Re:Check out these zelda shots on the cube
on
Mario's Revenge?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, the really interesting bit on cube.ign.com is where they compare the GameCube Zelda demo to the original N64 Zelda demo. It suggests that when Zelda is finally released for the 'Cube, it will be insanely better than what the demo shows.
Fuck Square and the Chocobos they rode in on!
on
Mario's Revenge?
·
· Score: 1
"but Yamauchi doesn't want them (damn son that guy holds a grudge). He's still pissed over Square abandoning them for PSX a few years back. "
Oh, he has a few more recent things to be pissed about. First off, Square didn't just leave the N64, they left Nintendo in general. That means giving up on what is quite possibly the single most popular gaming device in recorded history: the Game Boy.
They could have been like any number of the "normal" software companies like Konami and Capcom and such that still developed for the Game Boy even though they jumped ship in the console era, but noooo...
Instead, in what can only be a deliberate attempt by egotistcal Square to assassinate the Game Boy, they decided to team up with Bandai and publish the original Final Fantasy games on WonderSwan Color. Sure, it's only a niche system that couldn't hold a candle to what was rumored to be true about the GBA, but Square said "We're Square, we single-handedly sold the PlayStation! It doesn't matter how bad the condole is, if we publish for it, the consumers will eat it up!"
On top of that, Square announces plans to develop for PS2 and Xbox. Doesn't only publishing for 2 out of 3 sound rather targeted?
Then Square notices that their little scheme is more or less backfiring, and says "Well, now we'll develop for the GBA, because we're Square and no hardware company in their right mind would say 'no' to us after FFVII."
So, after blowing off Nintendo in a three-way console war, and then trying to assassinate Nintendo's cash cow (there's no way Square would have made much money on that deal either way), they essentially expect Nintendo to bend over and take it like Compaq does from Microsoft.
I, for one (and I'm probably the only one), agree with Yamauchi-sama. If they want to be the stuck-up prima donnas of the software industry, then they deserve to be seriously humbled in the upcoming console war. Their own stupidity has locked them out of the portable market until at least 2005, and their attempts to rub Nintendo's face in it has resulted in an understandable reaction.
Maybe then they'd go back to making games instead of slideshows. The last three Final Fantasy games have been a big step back to Sierra's King's Quest.
Actually, if you really want to get into it, I think Gumpei Yokoi's greatest contribution to gaming was the D-pad. He developed it for his Game & Watch games (also his invnetion) and patented it. That's why you didn't see other plus-shaped D-pads on any other non-Nintendo consoles until Dreamcast, which was developed after the patent wore off.
On the other hand, maybe they didn't include Yokoi because of his occasional failures. After winning big-time with the Game Boy, he went downhill with the Virtual Boy, and the WonderSwan is only mildly popular.
Let's see... try to download ISO images over a 56k modem connection from Linux-Mandrake over-night, only to find out the next morning that the automatic disconnect screwed me up 10 minutes before the download would have finished, or go out and spend $25 or so and get the disks, paper documentation (I'm a big fan of that), extra apps, and a few pdf books, all while supporting my fav distro.
"A space flight is a dangerous and EXTREMELY complicated process, and if a single component fails, or produces an error, the results can be catastrophic. "
I don't know the rules that the ESA has to live with, but if they're anything like the rules the DOD imposes on rocket launches, if something goes wrong, you just blow up the rocket. Even the shuttle's SRBs have the equivalent of a really long stick of dynamite to make sure that, in case of an accident, no pieces bigger than my hand or so would ever reach the surface.
"NASA, in the USia (sic), spends literally millions of dollars designing the space shuttle's computing system from the ground up. "
We're talking about the ESA here, not NASA. There are only two countries out there that have manned spaceflight programs, and PRC is much closer to being number 3 than any European nation or group. In my opinion, the Japanese will have manned space flight before the Europeans.
Today's useless fact: After the US and Russia/CIS, the country with the most people that have gone into space is Canada.
If you're going to compare the uses of these chips to an American launch platfrom, I'd use the Titan III, or maybe the Delta 2, but definately not the STS.
"Their in-house coders pour over each microchip and line of code hundereds of times looking for even the smallest bug. This superior attention to detail is not possible using the limited resources of the open-source method. "
Tell that to the NSA. So far, it seems they're doing pretty well at scrutinizing Open Source operating systems (ie. GNU/Linux), and seem to be on the verge of making it the most secure modern operating system hands-down.
Open Source means that the hacker sitting in his mom's basement with a computer and a bag of Fritos can (legally) take apart and tinker with the innards. It doesn't REQUIRE you to fit that stereotype, though. If it did, then what does that say about IBM's efforts to run Open Source software on their mainframes?
"It is also why NASA can succeed in safe, reliable space flight time, and time again, while other space programs are struggling."
I think you're confusing "attention to detail" with "multi-billion dollar infrastructure set up in the paranoid 50's and 60's to support the Saturn V." As long as they had the money to pay for the rockets, you could give Brevard County, Florida to any country in the world and they'd be able to build and launch super-heavy lifters to their heart's content.
There's so much there that even Florida's Spaceport Authority (part of the Florida Department of Transportation) owns and maintains their own launch facilities on the Cape (Launch Complexes 20 and 46, I believe). http://www.spaceportflorida.com
Getting into space doesn't require millions of dollars. Currently, all it requires is hundreds of dollars in model rocketry parts (and permission from the DOD and FAA to launch it). Sure, getting into orbit is even trickier, but I know of a team at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach working to do just that with a 6' rocket. The only expensive part of the equation is trying to put something the size of a Mack truck into orbit.
"that has been proven in a court of law (the Supreme Court, no less!)"
Somebody flunked their high school citizenship course...
Let's see if I can't walk you through this: Above the highest state courts (such as the Florida Supreme Court or the Maryland Court of Appeals) is the lowest federal court, called the U. S. District Court. This is where Microsoft has been found guilty of violating anti-trust laws.
So, they appealed the finding, and they are now appearing in the next step of the ladder, the U. S. Court of Appeals. Only after they're done here and need to appeal again does the case appear before the U. S. Supreme Court (maybe).
Am I the only one around that doesn't think that having everything wireless is a "good thing?" You don't have to be very intrusive to listen in on the communications, and you don't even have to violate federal wiretap laws to do it. (The FBI at least needs a court order to tap into your phone line, but not if they want to park a wireless frame sniffer outside your house. That's only a heartbeat away from random checks).
IMO, this is especially bad if the software will be juggling your "personal information" back and forth (including Wallet) as often and as automaticly as this information susggests.
"Oh, _that's_ an oversight. I'm sure they'll just rush lickety-split to fix that one and keep their users from being compelled to use MSN for the feature!:P"
Look at the interface of XP. Now look at the interface for MSN Explorer. See the difference? Neither do I. I have the sneaky suspicion that MSN Explorer will be "integrated" into XP to some extent. Heck, if they get off the DOJ's hook on the IE integration thing, that's practically carte blanche to integrate MSN as a whole into the OS, forcing owners to subscribe to MSN whether they want to use it or not.
... and this surprises you? "Upgrades" are about 50% the price of the full versions of Microsoft OSes, and yet the disks are identical except for the slight change in the setup code that looks for WIN.COM. One could, hypothetically speaking (*cough cough*) upgrade 95 to OSR2 by just erasing WIN.COM.
"what would happen if some hacker uploaded a trojan onto Microsoft's XP update server, and then every XP machine on the planet had a hard-drive erasing, EEPROM flashing virus?"
Cracker, shmacker. Installing NT 4.0 service packs have been known to crash servers (I know, I've done it before. My boss had to re-install Server 4.0 to get the web server up again). Now, I don't know if this same problem happens with 2000 (only one SP so far, anyway) or XP, but that's not a very good track record to go with.
If XP is designed to try to install this stuff automatically over-night or over the weekend, that would be a very ugly situation for an IT manager to come in to on a Monday morning.
Next year or so, after a 7+ year dry-spell, we have not one, but TWO new games coming out starring Samus Aran (the only chick in the industry that seems to know that skin-tight leather and tight shorts don't do anything to protect you in combat). I really don't see how any other software or hardware company can stand up to that kind of punishment, at least in North America.
In Spaceworld 2000, out of all the games sampled (Wave Race, Star Wars, Zelda, even Mario), the one that got the most noise from the crowd was Metroid.
(In case you haven't noticed, I'm salivating at the bit. I really can't think of any other games that drip pure atmosphere like Super Metroid. Castlevania: SotN was a good try, but...)
"Hanna Barbarra blew in the 80's. Putting that
shit on TV instead of Japanimation deprived
US audiences of great shows like Robotech"
At least the H-B stuff was original, not the Frankenstein that Robotech turned out to be (add Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospoedia, take out all but the most imortant plot points, and stir vigorously).
All cartoons sucked in the 80's. They were, after all, the 80's. The Moral Majority was in full control, and only the most mindless stuff was suitible for Saturday mornings. Heck, I blame the decade for killing off Saturday morning cartoons.
On the other hand, there wasn't all that much to work with. Look at DC Comics during the 70's and 80's. Of course, then there was that cool show with Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk and X-Men cameos...
"Making a show like the Flinstones
was very appropriate. "
The Flintstones wasn't originally intended for kids. It was an animated "The Honeymooners" (same time era, more or less). But, becuase you're too busy comparing it to modern standards (Astro Boy is modern by comparison), you don't want to give it credit for, say, the first animated television show in prime time... If we didn't have the Flintstones, we sure as heck wouldn't have had the Simpsons, or South Park, or any other big animated series you can think of today.
"Low-brow humor is about
all Americans seem to be able to appreciate. "
A real intellectual-type, hm? I guess your nose is too stuck up into the air ot notice that the majority of the jokes in South Park are intellectual. Let's see what gets laughs in South Park:
1.) The whole "Duck and Cover" thing from the 50's
2.) The Elian Gonzales situation
3.) The "Moral Majority"
4.) The whole New Age movement
5.) Politics politics politics
6.) Censorship
7.) The relationship between parents and children
8.) The "follow the herd" tendancies of people
9.) Questioning peoples' values
10.) Western society in general
Yeah, a whole bunch of low-brow stuff there...
"which
were at least a decade ahead of the US"
And what makes you assume that the Japanese are "ahead" of us? Why aren't we "ahead" of the Japanese? You really can't pick two cultures that are as different as those two. Comparing Japanese and American animation is like comparing soccer and (American) footbal. Sure, both are played on rectangular fields, two teams trying to get the ball from one end of the field to the other, and various amounts of kicking, but that's about it.
At the very least, you should have some sort of common ground before comparing. After all, I could pick Sailor Moon to represent the Japanese efforts and Daria for this side of the Pacific, and prove how much better American animation is.
"Just look at the
popularity of stuff like SouthPark and Jackass.
"
I'm not so sure they belong in the same category. Jackass wants to find out just how low people would go for money. South Park makes fun of the people who watch and/or want to be on Jackass.
It woudln't be so bad if Disney wasn't trying to be the Microsoft of cartoons. Whenever something cool comes out, Disney buys it out and utterly ruins it. Doug USED to be a really good show...
Well, first off, if you don't like the way the site is managed, Go off and make your own forum that only you and your friends would want to come to. That's always a really popular way to get a bulletin board site off the ground... And then I can come and complain about how you're doing everything all wrong, and how you should be more like Slashdot.
However, you do have a point about the NY Times bit. All this talk about keeping personal information secure, and yet we're forced to send information to one of the most popular newspapers in the western hemisphere to read half the stuff posted here.
It depends on the pieces in question, what it's made out of, what the shape is, so on and so forth...
However, with this particular auction... posted not even half an hour after splash-down, able to get information from this fisherman that found the piece, but no photos (at the prices their asking for, I think they could have afforded the ship-to-shore link for a quick modem transfer), and, last but not least, was found "between Austrailia and New Zealand" when it really came down way on the other side of New Zealand.
But oh NO, this auction is perfectly legit...
Wait until you see the latest EULA:
Title 862, Chapter 78, Section 8480, Paragragh 37:
The liscencee agrees not to hold Microsoft Corporation accountable for violating international war crimes, or to report any suspected crimes against humanity to any international human rights organization.
> Meanwhile, the evil people would find some
> other way to track you, like by IP -- lots of
> people are going static these days.
Static proxy servers, maybe, but I've yet come across a static IP for just one person, excepting web-hosting (they're just too damned few and expensive... where's IPv6 when you need it?)
If you've got two or more people accessing stuff through the same IP, that would seriously screw up their tracking stuff. One user goes to CuteFuzzyBunnies.com, while the next goes to GayMidgetKiddiePorn.com. What's that gonna say about your profile?
Hey, if you're gonna spend all that money on making plutonium and hydrogen isotopes, as well as launch and telemetry systems, and then you use Windows NT, you deserve what you get. At the very least you should write your own damned operating system, something that will run on a PlayStation 2... er... forget I said that.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the really interesting bit on cube.ign.com is where they compare the GameCube Zelda demo to the original N64 Zelda demo. It suggests that when Zelda is finally released for the 'Cube, it will be insanely better than what the demo shows.
Oh, he has a few more recent things to be pissed about. First off, Square didn't just leave the N64, they left Nintendo in general. That means giving up on what is quite possibly the single most popular gaming device in recorded history: the Game Boy.
They could have been like any number of the "normal" software companies like Konami and Capcom and such that still developed for the Game Boy even though they jumped ship in the console era, but noooo...
Instead, in what can only be a deliberate attempt by egotistcal Square to assassinate the Game Boy, they decided to team up with Bandai and publish the original Final Fantasy games on WonderSwan Color. Sure, it's only a niche system that couldn't hold a candle to what was rumored to be true about the GBA, but Square said "We're Square, we single-handedly sold the PlayStation! It doesn't matter how bad the condole is, if we publish for it, the consumers will eat it up!"
On top of that, Square announces plans to develop for PS2 and Xbox. Doesn't only publishing for 2 out of 3 sound rather targeted?
Then Square notices that their little scheme is more or less backfiring, and says "Well, now we'll develop for the GBA, because we're Square and no hardware company in their right mind would say 'no' to us after FFVII."
So, after blowing off Nintendo in a three-way console war, and then trying to assassinate Nintendo's cash cow (there's no way Square would have made much money on that deal either way), they essentially expect Nintendo to bend over and take it like Compaq does from Microsoft.
I, for one (and I'm probably the only one), agree with Yamauchi-sama. If they want to be the stuck-up prima donnas of the software industry, then they deserve to be seriously humbled in the upcoming console war. Their own stupidity has locked them out of the portable market until at least 2005, and their attempts to rub Nintendo's face in it has resulted in an understandable reaction.
Maybe then they'd go back to making games instead of slideshows. The last three Final Fantasy games have been a big step back to Sierra's King's Quest.
On the other hand, maybe they didn't include Yokoi because of his occasional failures. After winning big-time with the Game Boy, he went downhill with the Virtual Boy, and the WonderSwan is only mildly popular.
Am I really in the minority for paying for Linux?
I don't know the rules that the ESA has to live with, but if they're anything like the rules the DOD imposes on rocket launches, if something goes wrong, you just blow up the rocket. Even the shuttle's SRBs have the equivalent of a really long stick of dynamite to make sure that, in case of an accident, no pieces bigger than my hand or so would ever reach the surface.
"NASA, in the USia (sic), spends literally millions of dollars designing the space shuttle's computing system from the ground up. "
We're talking about the ESA here, not NASA. There are only two countries out there that have manned spaceflight programs, and PRC is much closer to being number 3 than any European nation or group. In my opinion, the Japanese will have manned space flight before the Europeans.
Today's useless fact: After the US and Russia/CIS, the country with the most people that have gone into space is Canada.
If you're going to compare the uses of these chips to an American launch platfrom, I'd use the Titan III, or maybe the Delta 2, but definately not the STS.
"Their in-house coders pour over each microchip and line of code hundereds of times looking for even the smallest bug. This superior attention to detail is not possible using the limited resources of the open-source method. "
Tell that to the NSA. So far, it seems they're doing pretty well at scrutinizing Open Source operating systems (ie. GNU/Linux), and seem to be on the verge of making it the most secure modern operating system hands-down.
Open Source means that the hacker sitting in his mom's basement with a computer and a bag of Fritos can (legally) take apart and tinker with the innards. It doesn't REQUIRE you to fit that stereotype, though. If it did, then what does that say about IBM's efforts to run Open Source software on their mainframes?
"It is also why NASA can succeed in safe, reliable space flight time, and time again, while other space programs are struggling."
I think you're confusing "attention to detail" with "multi-billion dollar infrastructure set up in the paranoid 50's and 60's to support the Saturn V." As long as they had the money to pay for the rockets, you could give Brevard County, Florida to any country in the world and they'd be able to build and launch super-heavy lifters to their heart's content.
There's so much there that even Florida's Spaceport Authority (part of the Florida Department of Transportation) owns and maintains their own launch facilities on the Cape (Launch Complexes 20 and 46, I believe). http://www.spaceportflorida.com
Getting into space doesn't require millions of dollars. Currently, all it requires is hundreds of dollars in model rocketry parts (and permission from the DOD and FAA to launch it). Sure, getting into orbit is even trickier, but I know of a team at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach working to do just that with a 6' rocket. The only expensive part of the equation is trying to put something the size of a Mack truck into orbit.
Somebody flunked their high school citizenship course...
Let's see if I can't walk you through this: Above the highest state courts (such as the Florida Supreme Court or the Maryland Court of Appeals) is the lowest federal court, called the U. S. District Court. This is where Microsoft has been found guilty of violating anti-trust laws.
So, they appealed the finding, and they are now appearing in the next step of the ladder, the U. S. Court of Appeals. Only after they're done here and need to appeal again does the case appear before the U. S. Supreme Court (maybe).
IMO, this is especially bad if the software will be juggling your "personal information" back and forth (including Wallet) as often and as automaticly as this information susggests.
Look at the interface of XP. Now look at the interface for MSN Explorer. See the difference? Neither do I. I have the sneaky suspicion that MSN Explorer will be "integrated" into XP to some extent. Heck, if they get off the DOJ's hook on the IE integration thing, that's practically carte blanche to integrate MSN as a whole into the OS, forcing owners to subscribe to MSN whether they want to use it or not.
... and this surprises you? "Upgrades" are about 50% the price of the full versions of Microsoft OSes, and yet the disks are identical except for the slight change in the setup code that looks for WIN.COM. One could, hypothetically speaking (*cough cough*) upgrade 95 to OSR2 by just erasing WIN.COM.
Cracker, shmacker. Installing NT 4.0 service packs have been known to crash servers (I know, I've done it before. My boss had to re-install Server 4.0 to get the web server up again). Now, I don't know if this same problem happens with 2000 (only one SP so far, anyway) or XP, but that's not a very good track record to go with.
If XP is designed to try to install this stuff automatically over-night or over the weekend, that would be a very ugly situation for an IT manager to come in to on a Monday morning.
In Spaceworld 2000, out of all the games sampled (Wave Race, Star Wars, Zelda, even Mario), the one that got the most noise from the crowd was Metroid.
(In case you haven't noticed, I'm salivating at the bit. I really can't think of any other games that drip pure atmosphere like Super Metroid. Castlevania: SotN was a good try, but...)
What do you think the proper name of the part that pulls out the nails is?
At least the H-B stuff was original, not the Frankenstein that Robotech turned out to be (add Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospoedia, take out all but the most imortant plot points, and stir vigorously).
All cartoons sucked in the 80's. They were, after all, the 80's. The Moral Majority was in full control, and only the most mindless stuff was suitible for Saturday mornings. Heck, I blame the decade for killing off Saturday morning cartoons.
On the other hand, there wasn't all that much to work with. Look at DC Comics during the 70's and 80's. Of course, then there was that cool show with Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk and X-Men cameos...
"Making a show like the Flinstones was very appropriate. "
The Flintstones wasn't originally intended for kids. It was an animated "The Honeymooners" (same time era, more or less). But, becuase you're too busy comparing it to modern standards (Astro Boy is modern by comparison), you don't want to give it credit for, say, the first animated television show in prime time... If we didn't have the Flintstones, we sure as heck wouldn't have had the Simpsons, or South Park, or any other big animated series you can think of today.
"Low-brow humor is about all Americans seem to be able to appreciate. "
A real intellectual-type, hm? I guess your nose is too stuck up into the air ot notice that the majority of the jokes in South Park are intellectual. Let's see what gets laughs in South Park:
1.) The whole "Duck and Cover" thing from the 50's
2.) The Elian Gonzales situation
3.) The "Moral Majority"
4.) The whole New Age movement
5.) Politics politics politics
6.) Censorship
7.) The relationship between parents and children
8.) The "follow the herd" tendancies of people
9.) Questioning peoples' values
10.) Western society in general
Yeah, a whole bunch of low-brow stuff there...
"which were at least a decade ahead of the US"
And what makes you assume that the Japanese are "ahead" of us? Why aren't we "ahead" of the Japanese? You really can't pick two cultures that are as different as those two. Comparing Japanese and American animation is like comparing soccer and (American) footbal. Sure, both are played on rectangular fields, two teams trying to get the ball from one end of the field to the other, and various amounts of kicking, but that's about it.
At the very least, you should have some sort of common ground before comparing. After all, I could pick Sailor Moon to represent the Japanese efforts and Daria for this side of the Pacific, and prove how much better American animation is.
"Just look at the popularity of stuff like SouthPark and Jackass. "
I'm not so sure they belong in the same category. Jackass wants to find out just how low people would go for money. South Park makes fun of the people who watch and/or want to be on Jackass.
It woudln't be so bad if Disney wasn't trying to be the Microsoft of cartoons. Whenever something cool comes out, Disney buys it out and utterly ruins it. Doug USED to be a really good show...
Well, first off, if you don't like the way the site is managed, Go off and make your own forum that only you and your friends would want to come to. That's always a really popular way to get a bulletin board site off the ground... And then I can come and complain about how you're doing everything all wrong, and how you should be more like Slashdot. However, you do have a point about the NY Times bit. All this talk about keeping personal information secure, and yet we're forced to send information to one of the most popular newspapers in the western hemisphere to read half the stuff posted here.
It depends on the pieces in question, what it's made out of, what the shape is, so on and so forth... However, with this particular auction... posted not even half an hour after splash-down, able to get information from this fisherman that found the piece, but no photos (at the prices their asking for, I think they could have afforded the ship-to-shore link for a quick modem transfer), and, last but not least, was found "between Austrailia and New Zealand" when it really came down way on the other side of New Zealand. But oh NO, this auction is perfectly legit...
Wait until you see the latest EULA: Title 862, Chapter 78, Section 8480, Paragragh 37: The liscencee agrees not to hold Microsoft Corporation accountable for violating international war crimes, or to report any suspected crimes against humanity to any international human rights organization.
> Meanwhile, the evil people would find some > other way to track you, like by IP -- lots of > people are going static these days. Static proxy servers, maybe, but I've yet come across a static IP for just one person, excepting web-hosting (they're just too damned few and expensive... where's IPv6 when you need it?) If you've got two or more people accessing stuff through the same IP, that would seriously screw up their tracking stuff. One user goes to CuteFuzzyBunnies.com, while the next goes to GayMidgetKiddiePorn.com. What's that gonna say about your profile?
Hey, if you're gonna spend all that money on making plutonium and hydrogen isotopes, as well as launch and telemetry systems, and then you use Windows NT, you deserve what you get. At the very least you should write your own damned operating system, something that will run on a PlayStation 2... er... forget I said that.