It has bluetooth. That means you can connect it to the internet via a bluetooth cell phone.
Slowwwww down there, cowboy. Bluetooth is just a way of connecting devices wirelessly. It does not provide automatic driver support for every wireless device. The Playstation 2 has a USB port on it, but that doesn't mean it can read images off my USB camera or print to my USB printer.
Personally, I DOUBT Nintendo will have cell-phone gaming for some time, because while BT-enabled cell phones are everywhere in Japan, writing an easy to use dialer system to embed in a gameboy would be a pain in the neck. And that's no what Nintendo does best. What they do best is head-to-head games on a local network. BT for creating wireless local networks is a cool enough idea; we don't need to go bringing cell phones into this. That's for revision 2.
I dunno. They still sold the Gameboy Color at the time of the Advance's release. I'm sure there was a little confusion, but kids know the difference and know what to ask for and know not to open it if they want to return it.
I dunno that the "toy look" hurt gamecube sales. For every person that didn't buy a GC because it was kid-ish, there was a parent who DID buy one for the same reason. My wife's aunt buys her kids nintendo systems because there are more kid-friendly games, while the PS market still seems to be teenagers and the Xbox market is "serious online gamers."
Each segment hates the others for what they are -- except those who have all three of the systems, like my friends for some reason...i have none, as my wife gives me shit when I play video games, making them less fun. I've taken to playing my Gameboy SP when she's not around (easy to put it to sleep when she comes back) and, you know, reading more.
Your "bad feeling" is unwarranted..."just" displaying the alternate screen would be an awesome feature!
For one thing, a second screen displaying a mini map, item screen or playbook means one less screen to pull up in game, interrupting the action. Which is important in multiplayer ARPGs like Shining Soul.
And the touch sensitive lower screen means you can just tap the weapon you're switching to, or area of the map you want illuminated, or the play you want to use. Which is much faster than scrolling through them with the keypad.
The addition of Bluetooth seems to imply that there are going to be more and better multiplayer games for the DS...and the touch screen is going to go a long way to making the multiplayer aspect more immediate, and thus, more fun.
Psht. I'd rather support good music, no matter what format it's in.
In the past week, I've downloaded music in about six formats, from SHN files to WMAs. It doesn't bother me TOO much that I have to follow special instructions to use them. After all, I have music on records, tapes, CDs, 8 tracks, DATs, reel-to-reels, laserdiscs, DVDs and minidiscs. At least I can play all my music files on the same machine!
Because that's what Microsoft is doing. So it must be wrong (up until Longhorn sells its first 10 million copies, then we'll scramble to implement it).
I'd trade Ext3 for Reiser, which is B-tree based, extremely scalable, has support for metadata journaling and outperforms Ext* for quick access to small files (such as web pages, perl scripts and config files).
Actually, we don't need all that armor and technology to protect us from bears. We need it to allow us to get arbitrarily CLOSE to bears with a certain guarantee of survivability. Just like we don't need a cruise ship to swim in the ocean, but we might need one to travel to Europe without dying.
All the technology needed to protect you from bears, in general, is a steel pot and a heavy stick. Hit A with B, and bears will generally leave you alone. A "rape whistle" is useful as well. This is how I've survived three bear encounters in the Adirondacks.
Bears do not like loud noises; they generally mean "this food source is not worth the trouble." Enough clanging and whistling, the average bear will climb the nearest tree until you go away, giving enough time for you to get your bearline down and pack up.
Of course, a smarter than average bear will steal your pic-a-nic basket.
I've built my own computers for 15 years. Built them for my parents and friends as well.
At one point last year, when I realized I had four broken machines to fix using my own money, using my own time, I decided to give it up and devote that time and money to my Beetle and assorted website projects.
To be honest, I quite liked the machines I build, they were extensions of myself. But it was not worth the hours and HOURS of time wasted making them work. I went mac last year and haven't regretted it...Apple's support is nothing short of amazing. They actually believe you when you say something broken.
I still build all my own servers for Webslum, with help from my super' Ryan. But that's more about economy and redundancy. I buy whatever hardware I can get two of for a good price, and install those. Many of the prebuilders just put in the cheapest stuff they can find.
Actually, the moral is "dude, don't get a Dell." Their phone support sucks.
The key is the term "on site." That means somebody will come to your house when it breaks. This person is NOT an Indian. They are a trained technician. You pay extra for this service, but it is worth it. "Free phone support" is an anagram for "Compelte waste of time."
Exactly. I think it's amusing when people tell me I couldn't do something that I did for three years, namely, run an alternative DOS with Windows. Shit, i even experimented with alternative DOS during the Windows 9x era -- when most people didn't even realize she was under there.
And expect to spend a lot of time doing your own support. This includes troubleshooting hardware issues, shipping out your own hardware for warranty requests, and waiting with no machine until they return.
Seriously...unless you really need to save money (e.g., you're in school), you probably want to buy your PC. These days, you don't save ALL that much money, and most of these systems come with 3 to 5 year warranties. If you don't care about brushed aluminum and red LEDs, you can plunk a $300 video card into any system they sell at HP/Micron/Gateway/Dell/etc and save about as much, WITH a warranty (and often a bundled LCD as well).
Uh, if case mods are the only use you can think of for a custom build gaming rig, try a little harder.
Sure, having a cool cathode light is neat. But having a machine with a cool cathode light and three years of on site support is far neater.
Some gamers, myself included, would far prefer to be playing games, rather than debugging hardware issues. Of course, the extent of my case modding was a brushed aluminum case I bought two years ago. Why waste your time making the box look nice when you could be brushing up on your head shots? I've some elite looking boxes piloted by canon fodder.
Say, you're right. I'm an idiot. I trusted the letter he included with the shipment, saying he'd already left positive feedback. Turns out he did nothing of the sort.
Incidentally, I have a seat for a '72 in my garage. It's in fair condition, vinyl's mostly intact but there's a rip over the left shoulder.
The lawsuits alleged that by bundling MS-DOS with machines running Windows 3.1, Microsoft obscured the fact that the Windows OS still relied on DOS for basic file I/O.
However: it was entirely possible to RUN windows 3.1 on almost any alternative DOS. In fact, many of these DOS's ran it faster.
In short: Microsoft used unfair and misleading marketing practices, NOT underhanded engineering, to bury the alternative DOSs. What engineering incompatibility they did use was usually reverse engineered quite quickly and with better results...I fondly remember utilities like Quarterdeck's QEMM memory manager, which would masquerade as Microsoft's EMM386 only with a smaller footprint and delivering more ram.
Incidentally, Caldera received $150 million in the settlement of this suit, which is about the same as what they would have gotten for selling 3 million copies of DR-DOS at $50 a pop. Which is a pretty good settlement. Shame none of that goes to the DR-DOS developers!
Speak for yourself. Some of "us" Slashdot readers don't expect Microsoft to stand in the way of WINE at all. After all, they couldn't stop DR-DOS or PC DOS or Pro DOS. And they didn't stand in the way of VirtualPC or VMWare.
As for breaking WINE -- well, Microsoft would be hard pressed to change their APIs in such a way that would break WINE, but that wouldn't break third party applications. The last thing Microsoft wants to do is to further annoy third part devs who have enough trouble with service packs already.
Incidentally, poking the WinAPI shouldn't be that big a deal considering how much work us third party Windows developers have already done to catalogue it. It is a popular Slashdot myth that nobody knows how Windows works. In reality, it's more the Linux/BSD situation that you think. There are a FEW developers who know how EVERYTHING in Windows works and (more importantly) what doesn't. But almost everybody knows a couple of API tricks. By this point, the whole API has been traversed and documented -- check out sites like allapi.net or dotnet247 for decent free info on the APIs and their side effects, and sites like SysInternals for tools to uncover the "secret world" of your Windows kernel. Process Explorer alone is a godsend...it's like a really handy GUI front end to grep, ps, and kill on Linux/UN*X with the ability to remove file, process and registry handles without (necessarily) crashing the program that opened them.
Feedback is hardly an accurate way to figure out who's good and who's bad. For one thing, a lot of high volume sellers trade between each other for higher feedback (hence why every feedback is the same..."steller buyer, better than expected, A++++").
Furthermore, stuff like this happens:
I just bought a non-working device, it wasn't marked as-is but was missing the proprietary power supply (thus forcing me to build my own, which will take about 10 hours). So I left neutral feedback explaining this caveat emptor situation -- and the seller went back and changed his positive feedback (i had paid the same day) to a negative feedback along with a series of lies claiming I begged for a refund and made unreasonable demands.
This pissed me off. NEUTRAL + $100 != NEGATIVE + Broken Fucking Device. I did nothing wrong, and now I look bad? It pissed me off even more when the guy emailed me, asking if I wanted to drop BOTH feedbacks under ebay's Mutual Retraction program.
Essentially, he chose to mar my reputation in the hopes that the damage would cause me to remove my neutral. After all, one negative out of 20 is worse than a neutral out of 850.
But I'm not going to do it. Ebay isn't my livelihood, and so I don't care that much. But I bet a lot of unsatisfied customers in that 850 did remove their feedback rather than get tagged as a negative buyer.
I have an unpatched copy of Windows 2000 sitting here on the machine next to me. It's been up and on broadband for three years -- but it has no viruses.
Why? Because that machine is behind a $50 firewall. You cannot reach it from the outside world.
Running an unpatched machine is not a problem if you take the right precautions. After all, if you've got a moat full of alligators, sometimes it'd be alright to leave the door onlocked.
I'd love to be able to plug in a chips or two into my PC and have them do better-than realtime MPEG-4 encoding that doesn't affect my processor at all... Who wouldn't?
Somebody who thought that buying one chip for $200 was better than buying two for $150?
I mean, that's why the industry moved to a one chip solution in the first place.
Geeks may like toys, but some of us don't see the point in touting every minor advance. Yes, technology got better, but that's what it does. I've got no problem with you and your pixel shader, but *I* don't need it.
Of course, I think a lot of people are worried that those who right GOOD games are going to do so requiring the new hardware. Which would force those of us who wanted to play, but did not have the new hardware, to go out and essentially waste money for one game.
I did this recently for KOTOR.
It is nice to see somebody's thinking about what else to use this graphics card for BESIDES graphics.
Slashdot Mirror
It has bluetooth. That means you can connect it to the internet via a bluetooth cell phone.
Slowwwww down there, cowboy. Bluetooth is just a way of connecting devices wirelessly. It does not provide automatic driver support for every wireless device. The Playstation 2 has a USB port on it, but that doesn't mean it can read images off my USB camera or print to my USB printer.
Personally, I DOUBT Nintendo will have cell-phone gaming for some time, because while BT-enabled cell phones are everywhere in Japan, writing an easy to use dialer system to embed in a gameboy would be a pain in the neck. And that's no what Nintendo does best. What they do best is head-to-head games on a local network. BT for creating wireless local networks is a cool enough idea; we don't need to go bringing cell phones into this. That's for revision 2.
And since the Gameboy DS should have about half the resolution of the N64, the faster chip should be even more capable.
I just add a -6 bonus to "funny" posts, because they usually aren't.
I dunno. They still sold the Gameboy Color at the time of the Advance's release. I'm sure there was a little confusion, but kids know the difference and know what to ask for and know not to open it if they want to return it.
I dunno that the "toy look" hurt gamecube sales. For every person that didn't buy a GC because it was kid-ish, there was a parent who DID buy one for the same reason. My wife's aunt buys her kids nintendo systems because there are more kid-friendly games, while the PS market still seems to be teenagers and the Xbox market is "serious online gamers."
Each segment hates the others for what they are -- except those who have all three of the systems, like my friends for some reason...i have none, as my wife gives me shit when I play video games, making them less fun. I've taken to playing my Gameboy SP when she's not around (easy to put it to sleep when she comes back) and, you know, reading more.
Your "bad feeling" is unwarranted..."just" displaying the alternate screen would be an awesome feature!
For one thing, a second screen displaying a mini map, item screen or playbook means one less screen to pull up in game, interrupting the action. Which is important in multiplayer ARPGs like Shining Soul.
And the touch sensitive lower screen means you can just tap the weapon you're switching to, or area of the map you want illuminated, or the play you want to use. Which is much faster than scrolling through them with the keypad.
The addition of Bluetooth seems to imply that there are going to be more and better multiplayer games for the DS...and the touch screen is going to go a long way to making the multiplayer aspect more immediate, and thus, more fun.
Psht. I'd rather support good music, no matter what format it's in.
In the past week, I've downloaded music in about six formats, from SHN files to WMAs. It doesn't bother me TOO much that I have to follow special instructions to use them. After all, I have music on records, tapes, CDs, 8 tracks, DATs, reel-to-reels, laserdiscs, DVDs and minidiscs. At least I can play all my music files on the same machine!
Because that's what Microsoft is doing. So it must be wrong (up until Longhorn sells its first 10 million copies, then we'll scramble to implement it).
I'd trade Ext3 for Reiser, which is B-tree based, extremely scalable, has support for metadata journaling and outperforms Ext* for quick access to small files (such as web pages, perl scripts and config files).
And let's not forget UDF for our DVDs.
Actually, we don't need all that armor and technology to protect us from bears. We need it to allow us to get arbitrarily CLOSE to bears with a certain guarantee of survivability. Just like we don't need a cruise ship to swim in the ocean, but we might need one to travel to Europe without dying.
All the technology needed to protect you from bears, in general, is a steel pot and a heavy stick. Hit A with B, and bears will generally leave you alone. A "rape whistle" is useful as well. This is how I've survived three bear encounters in the Adirondacks.
Bears do not like loud noises; they generally mean "this food source is not worth the trouble." Enough clanging and whistling, the average bear will climb the nearest tree until you go away, giving enough time for you to get your bearline down and pack up.
Of course, a smarter than average bear will steal your pic-a-nic basket.
I've built my own computers for 15 years. Built them for my parents and friends as well.
At one point last year, when I realized I had four broken machines to fix using my own money, using my own time, I decided to give it up and devote that time and money to my Beetle and assorted website projects.
To be honest, I quite liked the machines I build, they were extensions of myself. But it was not worth the hours and HOURS of time wasted making them work. I went mac last year and haven't regretted it...Apple's support is nothing short of amazing. They actually believe you when you say something broken.
I still build all my own servers for Webslum, with help from my super' Ryan. But that's more about economy and redundancy. I buy whatever hardware I can get two of for a good price, and install those. Many of the prebuilders just put in the cheapest stuff they can find.
Actually, the moral is "dude, don't get a Dell." Their phone support sucks.
The key is the term "on site." That means somebody will come to your house when it breaks. This person is NOT an Indian. They are a trained technician. You pay extra for this service, but it is worth it. "Free phone support" is an anagram for "Compelte waste of time."
I bit on the Back to the Future Delorean. If only I could turn back time...
Exactly. I think it's amusing when people tell me I couldn't do something that I did for three years, namely, run an alternative DOS with Windows. Shit, i even experimented with alternative DOS during the Windows 9x era -- when most people didn't even realize she was under there.
And expect to spend a lot of time doing your own support. This includes troubleshooting hardware issues, shipping out your own hardware for warranty requests, and waiting with no machine until they return.
Seriously...unless you really need to save money (e.g., you're in school), you probably want to buy your PC. These days, you don't save ALL that much money, and most of these systems come with 3 to 5 year warranties. If you don't care about brushed aluminum and red LEDs, you can plunk a $300 video card into any system they sell at HP/Micron/Gateway/Dell/etc and save about as much, WITH a warranty (and often a bundled LCD as well).
So long as the case badge comes with three years of on-site support from experienced American technicians, I'd buy one.
Uh, if case mods are the only use you can think of for a custom build gaming rig, try a little harder.
Sure, having a cool cathode light is neat. But having a machine with a cool cathode light and three years of on site support is far neater.
Some gamers, myself included, would far prefer to be playing games, rather than debugging hardware issues. Of course, the extent of my case modding was a brushed aluminum case I bought two years ago. Why waste your time making the box look nice when you could be brushing up on your head shots? I've some elite looking boxes piloted by canon fodder.
What about warcraft 3, unreal tournament 2k4 or neverwinter nights?
Not to mention Escape Velocity: Nova, which r0x0red.
Say, you're right. I'm an idiot. I trusted the letter he included with the shipment, saying he'd already left positive feedback. Turns out he did nothing of the sort.
Incidentally, I have a seat for a '72 in my garage. It's in fair condition, vinyl's mostly intact but there's a rip over the left shoulder.
The lawsuits alleged that by bundling MS-DOS with machines running Windows 3.1, Microsoft obscured the fact that the Windows OS still relied on DOS for basic file I/O.
However: it was entirely possible to RUN windows 3.1 on almost any alternative DOS. In fact, many of these DOS's ran it faster.
In short: Microsoft used unfair and misleading marketing practices, NOT underhanded engineering, to bury the alternative DOSs. What engineering incompatibility they did use was usually reverse engineered quite quickly and with better results...I fondly remember utilities like Quarterdeck's QEMM memory manager, which would masquerade as Microsoft's EMM386 only with a smaller footprint and delivering more ram.
Incidentally, Caldera received $150 million in the settlement of this suit, which is about the same as what they would have gotten for selling 3 million copies of DR-DOS at $50 a pop. Which is a pretty good settlement. Shame none of that goes to the DR-DOS developers!
Speak for yourself. Some of "us" Slashdot readers don't expect Microsoft to stand in the way of WINE at all. After all, they couldn't stop DR-DOS or PC DOS or Pro DOS. And they didn't stand in the way of VirtualPC or VMWare.
As for breaking WINE -- well, Microsoft would be hard pressed to change their APIs in such a way that would break WINE, but that wouldn't break third party applications. The last thing Microsoft wants to do is to further annoy third part devs who have enough trouble with service packs already.
Incidentally, poking the WinAPI shouldn't be that big a deal considering how much work us third party Windows developers have already done to catalogue it. It is a popular Slashdot myth that nobody knows how Windows works. In reality, it's more the Linux/BSD situation that you think. There are a FEW developers who know how EVERYTHING in Windows works and (more importantly) what doesn't. But almost everybody knows a couple of API tricks. By this point, the whole API has been traversed and documented -- check out sites like allapi.net or dotnet247 for decent free info on the APIs and their side effects, and sites like SysInternals for tools to uncover the "secret world" of your Windows kernel. Process Explorer alone is a godsend...it's like a really handy GUI front end to grep, ps, and kill on Linux/UN*X with the ability to remove file, process and registry handles without (necessarily) crashing the program that opened them.
Feedback is hardly an accurate way to figure out who's good and who's bad. For one thing, a lot of high volume sellers trade between each other for higher feedback (hence why every feedback is the same..."steller buyer, better than expected, A++++").
Furthermore, stuff like this happens:
I just bought a non-working device, it wasn't marked as-is but was missing the proprietary power supply (thus forcing me to build my own, which will take about 10 hours). So I left neutral feedback explaining this caveat emptor situation -- and the seller went back and changed his positive feedback (i had paid the same day) to a negative feedback along with a series of lies claiming I begged for a refund and made unreasonable demands.
This pissed me off. NEUTRAL + $100 != NEGATIVE + Broken Fucking Device. I did nothing wrong, and now I look bad? It pissed me off even more when the guy emailed me, asking if I wanted to drop BOTH feedbacks under ebay's Mutual Retraction program.
Essentially, he chose to mar my reputation in the hopes that the damage would cause me to remove my neutral. After all, one negative out of 20 is worse than a neutral out of 850.
But I'm not going to do it. Ebay isn't my livelihood, and so I don't care that much. But I bet a lot of unsatisfied customers in that 850 did remove their feedback rather than get tagged as a negative buyer.
I have an unpatched copy of Windows 2000 sitting here on the machine next to me. It's been up and on broadband for three years -- but it has no viruses.
Why? Because that machine is behind a $50 firewall. You cannot reach it from the outside world.
Running an unpatched machine is not a problem if you take the right precautions. After all, if you've got a moat full of alligators, sometimes it'd be alright to leave the door onlocked.
I'd love to be able to plug in a chips or two into my PC and have them do better-than realtime MPEG-4 encoding that doesn't affect my processor at all... Who wouldn't?
Somebody who thought that buying one chip for $200 was better than buying two for $150?
I mean, that's why the industry moved to a one chip solution in the first place.
Geeks may like toys, but some of us don't see the point in touting every minor advance. Yes, technology got better, but that's what it does. I've got no problem with you and your pixel shader, but *I* don't need it.
Of course, I think a lot of people are worried that those who right GOOD games are going to do so requiring the new hardware. Which would force those of us who wanted to play, but did not have the new hardware, to go out and essentially waste money for one game.
I did this recently for KOTOR.
It is nice to see somebody's thinking about what else to use this graphics card for BESIDES graphics.