sega and Capcom eventually put out some mighty fine software after they figured out how to program for it but most developers went with the simple PS and the public followed.
While the article states that there is no DRM or TCPA in the dev boxes, there is still proof to the contrary.
The article also states that these in no way represent the shipped product, which makes sense, but if they say that there is no DRM and then say that the shipped product will be different, does that mean that production Macintels will have DRM?
I had been concerned recently and was considering not recommending Macs to people asking me what computer to buy. Please Apple, give us a definite answer on this.
This is Hillary Clinton (a democrat) who is raising the fuss. Add to that the fact that one of the biggest anti-violent video game crusaders has been Joe Leiberman (a democrat, and vice presidential candidate in 2000) and you can see that it's simply all politicians that are raising their voice, not just the "religious right".
It's not like video games are a protected form of free speech or anything. Gotta love that super violent Resident of Evil Creek game.
Re:I highly doubt the widescreen rumor is true
on
New iBooks 'Any Day Now'
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I would have bought an iBook instead of my Powerbook, for instance, had Apple offered a widescreen display.
Yep. Someone at Apple still cries themselves to sleep at night over that lost iBook sale. Wait a sec, you bought a Powerbook. What did Apple lose on this deal?
The iBook, as well as Apple's whole consumer line, has to straddle the price point of being only slightly more expensive than cheapo PCs and not being too much less than the lucrative Power*** line.
Apple really would much rather have all of their customers purchase high margin Powerbooks. The consumer systems cannot be allowed to cut into that too deeply.
I can see the new iBooks shipping with a slight processor speed upgrade (1.42GHz) and 512MB RAM standard. There could also be a HDD size upgrade (40GB and 80GB). Widescreen isn't out of the question but probably won't happen. I can't see a video upgrade from the ATi 9200 while some PBs are still shipping with the crappy Go5600.
1 People who would use feature 2 People who wouldn't care 3 People who would be confused because of feature
With most companies, if there is a small amount in group 1 then said feature gets put on the wait list. Eventually it will be added. The higer that group 1 rises above group 2, the faster the feature will be added.
The difference with Apple is that they take group 3 into consideration. If group 3 is higher than group 1 then feature does not get added. This is why many technical people snub Apple.
For something like hibernation, there is a good amount of group 3 people. Try explaining what the difference between sleep, suspend, hibernation, and power off are to most people and they'll look at you very confused.
Honestly, does the Mac really need hibernation? Sleep works fine as it is. If you are going to not be using your system for a while, just turn it off. If you really need what you were working on, just leave it in suspend mode.
I can change my Powerbook battery while the system is on and not plugged in without losing anything (here at the bottom if you don't believe me) and that would be the biggest case for hibernation.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude did you hear?
No man, what?
Shock and Burnie has been ported to the PS2! It's 'bout time, I mean Sony needed something to sell more PS2s this holiday season.
Yeah, I was geting bored with DVD Blowout. I'll bet the Gamecube doesn't get this game.
Dude, no one cares about the lamecube, it's just for kidz. Nintendo wouldn't dare do something like this.
Sorry about not posting sooner, I post when I can.
The sad thing is that my post is absolutely true. I do use Dvorak and am not a good typist.
What makes it even worse is when the layout is changed on me. Mac OS (Panther) doesn't even show what the current layout is when resuming and Windows XP shows "EN" for Qwerty and "EN" for Dvorak. Very helpful indeed. At least with the Mac it alternates between a "DV" and an American flag on the menubar.
Then again, the flag only has 9 stars and 11 stripes. Meh, nothing is perfect.
I use the Dvorak layout myself. It would help prevent this in two ways.
1. The keystroke timing would be much different
2. Constantly making errors which require much backspace pressing
If they can't figure out what goes where while they are rearranging the save dialog, what hope do the end users have of finding things.
OK, we shouldn't educate users at all, huh? Yea I think that business users should never have admin rights to their business machines but for everything you can't nail down, you're either going to have to have smart users or have the IT folks hold the users' hands constantly.
My belief is that users should be as educated as possible but it should never be a business requirement. Feel free to lock things down; you should restrict access but also let your users know why they are that way. Hell, maybe it will help them with their home systems. Maybe they'll even pass good habits onto others. I can't see that as being a bad thing.
Publishers want people to buy a game before any reviews can negatively affect sales and also to show retailers that this is a quick moving item that needs to be restocked. They push for pre-orders and limited editions to make that first week's sales as high as possible because that is what is most important.
I've seen it backfire though. If it's a game that I'm really interested in, I'll likely shell out the extra bucks for the LE version but if it's a game that's not on my must-have list, then I won't buy it at all although I would've bought it if it didn't have an LE version.
I would've purchased MK:DA and Halo 2 if they hadn't had an LE bonus. I also will not buy Guild Wars should it ever be released for the Mac if they don't also re-release the LE version.
Actually what's funny is that I use the Dvorak layout on a regular Qwerty keyboard. It's very much like having an unlabeled keyboard and it was cheap.
On a related note, the site says that it's Mac compatible. Great, but it doesn't have an eject key. All USB keyboards are that Mac compatible.
GP could be referring to the Game Boy Micro which is a really small GBA. It also lacks the functionallity of playing the GB/GBC games like the DS.
Speaking of which, shouldn't the iPod Nano be called the iPod Micro? I mean they just skipped a SI measurement didn't they?
I'll just wait for the iPod Fempto.
WoW runs OK on it. It's nothing great but it gets the job done. The bottleneck in the Mini is the R9200.
Actually I have a friend who comes over to play it on the Mini because it's much better than the "high end" intel integrated craphics adapter on her PC. I really hope that Apple doesn't start putting those things in their systems.
If the next game will be the beginning of a new Zelda era, than wouldn't it make sense for it to be because of the new control mechanism that will be part of Revolution?
Think about it, of the non-handheld Zelda games, the last transition was from 2D to 3D and was marked with the series moving to the N64. This wasn't done out of malice, but it did represent a new era for the Zelda series; arguably one that was very beneficial.
The core of the franchise will probably be unchanged; Link will still battle Gannon over golden triangles while Zelda looks on from her cage, but the gameplay will change significantly.
I'm personally hoping that they keep the "sandbox" style intact but make it a bit less linear.
Boy that'd be nice... that's also what this was really about. Blizzard didn't want anyone making a WoW version of bnetd so they nipped it in the bud before it could even start. They also have several lines in their EULA about not making your own server. You do read these things, don't you? Here's what you should pay attention to:
I've paid for the client. I'm just not using their monthly service anymore.
You should know better than that. You did not buy anything but a box with shiny discs in them. The software is 0wned by Blizzard and not you.
Although I had been running betas of Chicago dual booting with OS/2 for a while before launch, most of my geek friends stuck with DOS/WFWG311. I remember a lot of people who had put off upgrading until Blizzard's Diablo hit the scene and required Windows 95 to run.
That game more than any other program was the biggest reason that I saw for most people to upgrade.
Alright class, your homework for this weekend is to finish Squaresoft's Final Math Fantasy. It's an 80+ hour game with plenty of repetitious "math battles" and I want your Memory Card (8MB) (for Playstation 2) on my desk Monday morning.
We had this sort of thing in my time. We called it edutainment and it wasn't that popular then either.
Yea, next thing you'll be telling me is that NASA found water on mars.
If they tax it without me having at least some sort of minor say-so in the matter, I'll just pee in the harbor!
Capcom's deepest 2-D fighters (IMO) were:
Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike
By the time 3rd strike came out, all of the local arcades had gone bye-bye or decided that they would only carry driving/shooting/fishing/ddr style games. Playing any fighting game on the Dreamcast controller makes my thumbs bleed.
Vampire Saviour
I'd agree with you here except for the lifebar problem; it changed the game too much. I prefer the second one (Vampire Hunter) out of the Vampire games.
Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo
You are referring to just Street Fighter II Turbo without the super nonsense, right? No one I've known, and I used to play with true SF fanatics, liked either Super Stereotype Fighter games.
and to a lesser extent, Street Fighter Alpha 3
I loved SFA2 and 3. I would probably put Street Fighter Zero 2 ' (please note the ') on the top of the list but no one ever seems to have heard about that one. SFA3 would have to be the fall back for "Best Capcom Fighting Game" but it still has it's flaws; V-ism Cody's dodge makes people scream "imbalance".
Actually, your boss will have a grey question mark above his head signifying that you still have work to do for this quest.
A bunch of guildies were planning to do a PUG raid on a high level instance but the tank couldn't go; his mom wouldn't let him. I immediately piped in the guild chat with:
You can't go until you finish 8[Math Homework]
Pacman had speed runners. Pitfall too.
I did speed runs of Pitfall all the time as a kid. I could never get my time down below 20 minutes...or above 20 minutes either.
the Saturn (which was buggy and prone to death)
Huh? From a self professed Sega fanboy, I'd expect a little better. The Saturn wasn't buggy or prone to crashing... unless you meant something else with the word "death".
The Saturn failed because of engineering mistakes that made it hard to program and expensive to make. Sega was building a great 2D machine, saw what Sony was doing with the PS and 3D, and stuck some more processors into the mix.
This beast was so hard to program that Sega's own Dev teams had difficulty with the system when putting together the SDK.
When Sega of America decided to release it three months early and didn't tell third party developers who were still struggling with the dev kits, they doomed the system to it's place in history.
The only really buggy part of the hardware was the cartridge port. That thing was worse than the NES's. The rest of the system was solid. My original JP release grey Saturn, under heavy use (including a running for a 3 day weekend non-stop) has survived 2 Playstatons, a PS2 and an Xbox.
The system did decently enough in Japan. Both Sega and Capcom eventually put out some mighty fine software after they figured out how to program for it but most developers went with the simple PS and the public followed.
While the article states that there is no DRM or TCPA in the dev boxes, there is still proof to the contrary.
The article also states that these in no way represent the shipped product, which makes sense, but if they say that there is no DRM and then say that the shipped product will be different, does that mean that production Macintels will have DRM?
I had been concerned recently and was considering not recommending Macs to people asking me what computer to buy. Please Apple, give us a definite answer on this.
Performance seems fine - same or better than XP pro on the same machine. Have't done any "real" tests.
I'm a Mac user. It sounds as if you're saying the Vista is snappier than XP.
This is Hillary Clinton (a democrat) who is raising the fuss. Add to that the fact that one of the biggest anti-violent video game crusaders has been Joe Leiberman (a democrat, and vice presidential candidate in 2000) and you can see that it's simply all politicians that are raising their voice, not just the "religious right".
It's not like video games are a protected form of free speech or anything. Gotta love that super violent Resident of Evil Creek game.
I would have bought an iBook instead of my Powerbook, for instance, had Apple offered a widescreen display.
Yep. Someone at Apple still cries themselves to sleep at night over that lost iBook sale. Wait a sec, you bought a Powerbook. What did Apple lose on this deal?
The iBook, as well as Apple's whole consumer line, has to straddle the price point of being only slightly more expensive than cheapo PCs and not being too much less than the lucrative Power*** line.
Apple really would much rather have all of their customers purchase high margin Powerbooks. The consumer systems cannot be allowed to cut into that too deeply.
I can see the new iBooks shipping with a slight processor speed upgrade (1.42GHz) and 512MB RAM standard. There could also be a HDD size upgrade (40GB and 80GB). Widescreen isn't out of the question but probably won't happen. I can't see a video upgrade from the ATi 9200 while some PBs are still shipping with the crappy Go5600.
When your little Hogwart checks out the latest Harry Potter book at Amazon, he or she may be reminded...
Isn't Hogwart the name of the school? What the heck would a little Hogwart be? Can any of you little Slashdots explain this to me?
For every feature, there are three groups:
1 People who would use feature
2 People who wouldn't care
3 People who would be confused because of feature
With most companies, if there is a small amount in group 1 then said feature gets put on the wait list. Eventually it will be added. The higer that group 1 rises above group 2, the faster the feature will be added.
The difference with Apple is that they take group 3 into consideration. If group 3 is higher than group 1 then feature does not get added. This is why many technical people snub Apple.
For something like hibernation, there is a good amount of group 3 people. Try explaining what the difference between sleep, suspend, hibernation, and power off are to most people and they'll look at you very confused.
Honestly, does the Mac really need hibernation? Sleep works fine as it is. If you are going to not be using your system for a while, just turn it off. If you really need what you were working on, just leave it in suspend mode.
I can change my Powerbook battery while the system is on and not plugged in without losing anything (here at the bottom if you don't believe me) and that would be the biggest case for hibernation.