Reading through the comments, I can't believe someone hasn't come up with this yet.
While measuring heartrate, you could tie that to a "Sanity" meter (not unlike Eternal Darkness's).
Sample scenario:
While roaming through the woods in the dark, hearing random screams and shrieks and growls, your sanity begins to leave you as your heart beats faster and your breath quickens.
As you feel the release of safety inside the haunted house, your heart rate slows, your sanity picks up...
...just as the beast runs into the room, scaring you senseless. Everything gets fuzzy as your sanity meter goes off the chart, and you are torn to shreds in your paralyzed fear.
I don't know about you, but that sounds like something I'd like to try. You have to keep your cool whilst in wild, scary situations.
Think about in context with the upcoming Call of Cthulu game.
Secondly, I believe it's very important to keep track of any and all movments of the biggest, richest, most powerful company in the world.
Of the company that controls 95% of the desktop market that Linux might, hopefully, break into.
If they're looking into new strategies, even ones that are years behind their time, we should know about it. When you only look at yourself, you'll sometimes see innovation or monopolism take over while you're busy staring at your shoes.
A company with such terrible operating practices should be watched closer than any other company, and I'm all for it.
Despite your obvious trolling, I will agree that it might seem a bit much, but I'll tell you, I'm glad we're looking too hard, than not looking hard enough.
I wait for these same comments about the SCO case in a few days.
Think about it: Atari (or Infogrames, whatever) paid over $20 million to make and over $60 million just for the LICENSE to create Enter The Matrix. It features lame gameplay, bad design, and a boringness that is almost unparalelled (sure its fun for five minutes, but c'mon).
Any game venture nowadays takes a gargantuan undertaking, tens of millions of dollars.
Why?
Well, of course you have to release it on every platform imaginable. This means, to me, that at least one of those platforms is going to get shafted. Normally its the PC version(s). Why? Too many configurations. Even if you do release a PC version, you have to continue to bugfix it as old/new bugs pop up with old/new equipment.
Plus there's the raw talent. Finding a programming team to develop for up to 4 or 5 platforms (can't forget the GBA) is tough. Getting a GOOD team is even tougher.
Plus there's the actors/voice talent. You don't necessarily have to invest a lot here, but hey, it doesn't hurt to get a "big name" on the box. (I know Wolverine's Revenge isn't touting Mark Hammill, but it sure is mentioned a lot on the game/Star Wars Geek sites)
Plus there's the development cycle. Another reason that most games lack originality is that you have to take that original idea, put it on all of these platforms AND make sure its still original and current a few years down the road. When an idea is created for a game, its not fleshed out in any matter (generally) for many moons. This means that any second guessing, or, god forbid, realization that it's never going to work won't come until months down the road. And just think of all the cash already spent!
Anyone remember Prey? Or Duke Nukem Forever? An old joke, but its still viable in context. They either had a terrible idea, or the technology outran them.
I remember a few years ago John Carmack shooting for the most high-end system imaginable (at the time) as his minimum sys requirements for Doom3. This was something along the lines of an 800Mhz PIII and a Geforce2. Everyone thought he was out of his mind. Nobody is going to have something that downright uber in a few years, nobody!
But its that kind of brave thinking that makes good games age well and others turn to vinegar.
When I heard that Railroad Tycoon 3 (a fav series of mine) was going to be playable on a TNT2, you could tell instantly that its development cycle was either a long time coming, or the project manager just didn't have the balls to say "We're going to require a DX8 compliant card to continue." Sure its nice to play it on old machines, but eye candy coupled with great gameplay makes games that last, and aren't stifled by old standards its desperately trying to make pliable with its codebase.
Getting back on target, games are now million dollar "projects" and "ventures" and this means that a LOT of people who control that cash want to have their say, and want to have their approval on it. Just imagine if GTA3 didn't have its two predecessors, and the big boss executive didn't like the idea of stealing cars and running over people for fun (granted there's still Carmaggedon, et al, but work with me).
New gameplay concepts are generally taken in small steps. GTA had two top-down perspective predecessors, the FPS world was born with Wolfenstein 3d on a shoe-string budget, using a character that already had an established fanbase.
Any new, brazen concept is going to get killed at that stage. Concepts don't make executives happy, they want to hear about market forcasts and demographics and marketing strategies. There is too much bullshit involved in a big budget game to really introduce something groundbreaking.
I'm afraid that the GTA series will suffer the same fate of More of the Same. I mean, seriously, GTA: Vice City was little more than a bug fix release, with a larger playing area, newer vehicles, nicer engine, and some (slightly) improved AI. I'm sure GTA: Whatever will be the same way. A
Little Billy plays with his X-Box handheld, his arms rippled with muscles from holding the 20 pound monster for weeks. He holds it like a dinner tray, hitting the massive buttons with his fist.
His mother enters the room. "Look Billy, I got you a puppy!"
Billy's eyes light up, and forgets his grip on the handheld. It goes hurling toward the carpet. The puppy runs toward it excitingly, hoping to impress his new owner.
"Nooooo!" Goes the mother's scream.
As the handheld falls on the dog, it crushes the skull instantly (the blood splattering on the wall in a vicious arc), the small "yelp" almost non-existent. The head is taken cleanly off, and the body stands still for a moment before dropping to the floor. The screams only grow louder...
Drive Bill over to the X-Box Linux Headquarters and wait for him to finish his "business". Then pay off the cops that come by with the trunkful of cash and dump the bodies of the X-Box Linux developers in the lake, after dropping Bill off at headquarters, of course.
Yeah, looking back it had some really nice features. Why it didn't have a better interface...
Even so, that odd MCP stuff just boggled the mind. I tried to play around in it a bit, astounded that it supported almost any SCSI device (CD writers, et al).
Never got in deep with the logs. I wrote a few WFLs, ran many many programs, updated MCP every few years or so. Interesting (not fun) times, for sure.
Hey, I'm fully aware (did you see the linked post?) of that. I know it's not a mainframe, I passed out of Computers 101 like every other geek.
All I'm expressing is that they continued to call it that even though it really wasn't one. They might've worked with room-filling mainframes in the past, and simply decided to call every "Main Server" a mainframe.
Hell, they called the monitor/keyboard the "Spo" (rhymes with foe), because that's what the bosses called it Back In The Day.
Here in East Tennessee we have the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), which, IIRC, has the lowest power rates in the nation, thanks to our extensive work in dams and modified waterways.
DSL is 1/3 the speed in this area (640k) for the same price. That's not competition.
Is that the same upstream/downstream quotient? I'd take a 10k/sec hit from my cable if I could get 35k/sec up and down, instead of 45k/sec down and 12k/sec up. You have your tradeoffs.
And yeah, wireless solutions are pretty much crap. Whenever a storm rolls in, there goes your internet...
You hear that? That's the clue train. ya just missed it.
Where to start.
Explain to me how Comcast has competition? DSL is NOT competition for Comcast Internet services (this is not an arguable point BTW).
Of course its competition! Competition is defined as two companies who have the same product with differing circumstances (its not Webster's, but its good enough). That means if people have another option at high speed internet, they might *gasp* just take it! This means that Comcast might have to lower their prices OR up their customer service (which is crap) in order to keep the customers they have.
If the phone companies or local municipalities up their interest in high speed internet (adding CO's in rural areas, et al), then this is what we call "competition."
Force the "natural monopolies" (their words, not mine) to compete instead of taking over and doing what they want.
There is still a choice involved. And hell, if everyone is running off the muni's bandwidth, and cable is shared bandwidth, then you're cable access is going to be mighty fine (assuming that comcast ups the bandwidth limit for "basic" customers).
Again, this is competition. You are still left with a choice, even if its not the one you like.
Why do you think Comcast immediately starts the propoganda machine as soon as muni's get this idea in their head? Think about it, and the answer might come eventually.
I've read comments like these a thousand times. Over and over. and I'm tired of it.
Dude, if somebody is on a cell phone, ask them to get off it. If someone is yammering, ask them to shut up. You'd be suprised at the amount of support you get when you get the gumption to just tell people to act their age (and respect those around them).
As for the 300# guy, that's something that comes along with it. I can deal with that, and sticky floors, if I get to see The Matrix Reloaded in ass whipping sound and a beautiful screen (hell, even a half-decent screen. Its still 20x larger than any "projector" $10k system you can setup in your house).
I love movies, and I love going to the movies. If people piss you off, tell them. If you're fed up, wait for the video. Most people scream "Just watch it on DVD, blah blah" Well, I'm not going to wait four months to see The Matrix Reloaded on DVD, I'm going to see it in a venue that is far nicer than anything I can set up myself.
And unless you've got money to burn or are rich beyond your imagination, you can't setup a theater as large, expansive, or feature-filled as a movie theater. Sorry, just can't do it. The owners spent millions so you can enjoy the movies on a BIG screen and nice sound. And I will support them because I love movies and if you don't like it in the theater, watch it at home. (Please don't respond with "My theater sucks, the projector is crap, blah blah" becuase I've heard that one too)
But please, stop bringing up this argument. Everyone has heard it, seen it, is used to it, and understands completely where you're coming from.
But it didn't stop Reloaded from making $135 mill at the box office, now did it?
Man, I hated Infoconnect. Not to mention we were wasting hundreds (upon hundreds) of dollars a year in licensing when NX/View was very much Free (as in beer) from Unisys.
We also had been using InfoConnect in transferring files over win3.11 serial connection (though it was still technically TCP/IP), and NX/Connect I believe it was called would install a shell module into Windows Explorer allowing you to "Copy as MCP Record Here", which saved thousands on licensing.
I loved all the free tools from Unisys. Print Control, NX/[blah] et al.
We actually tried to use NX/View bank-wide, but evidently there are some port collisions or something crazy going on, because if you ran more than 2 or 3 copies at once, a port managing program would freak out and we would have to shutdown and restore the network before we could get Premier II (the win32 interface) working properly again.
So most were stuck with Cadet, Infoconnect's little terminal proggy (as you well know), though me and the boss always got to run NX/View, and I liked its interface a 1000x better than chunky old cadet. Plus you could edit the drop down menus to send macros to the terminal, and that saved me a lot of time/trouble.
Did you ever see that easter egg in the Help - About section of NX/View? I'm trying to remember, something about holding shift or ctrl and clicking on various places would make this little blue guy in a tank show up and shoot around for a few, then disappear...
We had an old "mainframe" (shitty NT4 server) which ran COBOL code on it. Read about it here.
Well, one day Unisys comes in and offers to DOUBLE our current processing speed. We were using a dual pentium pro w/ 128 MB server.
And how were they planning on doubling the speed? By replacing the dongle on an LPT port on the back of the machine. They wanted tens of thousands to REPLACE A DONGLE. Evidently they throttle their own software in order to leech more cash off companies (banks in particular).
As I laughed and told them no, the look of surprise was priceless indeed...
Slashdot Mirror
Listen online. Most npr stations have online listening capabilities (Realplayer and Quicktime, respectively, usually both).
Here's one, here's mine, and here's one more.
And then, you patent it!
*rimshot*
While measuring heartrate, you could tie that to a "Sanity" meter (not unlike Eternal Darkness's).
Sample scenario:
I don't know about you, but that sounds like something I'd like to try. You have to keep your cool whilst in wild, scary situations.
Think about in context with the upcoming Call of Cthulu game.
or maybe some deer hunter type game too
*obligatory hick joke*
I wonder if it could tell if you're drunk, too...
*end obligatory hick joke*
Thanks to being from the south, I know dozens of guys who LOVE Deer Hunter but won't touch Quake 3. Sigh...
Firstly, filter it if you don't like it.
Secondly, I believe it's very important to keep track of any and all movments of the biggest, richest, most powerful company in the world.
Of the company that controls 95% of the desktop market that Linux might, hopefully, break into.
If they're looking into new strategies, even ones that are years behind their time, we should know about it. When you only look at yourself, you'll sometimes see innovation or monopolism take over while you're busy staring at your shoes.
A company with such terrible operating practices should be watched closer than any other company, and I'm all for it.
Despite your obvious trolling, I will agree that it might seem a bit much, but I'll tell you, I'm glad we're looking too hard, than not looking hard enough.
I wait for these same comments about the SCO case in a few days.
Yeah, because they were going fucking insane. Can you imagine 10 straight hours of Tetris? I know I've had a few long runs...
"I'll take a valium and Guiness for a 1000 Alex."
Interestingly, bonzi.com has been returning connection refused all day. This is usually one of the net's busiest sites.
Ah...a little thing called justice.
(Does this mean only 600,000 XP users trust Windows Update?)
Or does it mean that after a hundred thousand complaints they pulled it from the site?
*SLAP*
Remember Skate or Die?
Or perhaps the arcade version, with the wild bike handlebar controls?
Don't tell me I'm that old...
Here ya go. Look at anything with "TD" following its title.
:)
Once you get hooked on TD, don't expect to be let go soon
I suggest the Maze TD and Azure Defense TD
Spy Kids 3-D (aka Spy Kids 2)
Just as a note, Spy Kids 2 was its own (very fine) film, and Spy Kids 3-D is supposed to be the last in the series.
And have been for about 5 years now.
Think about it: Atari (or Infogrames, whatever) paid over $20 million to make and over $60 million just for the LICENSE to create Enter The Matrix. It features lame gameplay, bad design, and a boringness that is almost unparalelled (sure its fun for five minutes, but c'mon).
Any game venture nowadays takes a gargantuan undertaking, tens of millions of dollars.
Why?
Well, of course you have to release it on every platform imaginable. This means, to me, that at least one of those platforms is going to get shafted. Normally its the PC version(s). Why? Too many configurations. Even if you do release a PC version, you have to continue to bugfix it as old/new bugs pop up with old/new equipment.
Plus there's the raw talent. Finding a programming team to develop for up to 4 or 5 platforms (can't forget the GBA) is tough. Getting a GOOD team is even tougher.
Plus there's the actors/voice talent. You don't necessarily have to invest a lot here, but hey, it doesn't hurt to get a "big name" on the box. (I know Wolverine's Revenge isn't touting Mark Hammill, but it sure is mentioned a lot on the game/Star Wars Geek sites)
Plus there's the development cycle. Another reason that most games lack originality is that you have to take that original idea, put it on all of these platforms AND make sure its still original and current a few years down the road. When an idea is created for a game, its not fleshed out in any matter (generally) for many moons. This means that any second guessing, or, god forbid, realization that it's never going to work won't come until months down the road. And just think of all the cash already spent!
Anyone remember Prey? Or Duke Nukem Forever? An old joke, but its still viable in context. They either had a terrible idea, or the technology outran them.
I remember a few years ago John Carmack shooting for the most high-end system imaginable (at the time) as his minimum sys requirements for Doom3. This was something along the lines of an 800Mhz PIII and a Geforce2. Everyone thought he was out of his mind. Nobody is going to have something that downright uber in a few years, nobody!
But its that kind of brave thinking that makes good games age well and others turn to vinegar.
When I heard that Railroad Tycoon 3 (a fav series of mine) was going to be playable on a TNT2, you could tell instantly that its development cycle was either a long time coming, or the project manager just didn't have the balls to say "We're going to require a DX8 compliant card to continue." Sure its nice to play it on old machines, but eye candy coupled with great gameplay makes games that last, and aren't stifled by old standards its desperately trying to make pliable with its codebase.
Getting back on target, games are now million dollar "projects" and "ventures" and this means that a LOT of people who control that cash want to have their say, and want to have their approval on it. Just imagine if GTA3 didn't have its two predecessors, and the big boss executive didn't like the idea of stealing cars and running over people for fun (granted there's still Carmaggedon, et al, but work with me).
New gameplay concepts are generally taken in small steps. GTA had two top-down perspective predecessors, the FPS world was born with Wolfenstein 3d on a shoe-string budget, using a character that already had an established fanbase.
Any new, brazen concept is going to get killed at that stage. Concepts don't make executives happy, they want to hear about market forcasts and demographics and marketing strategies. There is too much bullshit involved in a big budget game to really introduce something groundbreaking.
I'm afraid that the GTA series will suffer the same fate of More of the Same. I mean, seriously, GTA: Vice City was little more than a bug fix release, with a larger playing area, newer vehicles, nicer engine, and some (slightly) improved AI. I'm sure GTA: Whatever will be the same way. A
Nintendo is making most of its money on its Gameboy business. Which is why Sony is getting into that market, and soon Microsoft.
Of course, they "only" made over 570 million this past fiscal year, and that was looked up as a disappointment.
Who modded this as flamebait?
This is a fantastic example of the ironic double-standard of most linux using moderators.
I hope whoever modded this down gets meta-moderated to hell.
Little Billy plays with his X-Box handheld, his arms rippled with muscles from holding the 20 pound monster for weeks. He holds it like a dinner tray, hitting the massive buttons with his fist.
His mother enters the room. "Look Billy, I got you a puppy!"
Billy's eyes light up, and forgets his grip on the handheld. It goes hurling toward the carpet. The puppy runs toward it excitingly, hoping to impress his new owner.
"Nooooo!" Goes the mother's scream.
As the handheld falls on the dog, it crushes the skull instantly (the blood splattering on the wall in a vicious arc), the small "yelp" almost non-existent. The head is taken cleanly off, and the body stands still for a moment before dropping to the floor. The screams only grow louder...
Also Known As:
GTA: Redmond
Example Mission:
Drive Bill over to the X-Box Linux Headquarters and wait for him to finish his "business". Then pay off the cops that come by with the trunkful of cash and dump the bodies of the X-Box Linux developers in the lake, after dropping Bill off at headquarters, of course.
Yeah, those rock solid Graphics APIs and fantastic drivers really show Windows who's boss.
Yeah, looking back it had some really nice features. Why it didn't have a better interface...
;)
Even so, that odd MCP stuff just boggled the mind. I tried to play around in it a bit, astounded that it supported almost any SCSI device (CD writers, et al).
Never got in deep with the logs. I wrote a few WFLs, ran many many programs, updated MCP every few years or so. Interesting (not fun) times, for sure.
Always nice to hear from fellow MCP'ers
Hey, I'm fully aware (did you see the linked post?) of that. I know it's not a mainframe, I passed out of Computers 101 like every other geek.
All I'm expressing is that they continued to call it that even though it really wasn't one. They might've worked with room-filling mainframes in the past, and simply decided to call every "Main Server" a mainframe.
Hell, they called the monitor/keyboard the "Spo" (rhymes with foe), because that's what the bosses called it Back In The Day.
I certainly agree here.
Here in East Tennessee we have the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), which, IIRC, has the lowest power rates in the nation, thanks to our extensive work in dams and modified waterways.
Is that the same upstream/downstream quotient? I'd take a 10k/sec hit from my cable if I could get 35k/sec up and down, instead of 45k/sec down and 12k/sec up. You have your tradeoffs.
And yeah, wireless solutions are pretty much crap. Whenever a storm rolls in, there goes your internet...
Ding, ding, ding ding....
You hear that? That's the clue train. ya just missed it.
Where to start.
Explain to me how Comcast has competition? DSL is NOT competition for Comcast Internet services (this is not an arguable point BTW).
Of course its competition! Competition is defined as two companies who have the same product with differing circumstances (its not Webster's, but its good enough). That means if people have another option at high speed internet, they might *gasp* just take it! This means that Comcast might have to lower their prices OR up their customer service (which is crap) in order to keep the customers they have.
If the phone companies or local municipalities up their interest in high speed internet (adding CO's in rural areas, et al), then this is what we call "competition."
Force the "natural monopolies" (their words, not mine) to compete instead of taking over and doing what they want.
There is still a choice involved. And hell, if everyone is running off the muni's bandwidth, and cable is shared bandwidth, then you're cable access is going to be mighty fine (assuming that comcast ups the bandwidth limit for "basic" customers).
Again, this is competition. You are still left with a choice, even if its not the one you like.
Why do you think Comcast immediately starts the propoganda machine as soon as muni's get this idea in their head? Think about it, and the answer might come eventually.
I'm not flaming here, but I'm generally curious.
I've read comments like these a thousand times. Over and over. and I'm tired of it.
Dude, if somebody is on a cell phone, ask them to get off it. If someone is yammering, ask them to shut up. You'd be suprised at the amount of support you get when you get the gumption to just tell people to act their age (and respect those around them).
As for the 300# guy, that's something that comes along with it. I can deal with that, and sticky floors, if I get to see The Matrix Reloaded in ass whipping sound and a beautiful screen (hell, even a half-decent screen. Its still 20x larger than any "projector" $10k system you can setup in your house).
I love movies, and I love going to the movies. If people piss you off, tell them. If you're fed up, wait for the video. Most people scream "Just watch it on DVD, blah blah" Well, I'm not going to wait four months to see The Matrix Reloaded on DVD, I'm going to see it in a venue that is far nicer than anything I can set up myself.
And unless you've got money to burn or are rich beyond your imagination, you can't setup a theater as large, expansive, or feature-filled as a movie theater. Sorry, just can't do it. The owners spent millions so you can enjoy the movies on a BIG screen and nice sound. And I will support them because I love movies and if you don't like it in the theater, watch it at home. (Please don't respond with "My theater sucks, the projector is crap, blah blah" becuase I've heard that one too)
But please, stop bringing up this argument. Everyone has heard it, seen it, is used to it, and understands completely where you're coming from.
But it didn't stop Reloaded from making $135 mill at the box office, now did it?
Man, I hated Infoconnect. Not to mention we were wasting hundreds (upon hundreds) of dollars a year in licensing when NX/View was very much Free (as in beer) from Unisys.
We also had been using InfoConnect in transferring files over win3.11 serial connection (though it was still technically TCP/IP), and NX/Connect I believe it was called would install a shell module into Windows Explorer allowing you to "Copy as MCP Record Here", which saved thousands on licensing.
I loved all the free tools from Unisys. Print Control, NX/[blah] et al.
We actually tried to use NX/View bank-wide, but evidently there are some port collisions or something crazy going on, because if you ran more than 2 or 3 copies at once, a port managing program would freak out and we would have to shutdown and restore the network before we could get Premier II (the win32 interface) working properly again.
So most were stuck with Cadet, Infoconnect's little terminal proggy (as you well know), though me and the boss always got to run NX/View, and I liked its interface a 1000x better than chunky old cadet. Plus you could edit the drop down menus to send macros to the terminal, and that saved me a lot of time/trouble.
Did you ever see that easter egg in the Help - About section of NX/View? I'm trying to remember, something about holding shift or ctrl and clicking on various places would make this little blue guy in a tank show up and shoot around for a few, then disappear...
I swear to God this is true:
We had an old "mainframe" (shitty NT4 server) which ran COBOL code on it. Read about it here.
Well, one day Unisys comes in and offers to DOUBLE our current processing speed. We were using a dual pentium pro w/ 128 MB server.
And how were they planning on doubling the speed? By replacing the dongle on an LPT port on the back of the machine. They wanted tens of thousands to REPLACE A DONGLE. Evidently they throttle their own software in order to leech more cash off companies (banks in particular).
As I laughed and told them no, the look of surprise was priceless indeed...
Evidently this is standard practice...