Yes, but what I'm also wondering is: can I use Gmail as my mail service for my free software project? It's often easier to find (or provide your own) web hosting than (good) mail hosting. If I could use Gmail for my very small email domain (4-6 email addresses) then I'd be a happy guy.
I keep saying "I wish we could use Gmail for our business email without having an @gmail.com in there."
This is very exciting to me.
I work for the enterprise support area at a large University. We've been bugging Google for a while now about Gmail, asking if this will ever become a product that we can run on our own, similar to the Google Search Appliance. Sure, we already have a webmail system for students, but there is a lot of interest on campus to have Gmail for our University webmail.
I'm also very excited by this. We're viewing this as a cautious first step for Google to (one day) release a "Gmail Appliance".
The trick is to attack the guy with the sword, then dodge the other guy's big axe attack. Axe man will be stunned for a few seconds, so run around behind him and start a speed kill. Should only have to do it a couple of times.
Yeah, I kind of figured that out after some random attacks, and had it confirmed when I googled for a walkthrough. But I still can't manage to do it without getting smacked around. Got tired of watching that same damned cutscene, so I took a break "for a few days". That was over two weeks ago.:-)
It's a great game, but those unskippable cutscenes took the fun right out.
POP has pre-rendered cutscenes that are often unskippable. Shadow of the Colossus has cutscenes that are rendered in-game and are skippable. These two differences have a huge effect. Of course unskippable cutscenes are annoying, especially after you've seen them 5 times, but also annoying are cutscenes in which the entire world suddenly looks completely different. Especially obvious in POP was when you went from the opening movie to the in-game graphics. The graphics are good, but they don't look like the pre-rendered stuff. Really lame. [...]
My suggestions:
1. No pre-rendered cutscenes
2.Ability to pause the cutscene and bring up a menu with the option to skip
You've hit the one thing about cutscenes in POP:Two Thrones that really bugs me - you can't skip them. Right now, I'm still playing POP:TT, and I can't get past the boss fight with the two bosses (one has a sword, the other has an axe.) It's really frustrating, I know it's just a matter of effort before I can do it, but every time I lose and have to restart, I have to watch the goddamned same cutscene. In POP:WW, I remember that once I've seen a cutscene, if you come back to it (i.e. retry) you can fast-forward through the cutscene by tapping "X". Not so in POP:TT.
I've actually stopped playing the game, because I couldn't stand watching the same cutscene over and over again. Really, it got that boring.
Or he could wake up in 300 years in sick bay with no money at all.
Wasn't there a Niven short story on this topic? I don't have the reference handy, but a guy with some terminal disease had his body frozen, expecting that a future generation would thaw him out when a cure had been discovered.
Thing was, he was revived thousands of years later, and while they had long since found a cure for his disease, he suddenly found himself with no money or rights. Hundreds of years before, the courts had established it was unfair to the economy (I think) to let a clinically dead person retain a bank account (which was still accumulating compound interest) and so had those accounts turned over to the State. Similarly, it was decided a dead person has no rights, as he has not participated in government.
So this guy wakes up to discover he's being tested/trained to be a space pilot, by way of paying back his debt to society. Or something.
Kind of puts a new perspective on things: What makes you so darn sure that future generations will want to thaw you out, and why should you expect to just pick up where you left off?
The one area where the PSP kicks the DS is graphics. The graphics on the PSP are incredible for a handheld system, but they come with a heavy price: game loading time and battery life. Whats worse is that once its loaded your still left playing with an analogue stick and 6 buttons. Its a platform thats been done to death.
Yeah, but you can play a lot of games with a config like that. And for me, portable gaming was a huge factor in choosing between the DS and the PSP. Game library should also be a large component.
Look, I ride the bus to work. That's 30 minutes each way. Sure, the DS has some cute games, and Nintendogs was right up there with the good ones. But what blew it for me was the bus ride to work. I imagined playing Nintendogs on the bus, making voice commands for my "puppy". Or using the stylus to draw elements in other games (i.e. WarioWare Touched) on a sometimes-bumpy bus ride. Are you kidding me? That kind of shit doesn't go over well on the downtown bus.
But when I took a closer look at the PSP, there are lots of games there that I would love to play (Battlefront II, Ape Escape, Grand Theft Auto, Prince of Persia, Daxter,...) and they are all playable with the standard 6-button layout and single analog stick. No silly "speaking" to my games, no interruptions because my bus just hit a pothole. It just plays the games, and does a great job of it. Minor irritations with camera control aside, the PSP has been a great portable gaming platform! I haven't brought my iPod to work with me in weeks.
One thing I was concerned with, going in, was all the loading from the UMD. I'm playing Ape Escape right now, and you know... it just doesn't spend all that much time loading. When I get to my bus stop, I don't need to exit the game and save. Instead, I just push the power slider to "Hold" and the game stays right where it was until I go home that evening. And when I "Resume", it's instant on.
Seriously, my PSP is good at what it was bought for - playing games.
The GNU GPL is quite clear. In section 7, it says:
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent
infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues),
conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or
otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not
excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot
distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this
License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you
may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent
license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by
all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then
the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to
refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
The "For example" is the case that could affect Linux (or FreeDOS, the project I'm attached to). If Microsoft decides to charge a royalty for use the FAT technology, then Linux (or FreeDOS) could not use it. (And since FAT is pretty much a requirement for DOS, that would be a huge problem for FreeDOS.)
For now, we are probably safe. Microsoft seems to intend to charge for the FAT technology as it applies to manufacturers of devices.
I second this idea. Let me build on that- assuming a moderator can assign points to story submissions similarly to how you assign points to comments, the points range for stories could be fairly limited: -1 to +1 (stories start at 0.) As the parent poster suggests, it could take more than 1 mod point to mod a story... or maybe only subscribers could mod stories, and it takes a full 5 points to do it.
I know this would require big changes in slashcode, but I'd actually buy a subscription to Slashdot if I knew I could browse stories at +1.
Does it mean that it might soon become possible to order Dell's full line of personal systems with Linux installed, or no OS/FreeDOS to save the Microsoft tax?
Can I just say, as coordinator of the FreeDOS Project, how cool it is that FreeDOS still affects Microsoft, even in some small way, in 2005/2006?:-)
IMO, too many publishers are waiting for next-gen, or are putting out "placeholder" games to keep the franchises alive until the next-gen is available. Look at "Jak X" or "Ratchet: Deadlocked" as excellent examples of placeholders.
Of course sales will be down, because there aren't any new & fresh games out there that garner any attention. Or at least, very few. "Nintendogs" is about the only breakaway hit for 2005.
The porn industry jumped all over DVD primarily because of random access. No more rewind/forward, easy looping, play at quarter/half speed and so on. Porn does not need to be watched in a linear, start-to-end fashion.
But if you skip all around the disc with that random access, don't you miss out on the great plot?
TFA mentions that in order to play these XBox "Classic" games on the XBox 360, "you need to have Xbox Live and the Xbox 360 hard drive accessory. When you first insert an Xbox game that is compatible with the Xbox 360, the system will download an update from Xbox Live and store it on the hard drive; it's functionally equivalent to a patch for a PC game."
And in fact, it is a patch.
So it's no surprise that the game looks better on the 360 - it's been intentionally patched (probably with a few up-res textures) to look good.
I love my PS2. I'm actually on my second one - not because my first one died, but because I bought the PS2 slimline and gave my first one to a friend. It's all about the games. I've played games on the XBox (including a few that supported 1080i on my HD-TV) but they're too much like games on the PC. There's more variety and unique games on the PS2.
Can't wait to play "We Love Katamari", or "Shadow of the Colossus" or even "Ratchet: Deadlocked". Last weekend, I went to our local GameStop and picked up some used games to get me through until Christmas. Right now, I'm playing "Maximo" and "Killzone".
The irony (for me) in Sony shipping the 100 millionth PS2 is that last weekend I also bought a PSOne for $20. I'll use it to set up a dedicated "Dance Dance Revolution" system, so I can get some exercise during the winter.
For a while there, I thought this was a strike being organized by some company that ran CoD2 servers, ala XBox Live. If that was the case, this would be Bad News(tm) for Call of Duty. Then I read TFA, and realized that wasn't the case.
Here, the "strike" is being organized (if you can call it that) by an upset gamer who runs a server, calling on others who run similar servers to take down their servers for a day. Still pretty bad PR for CoD2, but only if 99% of the game servers out there take part. Unfortunately, I suspect this will have about as much impact as those "Don't-Buy-Gas Day" boycotts I see via email from time to time (trying to force Big Oil to drop the price of gas at the pump.) That is, it will generate some press buzz, but in the end I doubt the company whose attention they are trying to attract will pay them much attention.
That said, cheaters really suck, and it kills the online gaming experience. I stopped playing online FPSs entirely because of cheaters.
They were running something on cable on Halloween night, about the making of the 'Star Wars' original trilogy. I used to be a big SW fan, so I watched it. Most telling moment was when Harrison "Han Solo" Ford said something to the effect of "Lucas didn't understand the acting process. For him, it was like, 'There it is [on the script]. You don't need to figure out the character. Just do it.' But acting isn't about just 'doing' the lines. Han Solo was a new character for me, and in order for me to make the character work, to sell it to an audience, I had to go through a process."
For me, that explains a lot of why the acting in the prequel trilogy fell flat, even with some respectable, established actors. Lucas doesn't understand acting, so he pushed his actors to "just do it." Result: wooden acting.
Are these people crazy? is there someone left in the world that's hard-up enough and will pay $45 for DOS?
Remember, the people they are selling DR-DOS to aren't just end-users like you and me. I imagine most of their users are companies that sell some embedded solution that runs on top of DOS. There are lots of companies that use FreeDOS to run an embedded application, and I would guess there are lots more that use DR-DOS to run a similar embedded DOS app.
No, that all happened quite suddenly on 10/25.
DR-DOS 8.1 no longer exists, so the problem appears to have been solved. All the links on DRDOS.com now point to DR-DOS 7.03 when you try to click on DR-DOS. Looks like they've pulled DR-DOS 8.1 completely and rolled back to their old version. No mention of DR-DOS 8.0 or DR-DOS 8.1.
Probably the easiest way for them to do all that very quickly was to roll back the web site to some old version.
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing a 5-digit UID post this is a bit like watching one's respected grandfather get drunk at a town-hall meeting and puke all over the podium.
Nah, 5-digit UIDs are still newbies. :-)
I can't get to the site, so I think we've succeeded in crushing it. So here's the list:
Yes, but what I'm also wondering is: can I use Gmail as my mail service for my free software project? It's often easier to find (or provide your own) web hosting than (good) mail hosting. If I could use Gmail for my very small email domain (4-6 email addresses) then I'd be a happy guy.
Google: Are you listening?
I keep saying "I wish we could use Gmail for our business email without having an @gmail.com in there." This is very exciting to me.
I work for the enterprise support area at a large University. We've been bugging Google for a while now about Gmail, asking if this will ever become a product that we can run on our own, similar to the Google Search Appliance. Sure, we already have a webmail system for students, but there is a lot of interest on campus to have Gmail for our University webmail.
I'm also very excited by this. We're viewing this as a cautious first step for Google to (one day) release a "Gmail Appliance".
The trick is to attack the guy with the sword, then dodge the other guy's big axe attack. Axe man will be stunned for a few seconds, so run around behind him and start a speed kill. Should only have to do it a couple of times.
Yeah, I kind of figured that out after some random attacks, and had it confirmed when I googled for a walkthrough. But I still can't manage to do it without getting smacked around. Got tired of watching that same damned cutscene, so I took a break "for a few days". That was over two weeks ago. :-)
It's a great game, but those unskippable cutscenes took the fun right out.
POP has pre-rendered cutscenes that are often unskippable. Shadow of the Colossus has cutscenes that are rendered in-game and are skippable. These two differences have a huge effect. Of course unskippable cutscenes are annoying, especially after you've seen them 5 times, but also annoying are cutscenes in which the entire world suddenly looks completely different. Especially obvious in POP was when you went from the opening movie to the in-game graphics. The graphics are good, but they don't look like the pre-rendered stuff. Really lame. [...]
My suggestions:
1. No pre-rendered cutscenes
2.Ability to pause the cutscene and bring up a menu with the option to skip
You've hit the one thing about cutscenes in POP:Two Thrones that really bugs me - you can't skip them. Right now, I'm still playing POP:TT, and I can't get past the boss fight with the two bosses (one has a sword, the other has an axe.) It's really frustrating, I know it's just a matter of effort before I can do it, but every time I lose and have to restart, I have to watch the goddamned same cutscene. In POP:WW, I remember that once I've seen a cutscene, if you come back to it (i.e. retry) you can fast-forward through the cutscene by tapping "X". Not so in POP:TT.
I've actually stopped playing the game, because I couldn't stand watching the same cutscene over and over again. Really, it got that boring.
Unskippable cutscenes make games un-fun.
Or he could wake up in 300 years in sick bay with no money at all.
Wasn't there a Niven short story on this topic? I don't have the reference handy, but a guy with some terminal disease had his body frozen, expecting that a future generation would thaw him out when a cure had been discovered.
Thing was, he was revived thousands of years later, and while they had long since found a cure for his disease, he suddenly found himself with no money or rights. Hundreds of years before, the courts had established it was unfair to the economy (I think) to let a clinically dead person retain a bank account (which was still accumulating compound interest) and so had those accounts turned over to the State. Similarly, it was decided a dead person has no rights, as he has not participated in government.
So this guy wakes up to discover he's being tested/trained to be a space pilot, by way of paying back his debt to society. Or something.
Kind of puts a new perspective on things: What makes you so darn sure that future generations will want to thaw you out, and why should you expect to just pick up where you left off?
Yeah, but you can play a lot of games with a config like that. And for me, portable gaming was a huge factor in choosing between the DS and the PSP. Game library should also be a large component.
Look, I ride the bus to work. That's 30 minutes each way. Sure, the DS has some cute games, and Nintendogs was right up there with the good ones. But what blew it for me was the bus ride to work. I imagined playing Nintendogs on the bus, making voice commands for my "puppy". Or using the stylus to draw elements in other games (i.e. WarioWare Touched) on a sometimes-bumpy bus ride. Are you kidding me? That kind of shit doesn't go over well on the downtown bus.
But when I took a closer look at the PSP, there are lots of games there that I would love to play (Battlefront II, Ape Escape, Grand Theft Auto, Prince of Persia, Daxter, ...) and they are all playable with the standard 6-button layout and single analog stick. No silly "speaking" to my games, no interruptions because my bus just hit a pothole. It just plays the games, and does a great job of it. Minor irritations with camera control aside, the PSP has been a great portable gaming platform! I haven't brought my iPod to work with me in weeks.
One thing I was concerned with, going in, was all the loading from the UMD. I'm playing Ape Escape right now, and you know ... it just doesn't spend all that much time loading. When I get to my bus stop, I don't need to exit the game and save. Instead, I just push the power slider to "Hold" and the game stays right where it was until I go home that evening. And when I "Resume", it's instant on.
Seriously, my PSP is good at what it was bought for - playing games.
GameStop To Fill 360 Preorders by February
Actually, they expect to fill the pre-orders by end of February which means the title is a bit mis-leading. Should read:
(Sorry for the rant)
Along a serious note: Does the new Intel Mac run Linux? That new MacBookPro is looking like a sweet Linux laptop. It is also very cute.
The GNU GPL is quite clear. In section 7, it says:
The "For example" is the case that could affect Linux (or FreeDOS, the project I'm attached to). If Microsoft decides to charge a royalty for use the FAT technology, then Linux (or FreeDOS) could not use it. (And since FAT is pretty much a requirement for DOS, that would be a huge problem for FreeDOS.)
For now, we are probably safe. Microsoft seems to intend to charge for the FAT technology as it applies to manufacturers of devices.
Microsoft's page specifically mentions:
Linux (and FreeDOS) is an operating system that reads and writes FAT, so we are not bound at this time by any royalty.
I have not read the patent filings for myself (yet), so I do not know yet if there are any other issues to this.
-jh
I second this idea. Let me build on that- assuming a moderator can assign points to story submissions similarly to how you assign points to comments, the points range for stories could be fairly limited: -1 to +1 (stories start at 0.) As the parent poster suggests, it could take more than 1 mod point to mod a story ... or maybe only subscribers could mod stories, and it takes a full 5 points to do it.
I know this would require big changes in slashcode, but I'd actually buy a subscription to Slashdot if I knew I could browse stories at +1.
Does it mean that it might soon become possible to order Dell's full line of personal systems with Linux installed, or no OS/FreeDOS to save the Microsoft tax?
Can I just say, as coordinator of the FreeDOS Project, how cool it is that FreeDOS still affects Microsoft, even in some small way, in 2005/2006? :-)
IMO, too many publishers are waiting for next-gen, or are putting out "placeholder" games to keep the franchises alive until the next-gen is available. Look at "Jak X" or "Ratchet: Deadlocked" as excellent examples of placeholders.
Of course sales will be down, because there aren't any new & fresh games out there that garner any attention. Or at least, very few. "Nintendogs" is about the only breakaway hit for 2005.
The porn industry jumped all over DVD primarily because of random access. No more rewind/forward, easy looping, play at quarter/half speed and so on. Porn does not need to be watched in a linear, start-to-end fashion.
But if you skip all around the disc with that random access, don't you miss out on the great plot?
She sounds very hot-looking.
TFA mentions that in order to play these XBox "Classic" games on the XBox 360, "you need to have Xbox Live and the Xbox 360 hard drive accessory. When you first insert an Xbox game that is compatible with the Xbox 360, the system will download an update from Xbox Live and store it on the hard drive; it's functionally equivalent to a patch for a PC game."
And in fact, it is a patch. So it's no surprise that the game looks better on the 360 - it's been intentionally patched (probably with a few up-res textures) to look good.
Indeed, I would have modded it "+1, Funny".
I love my PS2. I'm actually on my second one - not because my first one died, but because I bought the PS2 slimline and gave my first one to a friend. It's all about the games. I've played games on the XBox (including a few that supported 1080i on my HD-TV) but they're too much like games on the PC. There's more variety and unique games on the PS2.
Can't wait to play "We Love Katamari", or "Shadow of the Colossus" or even "Ratchet: Deadlocked". Last weekend, I went to our local GameStop and picked up some used games to get me through until Christmas. Right now, I'm playing "Maximo" and "Killzone".
The irony (for me) in Sony shipping the 100 millionth PS2 is that last weekend I also bought a PSOne for $20. I'll use it to set up a dedicated "Dance Dance Revolution" system, so I can get some exercise during the winter.
For a while there, I thought this was a strike being organized by some company that ran CoD2 servers, ala XBox Live. If that was the case, this would be Bad News(tm) for Call of Duty. Then I read TFA, and realized that wasn't the case.
Here, the "strike" is being organized (if you can call it that) by an upset gamer who runs a server, calling on others who run similar servers to take down their servers for a day. Still pretty bad PR for CoD2, but only if 99% of the game servers out there take part. Unfortunately, I suspect this will have about as much impact as those "Don't-Buy-Gas Day" boycotts I see via email from time to time (trying to force Big Oil to drop the price of gas at the pump.) That is, it will generate some press buzz, but in the end I doubt the company whose attention they are trying to attract will pay them much attention.
That said, cheaters really suck, and it kills the online gaming experience. I stopped playing online FPSs entirely because of cheaters.
They were running something on cable on Halloween night, about the making of the 'Star Wars' original trilogy. I used to be a big SW fan, so I watched it. Most telling moment was when Harrison "Han Solo" Ford said something to the effect of "Lucas didn't understand the acting process. For him, it was like, 'There it is [on the script]. You don't need to figure out the character. Just do it.' But acting isn't about just 'doing' the lines. Han Solo was a new character for me, and in order for me to make the character work, to sell it to an audience, I had to go through a process."
For me, that explains a lot of why the acting in the prequel trilogy fell flat, even with some respectable, established actors. Lucas doesn't understand acting, so he pushed his actors to "just do it." Result: wooden acting.
Are these people crazy? is there someone left in the world that's hard-up enough and will pay $45 for DOS?
Remember, the people they are selling DR-DOS to aren't just end-users like you and me. I imagine most of their users are companies that sell some embedded solution that runs on top of DOS. There are lots of companies that use FreeDOS to run an embedded application, and I would guess there are lots more that use DR-DOS to run a similar embedded DOS app.
No, that all happened quite suddenly on 10/25. DR-DOS 8.1 no longer exists, so the problem appears to have been solved. All the links on DRDOS.com now point to DR-DOS 7.03 when you try to click on DR-DOS. Looks like they've pulled DR-DOS 8.1 completely and rolled back to their old version. No mention of DR-DOS 8.0 or DR-DOS 8.1. Probably the easiest way for them to do all that very quickly was to roll back the web site to some old version.
People are smart... Someone doesn't deal with the public...
"A person is smart, but people are dumb, stupid and panicky." ~Agent K, 'MIB'
"'To start, press any key.' Where's the any key?" ~Homer Simpson, 'The Simpsons'
4) Pop-ups: Its my browser, my PC dont run around making windows on it!
Normally, I'm not a grammar nazi. But I had to call you on this one, since I had to go over it a few times before I realized you meant:
4) Pop-ups: It's my browser, my PC; don't run around making windows on it!