I rather think Nintendo's reliance on their GC/GBA system link feature in lieu of a serious online strategy was the major disappointment of the big 3. Doom III and Halo II will keep the xbox in business and xbox live will sell itself, (it is that good) and Sony is so far ahead of either MS or Nintendo that it doesn't need a killer app. (Though It has GT and GTA anyway!) With Sony announcing its GBA handheld competitor, this segment is only going to get better for us -- the gamers!
With the prevalence of people seeming to favour buying an Xbox for Doom III instead of upgrading their entire system going on in the Doom III thread on the front page, Xbox is making itself a serious alternative for FPS fans. (Note the Doom III trailer was taken from the Xbox version.)
For FPS fans the following games make an xbox an attractive proposition:
Halo I & II RTCW Thief III Doom III Counterstrike Red Faction I & II Deus Ex (rpg elements aside) Medal of Honour HalfLife II
The above also could make one think the xbox is competing against the pc gaming dollar as well as the typical ongoing console vs console war...
One advantage the xbox seems to have in the console wars is the dominance of the 'console FPS' game genre. Halo, Red Faction, Serious Sam, RTCW and now CS. Seems good option for those sick of the latest Radeon/GForce costing more than the rest of your system combined.
Though have to insert obligatory remark about WASD/mouse control advantage here.
Most of the comments I have seen have missed the original posters requirements:
- action game where I can play a spy or a soldier? - driving game where I can race around in cool cars? - D&D style game so I can re-live my pubescent RPG days?
Hire an XBOX.
For 1 - Splinter Cell For 2 - Sega GT For 3 - Morrowind
One of the advantages with VFP has always been that the client app/exe/whatever is 100% license/royalty free. As opposed to a VB/SQL Server type solution where MS will clip the ticket on the number of seats the solution you provided takes up. (Or per processor if above 50 or 60 seats.)
As an aside MS has wanted to force VFP developers to VB or.NET for a while, but the community is very loyal (and vocal) as VFP is a damn good product.
Normally when people ask what I do for a living, I take the easy route out and say "Stuff with computers", which usually shuts them up. If not then a "Programmer" usually narrows it down.
The interesting thing I find when talking with non-IT related Americans (I am in New Zealand), I get a vague(ish) reaction if I say I'm a programmer. If i change my response to "Database Engineer", it is inevitably "Ahhh!" and they immediatly have an indication of what I do.
It would appear to as though the engineer term when applied to programmers has been bastardised in the USA enough for it to filter through to the Joe 6-Pack.
At the 45th annual Grammy awards, the assembled crowd of music industry executives and celebrities eagerly awaited the announcements Sunday night because they knew full well that a Grammy boost could mean a surge in sales, or at least peer-to-peer file downloads.
Up until just a few years ago, music consumers had to go to record stores and buy CD's with actual money. Not only was it damned inconvenient to drive to a store, but consumers (especially young consumers) rarely have that kind of cash lying around. There had to be a better way. Luckily for everyone, the Internet explosion of the late 1990's ushered in a completely new and vital business model for the industry: piracy.
According to the RIAA, consumers have flocked to this new distribution system. Actual retail sales for 2002 were a fraction of what they had been before the advent of peer-to-peer file sharing, but since the music industry has yet to come up with a means of tracking downloads there is no real way of knowing. Available statistics make 2002 seem like a down year for the industry hen quite the opposite is true. Unofficial estimates of mp3 traffic indicate that music consumption shot up more than 150% in the past twelve months. Norah Jones' debut effort Come Away With Me is an excellent example of success in this new economic paradigm. Not only did the album receive several nominations including Best New Artist but it was also one of the most popular titles of the year, selling almost four hundred copies since its release early last summer. Industry experts say the numbers are excellent assuming the formula of seven thousand downloads for every retail sale. "Winning a string of Grammy awards is great," said Jones. "But I really hope this translates into more illegal downloads. Otherwise, it's just a statuette.My agent explains that I'm getting paid for this somehow. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it must be the wave of the future."
RIAA president and humanitarian Hillary Rosen says she is thrilled to see music piracy finally finding a home on the Web. "We tried making the switch years ago, but people just weren't ready in 1982 to form enormous anonymous sharing rings for bootleg eight-track tapes." Commercial music distribution is incredibly costly. Making sleeves, printing booklets, burning discs, it all adds up to an expense many in the industry believed was unnecessary. So, in the fall of 1999, a specially appointed RIAA task force designed and built the file sharing systems known as Napster and Gnutella. "I'm so happy to know that my organization has had a small part in this revolution," said Rosen. "It's all about getting the music out there - for the kids."
Accountants have scratched their heads over this acceptance of music sharing, questioning how the industry can meet their expenses by giving away their product. Rosen giddily pointed to an official RIAA document, detailing how the music sharing business model works: Sign artists to lucrative deal. Produce album. Upload songs to Web for an unknown number of people to download and share. Profit!
Did being a skinny computer geek amongst those big, horny, hardened criminals, enlighten your perspective on the female perspective of things? Did this scar you permanently?
1. Store user comments in a web site -- no need for ACID here?
2. Storing user preferences that need to be queried at each page view
3. Storing cookies
4. Logging activities that you want to query/aggregate elegantly later
5. Store temporary data (example: in a wizard type web app, there was an upload file widget, and I stored the data in MySQL to keep the data persistent accross pages, and when the user clicked 'finish' it was sent to an oracle DB). Store mailing list datas (email addresses, etc...)
6. Store access control information that need to be queried at each requests
7. Implement a special purpose search engine.
For any transaction intensive, ACID dependaent application you would be putting your job in your own shaky hands, opting for MYSQL. Have seen this personally at the rather large shop I work at.
I would stick to SQL Server, (this is a credible alternative since version 7 SP2) or the other normal Oracle/Postgres given budget/platform freedom.
Make sure you are running on Win2K with a Geforce2 and SoundBlaster. Then start up CS, and try to play for more than 10 minutes without crashing. After 2 weeks of this you will never feel the need again.....
I probably would tend to agree with you to a certain extent BUT it is good that we are talking about and susequently raising wider issues. I would have never known what the damn RIAA stood for if not some of the discussions round here the past few years.
What bought this home to me was having drinks last weekend with some of my non techie friends, the "burning cds" issue and poor Sony, BMG..etc came up conversation due to this guy who worked at Sony whining about lost Britney sales.
What amazed me was the fucking level of cluelessness of some of my supposedly intelligent friends about how little they knew of the wider issues.
Keep talking...and no i am not a teenager of in my basement...
Slashdot Mirror
"Did we really need Raine being sexually assaulted by a mechanical robot bug?"
YES!!!
I rather think Nintendo's reliance on their GC/GBA system link feature in lieu of a serious online strategy was the major disappointment of the big 3. Doom III and Halo II will keep the xbox in business and xbox live will sell itself, (it is that good) and Sony is so far ahead of either MS or Nintendo that it doesn't need a killer app. (Though It has GT and GTA anyway!) With Sony announcing its GBA handheld competitor, this segment is only going to get better for us -- the gamers!
With the prevalence of people seeming to favour buying an Xbox for Doom III instead of upgrading their entire system going on in the Doom III thread on the front page, Xbox is making itself a serious alternative for FPS fans. (Note the Doom III trailer was taken from the Xbox version.)
For FPS fans the following games make an xbox an attractive proposition:
Halo I & II
RTCW
Thief III
Doom III
Counterstrike
Red Faction I & II
Deus Ex (rpg elements aside)
Medal of Honour
HalfLife II
The above also could make one think the xbox is competing against the pc gaming dollar as well as the typical ongoing console vs console war...
Has Nintendo announced anything? Otherwise I feel they will be rapidly losing out of the three. GBA aside...
Wrong. Games editor simoniker posts quite reguarly to -decent- questions/points.
I happen to quite like the games section theme as well.
One advantage the xbox seems to have in the console wars is the dominance of the 'console FPS' game genre. Halo, Red Faction, Serious Sam, RTCW and now CS. Seems good option for those sick of the latest Radeon/GForce costing more than the rest of your system combined.
Though have to insert obligatory remark about WASD/mouse control advantage here.
First Pissing Shooter...
Final Fantasy is nothing like a D&D style game. Dont even try and make an argument that it is.
Ummm...his wife was going away shortly. Even IF sony was dumb to lose the exclusivity, you would be a year to early.
Guess thats why that call it the Kiddie-Cube.
Most of the comments I have seen have missed the original posters requirements:
- action game where I can play a spy or a soldier?
- driving game where I can race around in cool cars?
- D&D style game so I can re-live my pubescent RPG days?
Hire an XBOX.
For 1 - Splinter Cell
For 2 - Sega GT
For 3 - Morrowind
Thanks for coming.
You are being too paranoid.
.NET for a while, but the community is very loyal (and vocal) as VFP is a damn good product.
One of the advantages with VFP has always been that the client app/exe/whatever is 100% license/royalty free. As opposed to a VB/SQL Server type solution where MS will clip the ticket on the number of seats the solution you provided takes up. (Or per processor if above 50 or 60 seats.)
As an aside MS has wanted to force VFP developers to VB or
Over-rated-has-been-never-was. More info:
i n- crunch/
http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/hackers/capta
burn all our rented games!
(For backups of course)
(When the rental store is closed of course. Hmmmm..)
Welcome to the new Slashdot, ads are also inserted into the comments...
(Someone mod parent as offtopic please.)
I think they should focus on searching for a new name!
Normally when people ask what I do for a living, I take the easy route out and say "Stuff with computers", which usually shuts them up. If not then a "Programmer" usually narrows it down.
The interesting thing I find when talking with non-IT related Americans (I am in New Zealand), I get a vague(ish) reaction if I say I'm a programmer. If i change my response to "Database Engineer", it is inevitably "Ahhh!" and they immediatly have an indication of what I do.
It would appear to as though the engineer term when applied to programmers has been bastardised in the USA enough for it to filter through to the Joe 6-Pack.
Nethack announces they are going release a linux client!
At the 45th annual Grammy awards, the assembled crowd of music industry executives and celebrities eagerly awaited the announcements Sunday night because they knew full well that a Grammy boost could mean a surge in sales, or at least peer-to-peer file downloads.
Up until just a few years ago, music consumers had to go to record stores and buy CD's with actual money. Not only was it damned inconvenient to drive to a store, but consumers (especially young consumers) rarely have that kind of cash lying around. There had to be a
better way. Luckily for everyone, the Internet explosion of the late 1990's ushered in a completely new and vital business model for the
industry: piracy.
According to the RIAA, consumers have flocked to this new distribution system. Actual retail sales for 2002 were a fraction of what they had
been before the advent of peer-to-peer file sharing, but since the music industry has yet to come up with a means of tracking downloads there is no real way of knowing. Available statistics make 2002 seem like a down year for the industry hen quite the opposite is true. Unofficial estimates of mp3 traffic indicate that music consumption shot up more than 150% in the past
twelve months. Norah Jones' debut effort Come Away With Me is an excellent example of success in this new economic paradigm. Not only did the album receive several nominations including Best New Artist but it was also one of the most popular titles of the year, selling almost four hundred copies since its release early last summer. Industry experts say the numbers are excellent assuming the formula of seven thousand downloads for every retail sale. "Winning a string of Grammy awards is great," said Jones. "But I really hope this translates into more illegal downloads. Otherwise, it's just a
statuette.My agent explains that I'm getting paid for this somehow. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it must be the wave of the future."
RIAA president and humanitarian Hillary Rosen says she is thrilled to see music piracy finally finding a home on the Web. "We tried making the
switch years ago, but people just weren't ready in 1982 to form enormous anonymous sharing rings for bootleg eight-track tapes." Commercial music distribution is incredibly costly. Making sleeves, printing booklets, burning discs, it all adds up to an expense many in the industry believed was unnecessary. So, in the fall of 1999, a specially appointed RIAA task force designed and built the file sharing systems known as Napster and Gnutella. "I'm so happy to know that my organization has had a small part in this revolution," said Rosen. "It's all about getting the music out there - for the kids."
Accountants have scratched their heads over this acceptance of music sharing, questioning how the industry can meet their expenses by giving
away their product. Rosen giddily pointed to an official RIAA document, detailing how the music sharing business model works:
Sign artists to lucrative deal.
Produce album.
Upload songs to Web for an unknown number of people to download and share.
Profit!
Did being a skinny computer geek amongst those big, horny, hardened criminals, enlighten your perspective on the female perspective of things? Did this scar you permanently?
1. Store user comments in a web site -- no need for ACID here?
...)
2. Storing user preferences that need to be queried at each page view
3. Storing cookies
4. Logging activities that you want to query/aggregate elegantly later
5. Store temporary data (example: in a wizard type web app, there was an upload file widget, and I stored the data in MySQL to keep the data persistent accross pages, and when the user clicked 'finish' it was sent to an oracle DB).
Store mailing list datas (email addresses, etc
6. Store access control information that need to be queried at each requests
7. Implement a special purpose search engine.
For any transaction intensive, ACID dependaent application you would be putting your job in your own shaky hands, opting for MYSQL. Have seen this personally at the rather large shop I work at.
I would stick to SQL Server, (this is a credible alternative since version 7 SP2) or the other normal Oracle/Postgres given budget/platform freedom.
Make sure you are running on Win2K with a Geforce2 and SoundBlaster. Then start up CS, and try to play for more than 10 minutes without crashing. After 2 weeks of this you will never feel the need again.....
PS2 XP release is coming soon... as soon as they can figure out how to lock you out when you switch controllers.....
I probably would tend to agree with you to a certain extent BUT it is good that we are talking about and susequently raising wider issues. I would have never known what the damn RIAA stood for if not some of the discussions round here the past few years.
What bought this home to me was having drinks last weekend with some of my non techie friends, the "burning cds" issue and poor Sony, BMG..etc came up conversation due to this guy who worked at Sony whining about lost Britney sales.
What amazed me was the fucking level of cluelessness of some of my supposedly intelligent friends about how little they knew of the wider issues.
Keep talking...and no i am not a teenager of in my basement...
just like MS DOS was theirs??