I can see where you're coming from, but let's not discount the goofiness factor. I can just imagine office drones are sitting around at Microsoft with nothing to do, whispering to the next cubicle "Hey! There's this poll on ZDNet! Vote for.NET d00d!"
Maybe it's part of those "winning strategies" that that leaked Sales email mentioned...
Now the family arcade has to be off-limits because of violent games.
I wouldn't worry too much about arcades...have you been to one lately? Violent, gory arcade games peaked in about 1995 with the Mortal Kombat series. Most new games are racing sims or Tekken clones (which are not gory or terribly violent.)
Your kid is much more likely to see graphic violence on television at any time of the day.
Demand is out of hand in Japan since they dropped the price. SEGA is buying back US Dreamcasts and repackaging them as Japanese DC's. There is talk of a new production run of DC's in the spring.
The Dreamcast didn't fail in the US or Europe (although it didn't succeed anywhere near the level of the Playstation). In the US, SEGA sold more Dreamcasts on launch day than they ever sold of the Saturn. Mounting financial problems from the Saturn days finally got to SEGA, and they were forced to abandon the hardware business.
Next time you step out of your downy feather bed to go play Doom 2k2 on your gold plated computer, you might want to open your mind to the possibility of spending that hundred-dollar bill on a Dreamcast and some games instead of using it to light your cigar.
I don't know where you come from, but the Dell Optiplex line is rock steady.
Hahahaha!
Seriously, that's a good one. I know people that work for Dell, and they won't even claim that the hardware is "tested for months."
The brainless VP of Technology at my university (Trinity) decided to switch to all Dells after a hard-sell. They are unpleasant to work with in a normal computer lab situation, but when you put them in a media lab, their crapitude really shines.
Dell knowingly shipped its shiny 2000 Optiplexes with a BIOS that's incompatible with Adobe Premiere. And even though they replaced the computers in a week, our multi-hundred-thousand-dollar media lab is still a joke. Open Premiere with certain video setting, resize the window, and...CRASH.
No problems with the same version of Premiere on my Mac or even my buddy's IBM box. Dell (and Compaq) use the cheapest parts possible. They are exactly identical to the cheapest of cheap screwdriver jobs, except they cost twice as much. Do yourself a favor and (on topic part coming)...get an IBM.
I know Slashdot is a place where talking out your ass is acceptable, but come on.
I shouldn't reply to this troll, but for anyone who doesn't know much about consoles, I humbly offer this information:
1)You paid $2000 for a "gaming system" that will be obsolete in 2 years? Proves the point that most hardcore PC gamers are rich, stupid, or both.
2)FPS's aren't the center of the gaming universe. They will probably always be better on PCs. However, Dreamcast has a keyboard and mouse, and PS2 supports USB peripherals. I've had lots of fun playing Unreal Tournament online with the Dreamcast and my broadband adapter-no aimbots, or transparent walls-just healthy competitive gaming.
3)Phantasy Star Online (an ONLINE CONSOLE GAME) moved over a million copies worldwide. The modem is built into the Dreamcast, so Dreamcast sale=modem sale.
4)PS2's are $299, while GBA is $99. That's $200 difference, not $100.
Pay attention to my sig. It describes your post perfectly.
I saw a video game tips network while vacationing in Italy this summer. It was all in English, and the production values were similar to MTV, which is funny because you can't say "Be sure and kill all the skeletons! They're worth a ton of experience!" and sound remotely cool.
I myself produced and hosted a show called Entertainment Forum on my college public access channel for almost 2 years. It was a video game review show, we played about 3 games per hour. We had a blue screen on the set so it looked like we were sitting inside the video game world, very cool.
It was a fairly popular show, we had some loyal viewers and some people who channel-surfed into us because of our Ultimate Capitalist vs. Communists showdown (NES Ice Hockey-I was the Soviets and lost in triple overtime to those damn Americans!) The most popular episode-when we played Samba de Amigo on the air and showed geeks shaking maracas with the actual game bluescreened into the background. Damn that was fun, I miss college.
One warning sign that you might be in for mere amusement is: an overly up-to-date or hip course title and topic.
You're merely regurgitating the age-old troll of "things were better back then." Also you're mistakenly implying that anyone is going to throw out Descartes 101 for Barney and Moe.
I don't know if this is true everywhere, but I was delighted and enriched by several classes that rejected the stodgery of academia (cheap plug: at the Communication Department, Trinity University, San Antonio!). One course included "the Sitcom and American Culture," which you would probably dismiss as an "amusement course" but introduced students to concepts like countertextual readings and media criticism.
Although Taco might find it amusing to watch your homework, watching ten hours of Cheers and writing a 25-page paper about its reflections on American culture was one of the most vigorous experiences of my undergraduate career.
While you may dismiss Cheers and The Simpsons as fluff, they are important cultural artifacts at least as worthy of study as your Kant and Nietzche. What makes these topics suddenly "worthy?" Shakespeare and Voltaire were the Ally McBeals and Chicken Soup for the Soul of their time, yet we worship their works as sophisticated and transcendent now.
Fuck you. Buy a console for the games you like, or wait 2 years and see who's still around.
If you care more about how many consoles sell over what people actually want, then buy a fucking DVD player. I bet a lot of those will sell this holiday season!
For those of you not old enough to remember, the PC as dominant games platform is a relatively recent phenomenon.
you must be writing from sometime in the future. Here in December 2001, console gamers outnumber PC gamers by the millions.
And while the PC game developers continue to produce Doom and Warcraft over and over again, console gamers get to enjoy innovative titles like Frequency, Grand Theft Auto 3, Samba de Amigo, Jet Grind Radio, Power Stone 2, etc. Sure, the PC has some hints at innovation (the Sims) so maybe in 2005 or whenever you're writing this it will be as cheap, convenient, and crash-free as the PS3.
No kidding. I don't even wanna go into detail about how horrible this article is, but here's some things to think about:
Almost no mention of any consoles, except the newest batch.
Irrelevant mentions of PC games. The writer even arrogantly and ignorantly suggests that Doom was a watershed in console gaming.
Lots of dry comparisons about stuff like memory bandwidth and texture fill rate, undoubtedly ripped from someone's website. *YAWN*
No mention of the console marketplace. How is this informative about Console Wars again?
Seriously, I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and shit a better story about consoles than this. It seems that some PC nitwit who's never touched a console in his life wrote a history of PC games off the top of his head, stole a few images and tables to make it seem like it was about consoles, and of course Tom's Hardware picked it up. Crap like this is why I stopped reading that site in 1997.
Even more sad is that this board is being used to argue whether or not buying the Xbox hurts Microsoft or not. Mod me down if you want, but I'm really disappointed in Slashdot today.
Hey, you said it. Let's not discount colleges (and even my sisters' private high school) "providing" students with laptop-which means, "We just increased your tuition by $2000, and you don't get to choose what computer you get."
In my experience, implementation of computers and particularly the Internet has been excreble, especially outside the college level. At my sister's school, they got to pay $2100 for a Compaq that feels like a 486 (supposedly a Celeron, but it's the slowest POS I've ever used).
They also set up a wireless network, which allows students to IM each other (when their computers work.) IT sucks up a huge amount of budget, as the assheads had to set up an on-site repair shop in the high school just to keep the Compaqs up and running.
How are the laptops being put to use? PDF versions of textbooks are replacing their paper counterparts (I could understand for searching/indexing purposes, but who wants to read 50 pages of PDF?) Other than that, nothing.
The Internet (and computers in general) have been hailed as next great tool in education, just like the TV was before it. Let's not forget that implementation makes all the difference. Forcing students to carry around a laptop doesn't help anything.
Seriously, though, Windows works a lot better for embedded than people think. Remember Dreamcast?
Hopefully for the last time: 95% of Dreamcast games do not run WinCE/DirectX. The operating system the Dreamcast uses resides on the disc, not the system ROM, and is up to the developer what OS and API to use.
Most Dreamcast games used "SegaKatana," which was Sega's own API/OS for games. It was lean, mean, and very stable.
Since the Dreamcast uses a Hitachi SH4 processor (same family as PocketPCs), Windows CE compatibility was implemented to encourage PC ports. Most WinCE games (Worms World Party, Hidden and Dangerous, etc) are notoriously buggy and ugly compared to Katana games. This is not completely WinCE's fault, as most of the developers using WinCE didn't give a rat's ass about making a good port.
Homebrew developers can also build games using gcc. Several emulators and even a version of Linux have come to Dreamcast using this toolkit.
Conclusion: Don't associate the Dreamcast with Windows CE.
I really liked that part when Vince McMahon bought out the WCW, but after that, it seemed they couldn't get anything else right.
Booker T and Diamond Dallas Page were brought in as top WCW talent, but they were turned into buffoons and jobbed mercilessly to WWF talent like the Rock and Undertaker.
Meanwhile, the most "WWF" star of them all, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, becomes a part of WCW. Instead of being a force threatening the WWF, the WCW becomes a group of patsies for Steve Austin to crap on. Now don't get me wrong, I loved Rob Van Dam's elevation (he even beat Kurt Angle! W00t!) but Chris Jericho surely should have had a bigger part in all this. And that's why the WWF's ratings and attendace are sliding into a freefall.
The AC above me got it right. SEGA released the DC in Japan during the midst of its worst recession since post-WW2. However, the American launch was big (sold more in one day than the Saturn sold the entire time it was being produced.)
As close as I can estimate from looking at some press releases, the DC moved at least 5 million in the US, 2 million in Europe.
It has a large library of games, not as big as the Playstation, but it has a much better crap:good ratio. Games are cheap new or used ($20-$30 range for most).
Doing useful stuff with Linux requires the Broadband adapter or "DC Coder's Cable" (modified serial cable). Both are available from lik-sang.com
The homebrew community continues to make impressive contributions. check boob.co.uk for more info.
Well, I don't know about hacking (although it shouldn't be too hard, as the "Expansion Port" is a modified PCI slot) but www.lik-sang.com reports they just got another batch from SEGA of Japan...
Seems that this thing has a pretty big demand although it only supports 6 or so games. Why doesn't some third-party make a version? The "official" broadband adapter is just a modified Realtek LAN card. I'm sure someone could do it.
If you check www.mst3kinfo.com you can find that the Brains (mst3k production company) are selling a bunch of the SciFi episodes, as well as a new shorts tape with "Operation Venezuela" (originally planned for the MST3k interactive CD-ROM which never materialized).
I was lucky enough to see that one at their second convention in '96, and it's freakin funny. I hope they release some of the deleted scenes from the movie (like the meteor storm scene) soon.
PS I have over 100 episodes on video tape. Who wants to be a dear and buy me a DVD writer so I can convert them all over? You know you want to!
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft World? Remind me not to ride the roller coasters if I ever end up there....
Maybe it's part of those "winning strategies" that that leaked Sales email mentioned...
Don't forget reporting your viewing habits.
I wouldn't worry too much about arcades...have you been to one lately? Violent, gory arcade games peaked in about 1995 with the Mortal Kombat series. Most new games are racing sims or Tekken clones (which are not gory or terribly violent.)
Your kid is much more likely to see graphic violence on television at any time of the day.
The Dreamcast didn't fail in the US or Europe (although it didn't succeed anywhere near the level of the Playstation). In the US, SEGA sold more Dreamcasts on launch day than they ever sold of the Saturn. Mounting financial problems from the Saturn days finally got to SEGA, and they were forced to abandon the hardware business.
Next time you step out of your downy feather bed to go play Doom 2k2 on your gold plated computer, you might want to open your mind to the possibility of spending that hundred-dollar bill on a Dreamcast and some games instead of using it to light your cigar.
Hahahaha!
Seriously, that's a good one. I know people that work for Dell, and they won't even claim that the hardware is "tested for months."
The brainless VP of Technology at my university (Trinity) decided to switch to all Dells after a hard-sell. They are unpleasant to work with in a normal computer lab situation, but when you put them in a media lab, their crapitude really shines.
Dell knowingly shipped its shiny 2000 Optiplexes with a BIOS that's incompatible with Adobe Premiere. And even though they replaced the computers in a week, our multi-hundred-thousand-dollar media lab is still a joke. Open Premiere with certain video setting, resize the window, and...CRASH.
No problems with the same version of Premiere on my Mac or even my buddy's IBM box. Dell (and Compaq) use the cheapest parts possible. They are exactly identical to the cheapest of cheap screwdriver jobs, except they cost twice as much. Do yourself a favor and (on topic part coming)...get an IBM.
I shouldn't reply to this troll, but for anyone who doesn't know much about consoles, I humbly offer this information:
1)You paid $2000 for a "gaming system" that will be obsolete in 2 years? Proves the point that most hardcore PC gamers are rich, stupid, or both.
2)FPS's aren't the center of the gaming universe. They will probably always be better on PCs. However, Dreamcast has a keyboard and mouse, and PS2 supports USB peripherals. I've had lots of fun playing Unreal Tournament online with the Dreamcast and my broadband adapter-no aimbots, or transparent walls-just healthy competitive gaming.
3)Phantasy Star Online (an ONLINE CONSOLE GAME) moved over a million copies worldwide. The modem is built into the Dreamcast, so Dreamcast sale=modem sale.
4)PS2's are $299, while GBA is $99. That's $200 difference, not $100.
Pay attention to my sig. It describes your post perfectly.
I saw a video game tips network while vacationing in Italy this summer. It was all in English, and the production values were similar to MTV, which is funny because you can't say "Be sure and kill all the skeletons! They're worth a ton of experience!" and sound remotely cool.
I myself produced and hosted a show called Entertainment Forum on my college public access channel for almost 2 years. It was a video game review show, we played about 3 games per hour. We had a blue screen on the set so it looked like we were sitting inside the video game world, very cool.
It was a fairly popular show, we had some loyal viewers and some people who channel-surfed into us because of our Ultimate Capitalist vs. Communists showdown (NES Ice Hockey-I was the Soviets and lost in triple overtime to those damn Americans!) The most popular episode-when we played Samba de Amigo on the air and showed geeks shaking maracas with the actual game bluescreened into the background. Damn that was fun, I miss college.
One warning sign that you might be in for mere amusement is: an overly up-to-date or hip course title and topic.
You're merely regurgitating the age-old troll of "things were better back then." Also you're mistakenly implying that anyone is going to throw out Descartes 101 for Barney and Moe.
I don't know if this is true everywhere, but I was delighted and enriched by several classes that rejected the stodgery of academia (cheap plug: at the Communication Department, Trinity University, San Antonio!). One course included "the Sitcom and American Culture," which you would probably dismiss as an "amusement course" but introduced students to concepts like countertextual readings and media criticism.
Although Taco might find it amusing to watch your homework, watching ten hours of Cheers and writing a 25-page paper about its reflections on American culture was one of the most vigorous experiences of my undergraduate career.
While you may dismiss Cheers and The Simpsons as fluff, they are important cultural artifacts at least as worthy of study as your Kant and Nietzche. What makes these topics suddenly "worthy?" Shakespeare and Voltaire were the Ally McBeals and Chicken Soup for the Soul of their time, yet we worship their works as sophisticated and transcendent now.
Remember when that one dude posted "TUG MY WANG!" the other day?
That was fucking funny. You should post that again.
Fuck you. Buy a console for the games you like, or wait 2 years and see who's still around.
If you care more about how many consoles sell over what people actually want, then buy a fucking DVD player. I bet a lot of those will sell this holiday season!
you must be writing from sometime in the future. Here in December 2001, console gamers outnumber PC gamers by the millions.
And while the PC game developers continue to produce Doom and Warcraft over and over again, console gamers get to enjoy innovative titles like Frequency, Grand Theft Auto 3, Samba de Amigo, Jet Grind Radio, Power Stone 2, etc. Sure, the PC has some hints at innovation (the Sims) so maybe in 2005 or whenever you're writing this it will be as cheap, convenient, and crash-free as the PS3.
Seriously, I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and shit a better story about consoles than this. It seems that some PC nitwit who's never touched a console in his life wrote a history of PC games off the top of his head, stole a few images and tables to make it seem like it was about consoles, and of course Tom's Hardware picked it up. Crap like this is why I stopped reading that site in 1997.
Even more sad is that this board is being used to argue whether or not buying the Xbox hurts Microsoft or not. Mod me down if you want, but I'm really disappointed in Slashdot today.
Hey, you said it. Let's not discount colleges (and even my sisters' private high school) "providing" students with laptop-which means, "We just increased your tuition by $2000, and you don't get to choose what computer you get."
In my experience, implementation of computers and particularly the Internet has been excreble, especially outside the college level. At my sister's school, they got to pay $2100 for a Compaq that feels like a 486 (supposedly a Celeron, but it's the slowest POS I've ever used).
They also set up a wireless network, which allows students to IM each other (when their computers work.) IT sucks up a huge amount of budget, as the assheads had to set up an on-site repair shop in the high school just to keep the Compaqs up and running.
How are the laptops being put to use? PDF versions of textbooks are replacing their paper counterparts (I could understand for searching/indexing purposes, but who wants to read 50 pages of PDF?) Other than that, nothing.
The Internet (and computers in general) have been hailed as next great tool in education, just like the TV was before it. Let's not forget that implementation makes all the difference. Forcing students to carry around a laptop doesn't help anything.
ADB Flexlight baby! The most useful ADB creation ever invented.
[.....]
Hopefully for the last time: 95% of Dreamcast games do not run WinCE/DirectX. The operating system the Dreamcast uses resides on the disc, not the system ROM, and is up to the developer what OS and API to use.
Most Dreamcast games used "SegaKatana," which was Sega's own API/OS for games. It was lean, mean, and very stable.
Since the Dreamcast uses a Hitachi SH4 processor (same family as PocketPCs), Windows CE compatibility was implemented to encourage PC ports. Most WinCE games (Worms World Party, Hidden and Dangerous, etc) are notoriously buggy and ugly compared to Katana games. This is not completely WinCE's fault, as most of the developers using WinCE didn't give a rat's ass about making a good port.
Homebrew developers can also build games using gcc. Several emulators and even a version of Linux have come to Dreamcast using this toolkit.
Conclusion: Don't associate the Dreamcast with Windows CE.
Why is this post at -1? Are all those links contained Goatse.cx redirects or something. Do yourself a favor and mod this dude up.
(from mr.show)
Look Out Moon, America's gonna getcha
Gonna go kaboom was nice to have metcha
Cause you don't mess around
With God's America!
Blowing up the moon fever has swept America!
I really liked that part when Vince McMahon bought out the WCW, but after that, it seemed they couldn't get anything else right.
Booker T and Diamond Dallas Page were brought in as top WCW talent, but they were turned into buffoons and jobbed mercilessly to WWF talent like the Rock and Undertaker.
Meanwhile, the most "WWF" star of them all, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, becomes a part of WCW. Instead of being a force threatening the WWF, the WCW becomes a group of patsies for Steve Austin to crap on. Now don't get me wrong, I loved Rob Van Dam's elevation (he even beat Kurt Angle! W00t!) but Chris Jericho surely should have had a bigger part in all this. And that's why the WWF's ratings and attendace are sliding into a freefall.
I like the troll about being a "Visual Basic Kernel developer" the best. When is someone gonna post that one again?
Let's all go there.
I hear the whether is nice this time of yeer.
The AC above me got it right. SEGA released the DC in Japan during the midst of its worst recession since post-WW2. However, the American launch was big (sold more in one day than the Saturn sold the entire time it was being produced.)
As close as I can estimate from looking at some press releases, the DC moved at least 5 million in the US, 2 million in Europe.
It has a large library of games, not as big as the Playstation, but it has a much better crap:good ratio. Games are cheap new or used ($20-$30 range for most).
Doing useful stuff with Linux requires the Broadband adapter or "DC Coder's Cable" (modified serial cable). Both are available from lik-sang.com
The homebrew community continues to make impressive contributions. check boob.co.uk for more info.
Well, I don't know about hacking (although it shouldn't be too hard, as the "Expansion Port" is a modified PCI slot) but www.lik-sang.com reports they just got another batch from SEGA of Japan...
Seems that this thing has a pretty big demand although it only supports 6 or so games. Why doesn't some third-party make a version? The "official" broadband adapter is just a modified Realtek LAN card. I'm sure someone could do it.
If you check www.mst3kinfo.com you can find that the Brains (mst3k production company) are selling a bunch of the SciFi episodes, as well as a new shorts tape with "Operation Venezuela" (originally planned for the MST3k interactive CD-ROM which never materialized).
I was lucky enough to see that one at their second convention in '96, and it's freakin funny. I hope they release some of the deleted scenes from the movie (like the meteor storm scene) soon.
PS I have over 100 episodes on video tape. Who wants to be a dear and buy me a DVD writer so I can convert them all over? You know you want to!