Well mine wasn't - I liked this game. Still do to be honest. There's a remake around somewhere, but I still emulate the C64 version for preference.
Don't get me wrong, I don't rush home from work each nice desperate for a game of Ghostbusters. On the other hand, fifteen or twenty minutes every few months or so and I enjoy it - that's more than you can say for a lot of roughly twenty year-old games.
Our kids (one turning 7 next January, two that turned 5 and 3 this October) use a MacBook and have a G3 iMac. These are useful for a few reason:
One button mouse. Yes, really. A one button mouse is a clear advantage here - although the Mac certainly can use context clicks, it doesn't have to and so the kids end up with a simple interface.
Durability - the MacBook has stood up well, and the G3 iMac just keeps on going
Parental controls - the MacBook runs Leopard, the iMac Tiger. In both cases the parental controls are sufficient to allow us to not have to watch every millisecond of what they're doing, though obviously I'm still around.
Cheap. Not the MacBook, but the G3 iMac was rescued from a bin and these days can basically be had free with a bag of crisps (or chips if you're in the US - I'm in the UK). The all-in-one design helps here too - you get a cheap system with nothing else required.
They spend their time on CBeebies (the BBC children's web site) and Nick Jnr playing Flash games, so actual operating systems are basically meaningless here. What's important is that it can show a web page and run Flash, which both machines can. The iMac acts as a DVD player for kids' films too.. Supervised, they also go onto YouTube to look at clips of Mario Galaxy etc.. to help them with their games. There's plenty of educational early school-type sites out there too which help with maths and spelling.
To the naysayers in this thread who don't think a two year-old can cope - yes, they certainly can and ours does (well, he's three and one month now but you get the point). At that age they're unlikely to knock you out a quick CMS in Python, but some of the web sites for children are very well thought out and they enjoy their time there.
Maybe, just maybe, this class action lawsuit will convince the general masses to buy real instruments?
I'm a musician too - I write music and play keyboards. I'm a slightly above average player, fairly average writer (though I'd like to think differently of course). To reach those dizzying heights, it took me years of learning and practice. Years. I'm 36 now, I started learning when I was 9, haven't finished learning and doubt I ever will. Anyone on here who plays will be able to relate to that statement I think.
I also own Rock Band and Guitar Hero III. Have really enjoyed playing Guitar Hero III, though I've not really got into Rock Band as yet due to lack of time. Am I for a moment fooled into thinking I could really play a guitar to that level? No, I'm not. How many years would it take me to play guitar at the required level of skill? A lot of years, and that's assuming I ever made it. These games - they're not a substitute for real musicianship, but then they're not supposed to be either. They're exactly what they say they are, music-based games. I have a lot of fun with them, and to deny myself that just because I know I'm not really playing a proper guitar just seems foolish.
Bah. DikuMuds? LP? I have no truck with you and your fancy modern ways.
Naah - I started with MIST, telnetting in from Lancaster University to Essex University. In fact there was quite a Lancaster contingent on MIST, and I am not joking that I know people who failed their degrees due to their addiction.
MIST was only available at certain times, so we started hanging out at Cheeseplant's House. I had previously considered this to be the first talker in the world, though wikipedia states it's the second. I was known as Scorpion on both of these (and please Mr Slashdot Admins, can I have my original Slashdot account back that I've lost the password and email to?).
One thing is that MIST was player vs player, as well as player vs the game. Killing your fellow player was all part of the fun, though it was frowned on to kill a level one newbie at the time. Really enjoyed MIST and would love to see an emulator for it somewhere, though of course it wouldn't be the same without multiple players logged on. Does anyone know of one?
Having the data encrypted will do just a tiny bit to save face, but it will hardly stop anyone who wants in
Really? Let me know when you've finished breaking TrueCrypt then, or PGP, or BitLocker, or FileVault. I'll be the one waiting over here. For a very, very long time...
I suggest they call it Ix. Which means, of course, "member of a new-found family of very massive planets that encircle stars more massive than the sun". Obviously.
There has always been good and bad music in games. I grew up with the Commodore 64 -it has writers who heavily influenced the way I play keyboards and write music today. People like Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Chris Abbot...great stuff. Ed Bogas' Psi 5 Trading Company music which changed according to the game's events has also stuck in my mind.
However, it had utter dross too. Complete, total and redemptionless trash. Then, of course, was the stuff in-between - the average, take it or leave stuff which was neither genius nor risible. I suspect most tracks fall into this category. I suspect they still do on modern systems. I suspect they will do on systems in the future - the reason most stuff is just average these days is because that's pretty much what average means.
Orchestral scores - nothing wrong with them per se. Take a look at Super Mario Galaxy for a game where the music really does add to the experience, and that's pretty much all orchestral. Then again, I was always a fan of Rez (original, not had the chances to play Rez HD) and that took a very different approach to music - the blurb made clear that the Trance-style music was an integral part of the game's experience, and that if you played as if it were a straight shooter-on-rails then you were missing the point.
At some point, Wii Music or whatever it's going to be callde will come out. That's the preview they showed on first unveiling the Wii, where Miyamoto conducted a virtual orchestra using the Wiimote. Surely that is an innovative use of music in a game?
I've rambled a bit but the overall point I was making is this: all systems of all eras had stand-out music (yes, even the one-beep Spectrum. Manic Miner anyone?). All systems also had junk. And all systems primarily had tracks that were, well, rather average. The rule holds true today and I fully expect it to hold true tomorrow.
Posted anon since I was involved in one of these things recently.
At least, it would have been if I'd had a brain.
OK, since my name's out I'll finish the job. The operations are most likely valuable, as are the apps running in there. However, come merger and consolidation time merely having those centres around is a tremendous advantage. These things cost serious amounts of cash, and the electronic transaction volumes are growing all the time - yes, even now. So the raw existence of a pre-equipped building is the thing, not necessarily the data files within it.
No. it's all about avoiding the expense of building one yourself. The actual data in those centers may or may not be worthwhile to the buying organisation, but the floor space and ready-to-roll IT structure most certainly is.
Posted anon since I was involved in one of these things recently.
Threading Ensure your concurrency skills are up to snuff. Read about the newer (1.5+ so not that new admittedly) ways of handling concurrency in Java - a lot of older books will miss the java.util.concurrent frameworks.
JDBC Persistance frameworks are all well and good, but understand the fundamentals of how things work at the database level inside Java.
Spring Although this changed a little with the latest rev of EJB, many sites simply dumped it and went with Spring. Worth knowing.
Application servers Pick one and know one, use that to extrapolate to the rest. My own advice is to look at Tomcat, but just knowing the basic concepts behind them is a start.
There's probably a lot I've missed, but right now I'd consider looking at those.
From problems with the camera to issues getting a mento and coke together. Add in some residual gravity, and it was a complete failure.
It was experimentation - not a failure. The blog says they're working on improving the design for next time - this is exactly what scientific experimentation should show. Initial postulate, experimentation, refinement based on results.
Far from a failure, and I certainly enjoyed reading about it and watching the videos.
Operating System: Only Windows XP (SP2 or SP3) and Windows Vista are supported at this time. Running Windows on a Mac? Photosynth runs under Boot Camp only. Parallels and other VM software cannot run the viewer.
A posting, with video, on the VMware Fusion blog begs to differ. You do need to be running VMware Fusion 2 latest beta though.
I can't see this improving their opinion of Microsoft much.
In fairness to Microsoft, blue screens are normally due to bad hardware drivers. Whatever that thing actually was, it certainly wasn't a normal monitor and I'll bet the drivers are rather specific. And the less people use them, the fewer bugs are found.
And how does maintaining your own email server help? Those outgoing mails are going to somewhere right? And the incoming ones arrived from somewhere? Then they're likely being transmitted in the plain somewhere along the line.
Unless you encrypt the messages themselves, you're on your own. Having your own mailserver, which I do, simply doesn't help with this problem.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:How to cut internet piracy by 80%
on
UK P2P Fight Brewing
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Yeah, all the free music from Beethoven can't hold a candle to Britney Spears
Unless you're playing it yourself, you will find there's still copyright on the performance of that music.
You're free to take Beethoven's music and form a string quartet to play it. You're not free to take a performance of Beethoven's 5th by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and stick it up on bittorrent - that's definitely still copyrighted.
We're not searching Google, we're searching the Internet.
Nope, quite definitely searching Google. "The internet" cannot be searched, there's no protocol for it. You can search a concentration of culled pages stored in a particular place, but you're not searching the internet. You're searching what that place has stored, believing it to be a subset of the internet.
You can trivially see this with pages that present one thing to Google spiders and another to the real browsing user. Or with 404 links - they existed at the time they went in the index, but they don't exist now. It's not the internet being searched, it's the snapshot subset that's been indexed.
The real story here is how quickly the bugs were patched. I'd like to see MS respond half as fast to holes in Windows and it's attendant parts and pieces.
No. The real story here are the security bugs, precisely as described. This isn't cheerleading - to users of Ruby it really doesn't matter how fast some other imagined patch might have come out from another company for a different product. If I'm running Ruby, I need to know that these bugs exist and that patches can be applied for them.
Drop the us vs them thinking - it doesn't help is pretty much just FUD.
How old are you and which country? Not meant as a patronising question, it's a genuine one. If you're around my generation (I'm 36) and from the UK, chances are you will have heard of them. Spindizzy and Micro Machines being the top ones - they're stars of the 8-bit and 16-bit era really. I know they've done a lot since, but that's still what I know them for.
Yep - I use the converter several times a day, I use the Tube travel status (London Underground) map to check things before leaving and I use four instances of the clock widget to track time in the various zones I need to interact with.
Thought I'd share with you - when my four year-old and six year-old kids start asking for ridiculous things, my stock answer is "yes, and I'd like a pony". Normally gets the right amount of consideration after that.
.. video codecs used in consumer video systems (even H.264/Blu-Ray) do not have such high color depth. So what's the point?
And of course, video codecs have been perfected now and will never, ever change or improve. You're right - we should all just pack up and go home, it's all been done.
The initial machines were CoreDuo, not Core2Duo. Our family had a 32-bit MacBook Pro, MacBook and Mac Mini. I've since replaced the MacBook Pro with a Core2Duo model, but the MacBook and Mac Mini continue to do decent service and there's no need to replace them.
Slashdot Mirror
My childhood was ruined because of this game.
Well mine wasn't - I liked this game. Still do to be honest. There's a remake around somewhere, but I still emulate the C64 version for preference.
Don't get me wrong, I don't rush home from work each nice desperate for a game of Ghostbusters. On the other hand, fifteen or twenty minutes every few months or so and I enjoy it - that's more than you can say for a lot of roughly twenty year-old games.
Cheers,
Ian
Is made even more obvious in the concept drawings for C3P0, but take a look at Maria, from the 1927 film Metropolis.
Cheers,
Ian
They spend their time on CBeebies (the BBC children's web site) and Nick Jnr playing Flash games, so actual operating systems are basically meaningless here. What's important is that it can show a web page and run Flash, which both machines can. The iMac acts as a DVD player for kids' films too.. Supervised, they also go onto YouTube to look at clips of Mario Galaxy etc.. to help them with their games. There's plenty of educational early school-type sites out there too which help with maths and spelling.
To the naysayers in this thread who don't think a two year-old can cope - yes, they certainly can and ours does (well, he's three and one month now but you get the point). At that age they're unlikely to knock you out a quick CMS in Python, but some of the web sites for children are very well thought out and they enjoy their time there.
Cheers,
Ian
Maybe, just maybe, this class action lawsuit will convince the general masses to buy real instruments?
I'm a musician too - I write music and play keyboards. I'm a slightly above average player, fairly average writer (though I'd like to think differently of course). To reach those dizzying heights, it took me years of learning and practice. Years. I'm 36 now, I started learning when I was 9, haven't finished learning and doubt I ever will. Anyone on here who plays will be able to relate to that statement I think.
I also own Rock Band and Guitar Hero III. Have really enjoyed playing Guitar Hero III, though I've not really got into Rock Band as yet due to lack of time. Am I for a moment fooled into thinking I could really play a guitar to that level? No, I'm not. How many years would it take me to play guitar at the required level of skill? A lot of years, and that's assuming I ever made it. These games - they're not a substitute for real musicianship, but then they're not supposed to be either. They're exactly what they say they are, music-based games. I have a lot of fun with them, and to deny myself that just because I know I'm not really playing a proper guitar just seems foolish.
Cheers,
Ian
Bah. DikuMuds? LP? I have no truck with you and your fancy modern ways.
Naah - I started with MIST, telnetting in from Lancaster University to Essex University. In fact there was quite a Lancaster contingent on MIST, and I am not joking that I know people who failed their degrees due to their addiction.
MIST was only available at certain times, so we started hanging out at Cheeseplant's House. I had previously considered this to be the first talker in the world, though wikipedia states it's the second. I was known as Scorpion on both of these (and please Mr Slashdot Admins, can I have my original Slashdot account back that I've lost the password and email to?).
One thing is that MIST was player vs player, as well as player vs the game. Killing your fellow player was all part of the fun, though it was frowned on to kill a level one newbie at the time. Really enjoyed MIST and would love to see an emulator for it somewhere, though of course it wouldn't be the same without multiple players logged on. Does anyone know of one?
Cheers,
Ian
Having the data encrypted will do just a tiny bit to save face, but it will hardly stop anyone who wants in
Really? Let me know when you've finished breaking TrueCrypt then, or PGP, or BitLocker, or FileVault. I'll be the one waiting over here. For a very, very long time...
Cheers,
Ian
I suggest they call it Ix. Which means, of course, "member of a new-found family of very massive planets that encircle stars more massive than the sun". Obviously.
Cheers,
Ian
There has always been good and bad music in games. I grew up with the Commodore 64 -it has writers who heavily influenced the way I play keyboards and write music today. People like Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Chris Abbot...great stuff. Ed Bogas' Psi 5 Trading Company music which changed according to the game's events has also stuck in my mind.
However, it had utter dross too. Complete, total and redemptionless trash. Then, of course, was the stuff in-between - the average, take it or leave stuff which was neither genius nor risible. I suspect most tracks fall into this category. I suspect they still do on modern systems. I suspect they will do on systems in the future - the reason most stuff is just average these days is because that's pretty much what average means.
Orchestral scores - nothing wrong with them per se. Take a look at Super Mario Galaxy for a game where the music really does add to the experience, and that's pretty much all orchestral. Then again, I was always a fan of Rez (original, not had the chances to play Rez HD) and that took a very different approach to music - the blurb made clear that the Trance-style music was an integral part of the game's experience, and that if you played as if it were a straight shooter-on-rails then you were missing the point.
At some point, Wii Music or whatever it's going to be callde will come out. That's the preview they showed on first unveiling the Wii, where Miyamoto conducted a virtual orchestra using the Wiimote. Surely that is an innovative use of music in a game?
I've rambled a bit but the overall point I was making is this: all systems of all eras had stand-out music (yes, even the one-beep Spectrum. Manic Miner anyone?). All systems also had junk. And all systems primarily had tracks that were, well, rather average. The rule holds true today and I fully expect it to hold true tomorrow.
Cheers,
Ian
Posted anon since I was involved in one of these things recently.
At least, it would have been if I'd had a brain.
OK, since my name's out I'll finish the job. The operations are most likely valuable, as are the apps running in there. However, come merger and consolidation time merely having those centres around is a tremendous advantage. These things cost serious amounts of cash, and the electronic transaction volumes are growing all the time - yes, even now. So the raw existence of a pre-equipped building is the thing, not necessarily the data files within it.
Cheers,
Ian
No. it's all about avoiding the expense of building one yourself. The actual data in those centers may or may not be worthwhile to the buying organisation, but the floor space and ready-to-roll IT structure most certainly is.
Posted anon since I was involved in one of these things recently.
Ensure your concurrency skills are up to snuff. Read about the newer (1.5+ so not that new admittedly) ways of handling concurrency in Java - a lot of older books will miss the java.util.concurrent frameworks.
Persistance frameworks are all well and good, but understand the fundamentals of how things work at the database level inside Java.
Although this changed a little with the latest rev of EJB, many sites simply dumped it and went with Spring. Worth knowing.
Pick one and know one, use that to extrapolate to the rest. My own advice is to look at Tomcat, but just knowing the basic concepts behind them is a start.
There's probably a lot I've missed, but right now I'd consider looking at those.
Cheers,
Ian
From problems with the camera to issues getting a mento and coke together. Add in some residual gravity, and it was a complete failure.
It was experimentation - not a failure. The blog says they're working on improving the design for next time - this is exactly what scientific experimentation should show. Initial postulate, experimentation, refinement based on results.
Far from a failure, and I certainly enjoyed reading about it and watching the videos.
Cheers,
Ian
Operating System: Only Windows XP (SP2 or SP3) and Windows Vista are supported at this time. Running Windows on a Mac? Photosynth runs under Boot Camp only. Parallels and other VM software cannot run the viewer.
A posting, with video, on the VMware Fusion blog begs to differ. You do need to be running VMware Fusion 2 latest beta though.
Cheers,
Ian
I can't see this improving their opinion of Microsoft much.
In fairness to Microsoft, blue screens are normally due to bad hardware drivers. Whatever that thing actually was, it certainly wasn't a normal monitor and I'll bet the drivers are rather specific. And the less people use them, the fewer bugs are found.
Cheers,
Ian
... to maintain your own mail server.
And how does maintaining your own email server help? Those outgoing mails are going to somewhere right? And the incoming ones arrived from somewhere? Then they're likely being transmitted in the plain somewhere along the line.
Unless you encrypt the messages themselves, you're on your own. Having your own mailserver, which I do, simply doesn't help with this problem.
Cheers,
Ian
Yeah, all the free music from Beethoven can't hold a candle to Britney Spears
Unless you're playing it yourself, you will find there's still copyright on the performance of that music.
You're free to take Beethoven's music and form a string quartet to play it. You're not free to take a performance of Beethoven's 5th by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and stick it up on bittorrent - that's definitely still copyrighted.
Cheers, Ian
Nope, quite definitely searching Google. "The internet" cannot be searched, there's no protocol for it. You can search a concentration of culled pages stored in a particular place, but you're not searching the internet. You're searching what that place has stored, believing it to be a subset of the internet.
You can trivially see this with pages that present one thing to Google spiders and another to the real browsing user. Or with 404 links - they existed at the time they went in the index, but they don't exist now. It's not the internet being searched, it's the snapshot subset that's been indexed.
Cheers,
Ian
"You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought".
Cheers,
Ian
The real story here is how quickly the bugs were patched. I'd like to see MS respond half as fast to holes in Windows and it's attendant parts and pieces.
No. The real story here are the security bugs, precisely as described. This isn't cheerleading - to users of Ruby it really doesn't matter how fast some other imagined patch might have come out from another company for a different product. If I'm running Ruby, I need to know that these bugs exist and that patches can be applied for them.
Drop the us vs them thinking - it doesn't help is pretty much just FUD.
Cheers,
Ian
How old are you and which country? Not meant as a patronising question, it's a genuine one. If you're around my generation (I'm 36) and from the UK, chances are you will have heard of them. Spindizzy and Micro Machines being the top ones - they're stars of the 8-bit and 16-bit era really. I know they've done a lot since, but that's still what I know them for.
Cheers,
Ian
From the summary: "Nokia is concerned that the Linux developers need to learn to live with DRM, SIM-locking, and 'IPR'. But they won't. "
Rephrased by me: Nokia is concerned that they need Linux developers need to learn to live with DRM, SIM-locking, and 'IPR'. And they won't.
Cheers,
Ian
Do others find widgets useful? What are they?
Yep - I use the converter several times a day, I use the Tube travel status (London Underground) map to check things before leaving and I use four instances of the clock widget to track time in the various zones I need to interact with.
Cheers,
Ian
Class.
Thought I'd share with you - when my four year-old and six year-old kids start asking for ridiculous things, my stock answer is "yes, and I'd like a pony". Normally gets the right amount of consideration after that.
Cheers,
Ian
.. video codecs used in consumer video systems (even H.264/Blu-Ray) do not have such high color depth. So what's the point?
And of course, video codecs have been perfected now and will never, ever change or improve. You're right - we should all just pack up and go home, it's all been done.
Cheers,
Ian
What models of macs came with a 32 bit OS?
The initial machines were CoreDuo, not Core2Duo. Our family had a 32-bit MacBook Pro, MacBook and Mac Mini. I've since replaced the MacBook Pro with a Core2Duo model, but the MacBook and Mac Mini continue to do decent service and there's no need to replace them.
Cheers,
Ian