The market of 1994 had nintendo clinging out to the huge revenue from ROM and unwilling to move on to cheaper media with more storage space. This created a demand for an alternative. Sony provided that alternative and Squaresoft jumped on board because they wanted to use tons of CGI footage on their projects.
Porting from PC to Xbox is easy, and the huge installed userbase of the PS2 make it a worthwhile investment. Gamecube sells mainly because of the highly popular first-party franchises (Mario, Metroid and Zelda sell the consoles). Apple does not have the huge installed base or backward compatibility to a gigantic software library of the PS/PS2. It does not own any IP that would promote their console like Nintendo (they should have bought bungie if they wanted this).
1994 was a perfect time to enter the market, anyone in the industry knew that a number of third party developpers were dissatisfied with Nintendo. 2004 is not a good time to enter the market.
I still have fond memory of being in high school in the early nineties and having all my (female) teachers drill into the head of everyone that the girls in the class were so much smarter, mature and overall better then guys, and they'd all be doctor and that the guys in the class would be picking trash off the side of the highway.
I have even fonder memories of going to an engineering school were for some reason they were trying hard to convince women to go into engineering. A large portion of the sholarships had the requirement to be a women to be eligible. I tried to laugh it when I had to work 20-30 hours a week at an ISP help desk to be able to live through my degree.
The reason I posted my original comment is that the professor did something that you can't do in the media today (/. being one of those media) : suggest that women are not smarter then men.
And to enjoy watching the moderation go up and down.
There's no way men can be smarter then women in any area. Look at all these men in tv ads that can't even do anything and need the help of those smarter, more mature female version of ourselves.
Sometimes I wonder how I manage to dress myself in the morning and get to work, since my chromosomes make me so dumb.
And the company that compresses all their file with this algorithm will be able to decompress the files and do whatever they want with it in the future. There is no difference.
Anyone stupid enough to encode their data using a proprietary system deserve to lose all their data, IMNSHO.
Well, that's a positive attitude. In absence of an open source alternative that performs at the same level, why should a consumer that can benefit from this technology pass it up?
What's next, "If you're stupid to drive a car encumbered with patents you deserve to die?".
Yes, and let me tell you, the best scene of the next Terminator is where Diego Maradona tries to a outrun a T-1000, but unfortunately for diego the robot was sent back to 2004, not 1984.
The FTC froze the funds that they had in Canada, along with other locations. Even if they are not in the USA, if they take credit cards, their money flows through the USA.
Wait a second, did Canada get annexed by the USA while I was on holidays?
There wasn't too much connection between Dune II and WarCraft, either.
Blizzard took Dune 2, polished the interface, cut the the number of opposite sides to two instead of three, use a medieval theme and the roster of unit is mirrored on both sides, save for spells. Blizzard have always been king at making perfect interfaces for their game. They optimized and themed Dune 2, and released Warcraft. I know Herzog Zwei was the first RTS, but Dune 2 established the PC RTS era, Warcraft was an imitation. They only started shining from a strategy standpoint with the amazingly good game "Starcraft". My whole point is that Blizzard is not a "revolutionary" company, they take established concept and optimize/"pastheurize" them for massive consumption by the most possible consumers.
Dune II had a terrible interface and gameplay that was nearly identical to C&C, not WarCraft.
This is like comparing: Coors Lite vs Vintage wine Mozarella vs Brie
Easier to consume in large quantities, but not of higher quality.
Oh it is horrible, that's the feeling I was trying to convey in my write-up. Kinda like eating your brain with a toothpick for hours on end. It's painful, tastes bad, takes forever and you know it's killing you.
I quit back in August (detail I should have included I guess).
FFXI is the worst game for people who have a life. I should know, I had a THF50/WAR37/DRK30 with all jobs unlocked, most leveled to lvl 10+.
A typical FFXI session would be : log on at 6:00pm, get my 2 friends into a party and frantically search for a WHM and 2 damage dealers. Any evening where getting WHM was easy, there was no good damage dealers available. Around 7-7:30 if we're lucky, we can set out to go camp. Around 8pm, we're in position, we start killing, it's good. Around 8:45 pm the whm has to leave for whatever reason, the whole evening is shot.
Then you've levelled a bit, let's get some equipment! Great news : that amazingly good dagger for lvl 50 thieves is dropped by a lvl 76 HNM. In other words high levels are making you pay trough the nose for it because there's no way in hell a lvl 50 can go get it for himself, even if there's 18 lvl 50 trying together. So we go farm. 10k gil an hour is the best you can hope to, so there goes THIRTY hours of farming items because that dagger is 300k. Wanna camp a high value item instead? Well, join the 10 other campers at Mee Deggi/Leaping Lizzy/Valkurm Emperor/etc. The monster appears every hour to 1.5 hour, so keep a clock near your computer. Oh, and you might get 4-5 kills and still get no drop, the drop is rare.
FFXI was an exercise in masochism. The nice part of EQ2 is I can group with my 2 RL friends, play 2-3 hours and make progress, then stop for the week. Very casual friendly in my experience.
Haven't played WoW, but I've seen a couple of people say it's "revolutionary". I might be a skeptic, but if it's "revolutionary" like Warcraft was to Command&Conquer and Dune 2, then I'll have to disagree.
Speaking Hebrew but not English in Canada is a bit like being born and raised in Canada but only knowing French and not English. It happens, but it's actually statistically rare and it's really not viable to cater for the few people it effects.
Thrust me, between having the second biggest french speaking city in the world after Paris, and taking into account that 31% of canadian can speak both french and english, with the vast majority of these being in the eastern half of the country, you can probably figure out it's actually pretty freakin' viable. 17% of canadian don't even speak english because they simply don't need to. 82% of anglophones in quebec can also speak french.
I guess it's just hard for some people that watch TV shows where aliens from outer space speak english to grasp the concept of someone not speaking their language and living a life similar to theirs.
This so reminds me of the fuzz about the introduction of catalytic converters in Germany. "It will be way more expensive. It will cost jobs!", was the car industry's mantra.
I think the car companies had the same reactions when regulations forced them to put seatbelts in car way back them. They felt it made their product seem unsafe for customers and was bad for business, and jobs (mostly situated in the pallbearing industry imho).
combining small increases in use of non-fossil energy sources (nuclear, wind, solar) with increases in energy efficiency (hybrid cars, reasonable insulation of houses)
Well, we're on the right path, ford just introduced the new "Super-duty" pick-up truck, the biggest and meanest penis-enlarger for commuting to work, and pulling something with it once every 2 years. The official spec cite "not-applicable" for fuel economy, which is probably pretty accurate. On the plus side, the 38 gallon tank probably will allow you to fuel up only twice per week when commuting.
I know what you mean. Halo does not even come close to being on the same level as Call of Duty (my personnal favorite of the last two years). I started playing Halo's single player campaign and it felt like one of the most hollow gaming experience of recent fps I've played.
I've been guilty of similar lapses of stupidity, but many orders of magnitudes worse. My worst offense was after working five 14 hours shift on the road, taking off after my last shift in a freaking snowstorm, with a company pick-up truck that was only 2WD (RWD), and driving 12 hours until 9 the next morning to get back to my place because I had a new girlfriend I wanted to see. That was truly dumb. I actually had to take a break between 5AM and 6AM because I was out of gas and the station wasn't opened.
The kind of thing that make you wonder if you're really that smart. Sad part is I had to hit the road for another two weeks a few days later, and came back to find out I was dumped (however, that's not unusual).
Now, if only they can devise a way to keep 85 year olds who think that it's their god given right to drive until the day they die, from slamming on the gas and destroying buildings and killing pedestrians because they thought it was the break pedal
Heh, lots of people got stories like this, so I'll throw in mine. I know a girl that used to work in a big supermarket with an in-door garage. If you ever worked as a wrapper you know you sometimes go and help people get stuff in their car. A car was backing out of the spot behind the car where she was putting things in. The old lady saw her and proceeded to press down on the wrong pedal.
That girl will now spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, both legs destroyed beyond repair.
You do understand that those big power supplies are for running two very powerful 3D graphic cards to push the cutting edge games to the limit? If you only want to do word processing, a 250W Antec PSU will do the job just fine.
You need to compare apples to apples. Don't compare an ultimate gaming rig to a mac using power consumption as your primary criteria.
Slashdot Mirror
The market of 1994 had nintendo clinging out to the huge revenue from ROM and unwilling to move on to cheaper media with more storage space. This created a demand for an alternative. Sony provided that alternative and Squaresoft jumped on board because they wanted to use tons of CGI footage on their projects.
Porting from PC to Xbox is easy, and the huge installed userbase of the PS2 make it a worthwhile investment. Gamecube sells mainly because of the highly popular first-party franchises (Mario, Metroid and Zelda sell the consoles). Apple does not have the huge installed base or backward compatibility to a gigantic software library of the PS/PS2. It does not own any IP that would promote their console like Nintendo (they should have bought bungie if they wanted this).
1994 was a perfect time to enter the market, anyone in the industry knew that a number of third party developpers were dissatisfied with Nintendo. 2004 is not a good time to enter the market.
Hot and wet is great when you're with a lady, but not when you're storing media. ;-)
/. audience at that sentence.
I think you lost half of the
I still have fond memory of being in high school in the early nineties and having all my (female) teachers drill into the head of everyone that the girls in the class were so much smarter, mature and overall better then guys, and they'd all be doctor and that the guys in the class would be picking trash off the side of the highway.
I have even fonder memories of going to an engineering school were for some reason they were trying hard to convince women to go into engineering. A large portion of the sholarships had the requirement to be a women to be eligible. I tried to laugh it when I had to work 20-30 hours a week at an ISP help desk to be able to live through my degree.
The reason I posted my original comment is that the professor did something that you can't do in the media today (/. being one of those media) : suggest that women are not smarter then men.
And to enjoy watching the moderation go up and down.
There's no way men can be smarter then women in any area. Look at all these men in tv ads that can't even do anything and need the help of those smarter, more mature female version of ourselves.
Sometimes I wonder how I manage to dress myself in the morning and get to work, since my chromosomes make me so dumb.
And the company that compresses all their file with this algorithm will be able to decompress the files and do whatever they want with it in the future. There is no difference.
Anyone stupid enough to encode their data using a proprietary system deserve to lose all their data, IMNSHO.
Well, that's a positive attitude. In absence of an open source alternative that performs at the same level, why should a consumer that can benefit from this technology pass it up?
What's next, "If you're stupid to drive a car encumbered with patents you deserve to die?".
Yes, and let me tell you, the best scene of the next Terminator is where Diego Maradona tries to a outrun a T-1000, but unfortunately for diego the robot was sent back to 2004, not 1984.
Considering the creation of Skynet will lead to the destruction of humanity, we simply won't be able to field a good team in 2050.
The FTC froze the funds that they had in Canada, along with other locations. Even if they are not in the USA, if they take credit cards, their money flows through the USA.
Wait a second, did Canada get annexed by the USA while I was on holidays?
Do you often microwave stuff with your head inserted into the microwave or was this revelation the result of a one-time experiment?
There wasn't too much connection between Dune II and WarCraft, either.
Blizzard took Dune 2, polished the interface, cut the the number of opposite sides to two instead of three, use a medieval theme and the roster of unit is mirrored on both sides, save for spells. Blizzard have always been king at making perfect interfaces for their game. They optimized and themed Dune 2, and released Warcraft. I know Herzog Zwei was the first RTS, but Dune 2 established the PC RTS era, Warcraft was an imitation. They only started shining from a strategy standpoint with the amazingly good game "Starcraft". My whole point is that Blizzard is not a "revolutionary" company, they take established concept and optimize/"pastheurize" them for massive consumption by the most possible consumers.
Dune II had a terrible interface and gameplay that was nearly identical to C&C, not WarCraft.
This is like comparing:
Coors Lite vs Vintage wine
Mozarella vs Brie
Easier to consume in large quantities, but not of higher quality.
Maybe it's just me, but that sounds horrible.
Oh it is horrible, that's the feeling I was trying to convey in my write-up. Kinda like eating your brain with a toothpick for hours on end. It's painful, tastes bad, takes forever and you know it's killing you.
I quit back in August (detail I should have included I guess).
FFXI is the worst game for people who have a life. I should know, I had a THF50/WAR37/DRK30 with all jobs unlocked, most leveled to lvl 10+.
A typical FFXI session would be : log on at 6:00pm, get my 2 friends into a party and frantically search for a WHM and 2 damage dealers. Any evening where getting WHM was easy, there was no good damage dealers available. Around 7-7:30 if we're lucky, we can set out to go camp. Around 8pm, we're in position, we start killing, it's good. Around 8:45 pm the whm has to leave for whatever reason, the whole evening is shot.
Then you've levelled a bit, let's get some equipment! Great news : that amazingly good dagger for lvl 50 thieves is dropped by a lvl 76 HNM. In other words high levels are making you pay trough the nose for it because there's no way in hell a lvl 50 can go get it for himself, even if there's 18 lvl 50 trying together. So we go farm. 10k gil an hour is the best you can hope to, so there goes THIRTY hours of farming items because that dagger is 300k. Wanna camp a high value item instead? Well, join the 10 other campers at Mee Deggi/Leaping Lizzy/Valkurm Emperor/etc. The monster appears every hour to 1.5 hour, so keep a clock near your computer. Oh, and you might get 4-5 kills and still get no drop, the drop is rare.
FFXI was an exercise in masochism. The nice part of EQ2 is I can group with my 2 RL friends, play 2-3 hours and make progress, then stop for the week. Very casual friendly in my experience.
Haven't played WoW, but I've seen a couple of people say it's "revolutionary". I might be a skeptic, but if it's "revolutionary" like Warcraft was to Command&Conquer and Dune 2, then I'll have to disagree.
Speaking Hebrew but not English in Canada is a bit like being born and raised in Canada but only knowing French and not English. It happens, but it's actually statistically rare and it's really not viable to cater for the few people it effects.
Thrust me, between having the second biggest french speaking city in the world after Paris, and taking into account that 31% of canadian can speak both french and english, with the vast majority of these being in the eastern half of the country, you can probably figure out it's actually pretty freakin' viable. 17% of canadian don't even speak english because they simply don't need to. 82% of anglophones in quebec can also speak french.
I guess it's just hard for some people that watch TV shows where aliens from outer space speak english to grasp the concept of someone not speaking their language and living a life similar to theirs.
This so reminds me of the fuzz about the introduction of catalytic converters in Germany. "It will be way more expensive. It will cost jobs!", was the car industry's mantra.
I think the car companies had the same reactions when regulations forced them to put seatbelts in car way back them. They felt it made their product seem unsafe for customers and was bad for business, and jobs (mostly situated in the pallbearing industry imho).
combining small increases in use of non-fossil energy sources (nuclear, wind, solar) with increases in energy efficiency (hybrid cars, reasonable insulation of houses)
Well, we're on the right path, ford just introduced the new "Super-duty" pick-up truck, the biggest and meanest penis-enlarger for commuting to work, and pulling something with it once every 2 years. The official spec cite "not-applicable" for fuel economy, which is probably pretty accurate. On the plus side, the 38 gallon tank probably will allow you to fuel up only twice per week when commuting.
I know what you mean. Halo does not even come close to being on the same level as Call of Duty (my personnal favorite of the last two years). I started playing Halo's single player campaign and it felt like one of the most hollow gaming experience of recent fps I've played.
Every big mall in Montreal has one :
Promenades St-Bruno
Mail Champlain
Boul le Corbusier (not a mall)
Galerie Anjou
Centre Fairview
Centre Eaton
Maybe in a couple other malls too.
I can get a hummer for around 50 bucks in my city. I don't get the connection with gas theft though.
At this point, wouldn't having a good digital camera that included basic cell phone capabilties be smarter?
I've been guilty of similar lapses of stupidity, but many orders of magnitudes worse. My worst offense was after working five 14 hours shift on the road, taking off after my last shift in a freaking snowstorm, with a company pick-up truck that was only 2WD (RWD), and driving 12 hours until 9 the next morning to get back to my place because I had a new girlfriend I wanted to see. That was truly dumb. I actually had to take a break between 5AM and 6AM because I was out of gas and the station wasn't opened.
The kind of thing that make you wonder if you're really that smart. Sad part is I had to hit the road for another two weeks a few days later, and came back to find out I was dumped (however, that's not unusual).
Now, if only they can devise a way to keep 85 year olds who think that it's their god given right to drive until the day they die, from slamming on the gas and destroying buildings and killing pedestrians because they thought it was the break pedal
Heh, lots of people got stories like this, so I'll throw in mine. I know a girl that used to work in a big supermarket with an in-door garage. If you ever worked as a wrapper you know you sometimes go and help people get stuff in their car. A car was backing out of the spot behind the car where she was putting things in. The old lady saw her and proceeded to press down on the wrong pedal.
That girl will now spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, both legs destroyed beyond repair.
You do understand that those big power supplies are for running two very powerful 3D graphic cards to push the cutting edge games to the limit? If you only want to do word processing, a 250W Antec PSU will do the job just fine.
You need to compare apples to apples. Don't compare an ultimate gaming rig to a mac using power consumption as your primary criteria.
I always thought that coke machine in west freeport used to be a pepsi machine.
Some people will alway want a easy-to-use secure OS, and if they're lucky the game that's out right now for PC will be out in a year for their OS.
And some will pay half, get a secure OS for free, and dual-boot into the "insecure" OS and play 100% of the cutting edge games.