Yep, there's something going on. Might not be just MS too...
MS puts out a new revision (potentially unmoddable) of Xbox, making all previous modchips invalid.
But lik-sang buys the open-xbox and puts out the Matrix chip, which has a question mark over whether works with new revisions (not sure if many people have seen the new revisions or the new matrix chip).
lik-sang's "servers go down" a few weeks ago (track it with deja, we have mid september questions on the fact)
lan-kwei's web page suddenly removes their mod chips from sale.
But on a separate note, the gameboy advance flasher manufacturer www.visoly.com drops off the net. With the front page saying one thing:
"In god we trust, united we stand!"
Might be nintendo in there too...
Rumours abound about new Xbox games checking for mods and crashing if found, as well as Xbox live alledgely checking for mods and refusing to work otherwise...
However, the future of modding the Xbox at the moment? Get your first revision Xbox, and mod if with a switchable mod, such as the Xecuter. Then see what we got in 6 months time...
But a few companies are flexing their muscles at the moment...
Personally, I wonder how long someone like yourself can last using such things as MS. As a software engineer who used windows 3.1 borland c++ for a month in 1991, and solaris ever since, I really do wonder how different it would be to be on the other side of the coin. A different OS every few years... Supporting how many flavours of an OS as an admin?
But however, theres the common MS belief/PR that managing a PC is easy with windows. It all networks itself. This might be true (in a sense) for a single user case (which I think is MS's strength), but 10 times worse for 10 users and exponetially worse as it grows.
So you end up with a difficult job that everyone thinks is easy.. I mean, thats why they bought MS in the first place, right?
My personal view is that MS does not have the higher level technical ability to survive in an open market. Thus they will continue to manipulate and buy and sell souls like they've always done (I remember DR Dos). People like yourself?
Well, its only really a matter of time before you find that out...
Yep, there's dvb-rcs services. I know, cos I work on a project and thats out there (www.aramiska.com)..
But if anything, we're seen little interest from american companies in it. Ok, might be because its standards based, but the point being, I would say its probably more difficult to get 2 way in the US...
What with MS starting to lock out the warez'ing XP'ers (which is one thing), and hiking up the corporate licenses (which is altogether different), then there's a massive demand for a well supported and highly compatible win9x clone out there.
Doesn't have to be open source or anything like that...
There's a huge market for a second source win9x compatible out there. And if IBM can't see theres a lot of money to be made in OS/2 being that, then they should be selling something they understand...
I notice in recent times, direct x being the carrot which is leading people in the next stage of the MS minefield... USB 2.0 will be after that...
>Will the Linux version cost less because they're >not offering tech support with it. or will it >just be community-support-based, like every other >product?
Well, if it goes anything like the loki games port of UT, there will be no tech support and 10,000 unanswered forum posts saying "I can't get this to run"...
You could say "yeah, but loki's gone", but from the looks of the archives, it was no less likely to run when they were around...
Its a case of "I'd love to have it". If UT worked in linux, I'd have no reason to boot windows unless to play an occasional new game for a while... UT2003 "warez demo" has not been hugely received by my friends (I avoid all unofficial demos and "tech demos" since the days of Q1).
But what the hell, better than nothing. Or as they might say "a dodge in the right direction".
I don't know how far afield they go, but you get the Farscape dvds over here in the uk:
4-5 episodes a box for 17.99 ukp, which is erm, probably around $27. They are region 2, and probably region locked which can be a problem, especially since americans tend not to multi region as much as us lot over here...
vol 3.9&vol 3.10 are currently due out next week..
Yep, I've bought every one so far. I am never able to see them on the television, so I get the dvds to save time...
But is this question not "nobody is buying season 5"? (Ie: bbc as well as sci fi?) Could it survive on dvd sales alone? I do doubt that...
Personally, I think its one of those reoccuring themes on slashdot.
"formal education in computers is bad"
And yet every so often there will be a news item on a basic principle of comp science which is taught during formal education, and it will be posted as "news". "Testing is good!" "People like whitespace???"
But what I really think underlying this is "programmer snobbery". A lot of the formal educated people cannot actually cut it as programmers in the field, and shift into the satellite jobs, such as proposal writing, testing, management etc...
Still, I think arrogance in programmers is one of the worst thing about computers though...
We got to the conclusion that we needed to have a smooth form such as a sphere, detecting one side and emitting another, but then hit the old problem...
"It will be upside down"
So we came to the conclusion of needing an advanced "remapping" processor to readjust, but still it would be affected whenever it moved.
If this is the current level of brainpower though, people either don't make whacky movies anymore, or just don't think much about them...
Ah, the days before Lucasart became the whore of George Lucas's Star Wars merchandising empire.
1) Day of the Tentacle, amazing, illogical, and the jokes are like a decent saturday morning cartoon. 2) Monkey Island II (that twist at the end, though hinted in 1st, works best if you play II before I) 3) Monkey Island I (what can you say?) 4) Grim Fandango (hugely underrated) 5) Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (adventure)
(a search for "monkey island fanpage" on google turns up a huge amount of german fanpages, btw).
Never rated Sam and Max, mainly because I read the comics for a long time before, and saw it as a cheap unfunny version of the humour. Full Throttle was ok, but a bit like a bad B-movie.
Later MI games suffered from the lack of Ron Gilbert, and a bit like a sequel which doesn't involve original creator...
I'd guess adventure games don't sell anymore, unless they're call Myst and pre-rendered. Thats why LucasArts churned out so much mindless stuff in recent years...
It does look that to me. Its like the increasing use of banner adds, 100 spams from the same person. Someone needs money and has had some "bright" idea as to how they get it...
Its not as if they're aiming for exceptionally cash rich targets either. Now 2.5 years ago they might have made a killing....
I think this is a major Desktop issue in general..
on
RPM Dependency Graph
·
· Score: 1
Its the one thing which does make me go "Erm" when trying to convert local "MS is great"/"Did you pay for that software?"/"No, but I can't work linux" blokey to Mandrake.
They can't and for the forseeable future, stick in "funky messing around application" and it works. Package dependencies, find that libqt installation, blah blah blah.
I think its more than that though... The constantly shifting sands of open source (try and get an older version of some linux packages is more than a chore) means that some apps will have to be tied to a specific version of some libraries. Yes, that might mean the application might have to come with _everything_ it needs to install (no dependencies at all not provided), and installed locally in a users system with the library paths mutated to override the system versions of the libraries required...
Its contrary to all the "lots of small apps put together" idea of unix, but if its a desktop, then the user should _not_ have root permission, not be able to install in/usr/local/ but be able to take the machine on their desk into their own hands occasionally. Yes, they'll bloat up their filestore and have a sysadmin chasing them to tidyup every so often, but thats the price of some control of your machine.
I think MS's days are numbered in the corporate world, preciously because of their lack of large scale network administration and control. Their OS is designed for individuals.
However, linux's shift into the desktop market also needs some compromise to match the simple "I want this app on my computer now" philosophy of Apple and Windows. Users should not have root permission and not have to mess with dependencies. However, that gives up some adminstration control of a machine, and thats the ultimate question which has to be answered before the issue can be addressed...
I don't know, whats the phrase about "Fool me twice" again?
Last time around they messed the Dreamcast over with this PR stuff about the "Emotion Engine" and talk about the PS2 being so massively more powerful than a PC at that time.
It was all nonsense. PS2 came out as jaggier looking than the Dreamcast. It certainly wasn't the great jump in technology they claimed it to be, but it had managed to destroy is main competitor without selling a console...
So I'd reckon it would be a slight jump in technology, but nothing close the competitors next console...
"Commander Keen [idsoftware.com] came out in 1980"
Wow. I'm impressed. I missed it for 10 years. Great game, but how did they manage to use EGA 6 years before it was invented?
As for Epic? Epic used to be Apogee effectively, when Apogee were friendly with iD. Take a snapshot of the stuff from the Doom development times, and you'll recognise them as Epic staff now (remember Jay Wilbur? wasnt he the "biz guy"?). Probably far less turnover that id has (1 original worker from those days?)
I've found a few bigger named ones, but this might be prevalent in more british based websites, but there are often multi-million companies who have non conformant websites.
Just give them a bit of publicity...
www.tesco.com
(I got an email from one of their customer service people saying my order was being dealt with, when I complained).
Often I can't remember them now, because this has been going on for years (we can't upgrade our browsers in work, multi versioned solaris's, which needs OS patches to run netscape 6).
If I had an online source of somewhere to submit my non compliant website, I would have probably submitted hundreds by now.
The games site at blueyonder.co.uk (an isp?)
www.bensonsworld.co.uk (told they don't care about my type of customers)
www.gamesdomain.co.uk (after it got took over by BT open world)
www.pcworld.co.uk (not joking. they assume you have a PC running windows and IE)
I've found computer hardware sites being the worst, with over 60-70% of the ones I've tried in uk to cause my browser to core dump. Games sites come next, causing all sorts of problems.
At one point hotmail wouldn't work with my browser for months. Still has java bugs with mozilla at home...
We to this day have commercial department problems with using things like emacs, perl and g++, not to mention linux. The attitude being "we want a supported product".
I say "hang on, isn't this how GNU/Linux was supposed to be making the money?"
Ok, so the source developers are probably too busy to do it, but surely the distros could sell product by product support contracts for a very lucrative price. Their paid support could feed back into the original source...
I get the feeling M$ are entering a territory they haven't completely thought about...
I've always said the difference between console and PC games are simply the controllers. M$ make a fair bit of money with their controllers for PCs which is fair enough, but the markets huge and they have their little niche which works (flight sims etc).
But in consoles its different. A deviation from the norm doesn't sell games, and its the mass market which counts for those games. A game which uses the standard controller, but is mediocre will likely outsell an outstanding game which needs a keyboard and a mouse...
Its not just the "buy these extra bits to play it" which is the problem, its also the place people play them... A keyboard and mouse doesn't work while squatting on the floor. Big multi buttoned controllers are likely to fall face down onto the floor at vital moments...
Diversity like that needs a really large market. Xbox isn't there quite yet...
Slashdot Mirror
I think we've worked out already that the Antitrust people are pussycats
Its not worth the 7 years of litigation just so they get asked to please, please, change the colour of their drives in the end...
(an agreement which their friends regulate)
"The game is afoot"
Yep, there's something going on. Might not be just MS too...
MS puts out a new revision (potentially unmoddable) of Xbox, making all previous modchips invalid.
But lik-sang buys the open-xbox and puts out the Matrix chip, which has a question mark over whether works with new revisions (not sure if many people have seen the new revisions or the new matrix chip).
lik-sang's "servers go down" a few weeks ago (track it with deja, we have mid september questions on the fact)
lan-kwei's web page suddenly removes their mod chips from sale.
But on a separate note, the gameboy advance flasher manufacturer www.visoly.com drops off the net. With the front page saying one thing:
"In god we trust, united we stand!"
Might be nintendo in there too...
Rumours abound about new Xbox games checking for mods and crashing if found, as well as Xbox live alledgely checking for mods and refusing to work otherwise...
However, the future of modding the Xbox at the moment? Get your first revision Xbox, and mod if with a switchable mod, such as the Xecuter. Then see what we got in 6 months time...
But a few companies are flexing their muscles at the moment...
Well, you've got to see theres some stupidity there...
.mov format is a 7 meg download, so download it once and watch it many times...
.rm format is streamed and protected from real servers. Yep. Just in case we want to copy it. Want to watch it again? 7 Meg again.
The
The
Maybe they think we can build our own Two Towers move from the trailer. But only in the ".ram" format.
Microsoft Promotional site has been slashdotted.
Now she might be able to rewrite that song "Isn't it ironic"...
Not from me though.
Personally, I wonder how long someone like yourself can last using such things as MS. As a software engineer who used windows 3.1 borland c++ for a month in 1991, and solaris ever since, I really do wonder how different it would be to be on the other side of the coin. A different OS every few years... Supporting how many flavours of an OS as an admin?
But however, theres the common MS belief/PR that managing a PC is easy with windows. It all networks itself. This might be true (in a sense) for a single user case (which I think is MS's strength), but 10 times worse for 10 users and exponetially worse as it grows.
So you end up with a difficult job that everyone thinks is easy.. I mean, thats why they bought MS in the first place, right?
My personal view is that MS does not have the higher level technical ability to survive in an open market. Thus they will continue to manipulate and buy and sell souls like they've always done (I remember DR Dos). People like yourself?
Well, its only really a matter of time before you find that out...
Erm, europe? Is the air different over there?
Yep, there's dvb-rcs services. I know, cos I work on a project and thats out there (www.aramiska.com)..
But if anything, we're seen little interest from american companies in it. Ok, might be because its standards based, but the point being, I would say its probably more difficult to get 2 way in the US...
Actually, I've been thinking about this recently.
What with MS starting to lock out the warez'ing XP'ers (which is one thing), and hiking up the corporate licenses (which is altogether different), then there's a massive demand for a well supported and highly compatible win9x clone out there.
Doesn't have to be open source or anything like that...
There's a huge market for a second source win9x compatible out there. And if IBM can't see theres a lot of money to be made in OS/2 being that, then they should be selling something they understand...
I notice in recent times, direct x being the carrot which is leading people in the next stage of the MS minefield... USB 2.0 will be after that...
What corporate customer needs that...
Have murderous AI's locking us in the holosuite and not before then...
(Wait a minute, hasn't the Playstations 3 PR team claimed they're debugging that at the moment?)
Maybe, a long time ago, the BBC had a reputation as a fair and independent journalistic organisation.
But in recent years, they are merely parrots for whatever press releases they deem worth broadcasting.
Their normal news items are highly sensationalised, bordering on sub tabloid (a curse of uk journalism in particular) and rarely researched at all.
Their tech journalism, however, reaches new heights of incompetence. I think they must recruit the homeless to write their articles.
- They regularly bite any PR for publicity whoring madman kevin warwick (see theregister for his recent japes).
- They regularly use the words "web and the internet" interchangably.
- They probably have not actually _heard_ of linux (their television tech program certainly doesn't seem to know about anything but windows)
Basically, its the modern curse of crappy journalism which blights a lot of media organisations with a tech arm...
I personally reckon they've spending too much time trying to get Word to do what they want, to actually go off and research anything...
>Will the Linux version cost less because they're
>not offering tech support with it. or will it
>just be community-support-based, like every other
>product?
Well, if it goes anything like the loki games port of UT, there will be no tech support and 10,000 unanswered forum posts saying "I can't get this to run"...
You could say "yeah, but loki's gone", but from the looks of the archives, it was no less likely to run when they were around...
Its a case of "I'd love to have it". If UT worked in linux, I'd have no reason to boot windows unless to play an occasional new game for a while... UT2003 "warez demo" has not been hugely received by my friends (I avoid all unofficial demos and "tech demos" since the days of Q1).
But what the hell, better than nothing. Or as they might say "a dodge in the right direction".
Whoops, missed out the details. www.play247.com
search for Farscape under the region 2 button...
I don't know how far afield they go, but you get the Farscape dvds over here in the uk:
4-5 episodes a box for 17.99 ukp, which is erm, probably around $27. They are region 2, and probably region locked which can be a problem, especially since americans tend not to multi region as much as us lot over here...
vol 3.9&vol 3.10 are currently due out next week..
Yep, I've bought every one so far. I am never able to see them on the television, so I get the dvds to save time...
But is this question not "nobody is buying season 5"? (Ie: bbc as well as sci fi?) Could it survive on dvd sales alone? I do doubt that...
Personally, I think its one of those reoccuring themes on slashdot.
"formal education in computers is bad"
And yet every so often there will be a news item on a basic principle of comp science which is taught during formal education, and it will be posted as "news". "Testing is good!" "People like whitespace???"
But what I really think underlying this is "programmer snobbery". A lot of the formal educated people cannot actually cut it as programmers in the field, and shift into the satellite jobs, such as proposal writing, testing, management etc...
Still, I think arrogance in programmers is one of the worst thing about computers though...
Man, I thought I was the only one...
We got to the conclusion that we needed to have a smooth form such as a sphere, detecting one side and emitting another, but then hit the old problem...
"It will be upside down"
So we came to the conclusion of needing an advanced "remapping" processor to readjust, but still it would be affected whenever it moved.
If this is the current level of brainpower though, people either don't make whacky movies anymore, or just don't think much about them...
Smid
Ah, the days before Lucasart became the whore of George Lucas's Star Wars merchandising empire.
1) Day of the Tentacle, amazing, illogical, and the jokes are like a decent saturday morning cartoon.
2) Monkey Island II (that twist at the end, though hinted in 1st, works best if you play II before I)
3) Monkey Island I (what can you say?)
4) Grim Fandango (hugely underrated)
5) Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (adventure)
(a search for "monkey island fanpage" on google turns up a huge amount of german fanpages, btw).
Never rated Sam and Max, mainly because I read the comics for a long time before, and saw it as a cheap unfunny version of the humour. Full Throttle was ok, but a bit like a bad B-movie.
Later MI games suffered from the lack of Ron Gilbert, and a bit like a sequel which doesn't involve original creator...
I'd guess adventure games don't sell anymore, unless they're call Myst and pre-rendered. Thats why LucasArts churned out so much mindless stuff in recent years...
It does look that to me. Its like the increasing use of banner adds, 100 spams from the same person. Someone needs money and has had some "bright" idea as to how they get it...
Its not as if they're aiming for exceptionally cash rich targets either. Now 2.5 years ago they might have made a killing....
Its the one thing which does make me go "Erm" when trying to convert local "MS is great"/"Did you pay for that software?"/"No, but I can't work linux" blokey to Mandrake.
/usr/local/ but be able to take the machine on their desk into their own hands occasionally. Yes, they'll bloat up their filestore and have a sysadmin chasing them to tidyup every so often, but thats the price of some control of your machine.
They can't and for the forseeable future, stick in "funky messing around application" and it works. Package dependencies, find that libqt installation, blah blah blah.
I think its more than that though... The constantly shifting sands of open source (try and get an older version of some linux packages is more than a chore) means that some apps will have to be tied to a specific version of some libraries. Yes, that might mean the application might have to come with _everything_ it needs to install (no dependencies at all not provided), and installed locally in a users system with the library paths mutated to override the system versions of the libraries required...
Its contrary to all the "lots of small apps put together" idea of unix, but if its a desktop, then the user should _not_ have root permission, not be able to install in
I think MS's days are numbered in the corporate world, preciously because of their lack of large scale network administration and control. Their OS is designed for individuals.
However, linux's shift into the desktop market also needs some compromise to match the simple "I want this app on my computer now" philosophy of Apple and Windows. Users should not have root permission and not have to mess with dependencies. However, that gives up some adminstration control of a machine, and thats the ultimate question which has to be answered before the issue can be addressed...
I don't know, whats the phrase about "Fool me twice" again?
Last time around they messed the Dreamcast over with this PR stuff about the "Emotion Engine" and talk about the PS2 being so massively more powerful than a PC at that time.
It was all nonsense. PS2 came out as jaggier looking than the Dreamcast. It certainly wasn't the great jump in technology they claimed it to be, but it had managed to destroy is main competitor without selling a console...
So I'd reckon it would be a slight jump in technology, but nothing close the competitors next console...
"Commander Keen [idsoftware.com] came out in 1980"
Wow. I'm impressed. I missed it for 10 years. Great game, but how did they manage to use EGA 6 years before it was invented?
As for Epic? Epic used to be Apogee effectively,
when Apogee were friendly with iD. Take a snapshot of the stuff from the Doom development times, and you'll recognise them as Epic staff now (remember Jay Wilbur? wasnt he the "biz guy"?). Probably far less turnover that id has (1 original worker from those days?)
I've found a few bigger named ones, but this might be prevalent in more british based websites, but there are often multi-million companies who have non conformant websites.
Just give them a bit of publicity...
www.tesco.com
(I got an email from one of their customer service people saying my order was being dealt with, when I complained).
Often I can't remember them now, because this has been going on for years (we can't upgrade our browsers in work, multi versioned solaris's, which needs OS patches to run netscape 6).
If I had an online source of somewhere to submit my non compliant website, I would have probably submitted hundreds by now.
The games site at blueyonder.co.uk (an isp?)
www.bensonsworld.co.uk (told they don't care about my type of customers)
www.gamesdomain.co.uk (after it got took over by BT open world)
www.pcworld.co.uk (not joking. they assume you have a PC running windows and IE)
I've found computer hardware sites being the worst, with over 60-70% of the ones I've tried in uk to cause my browser to core dump. Games sites come next, causing all sorts of problems.
At one point hotmail wouldn't work with my browser for months. Still has java bugs with mozilla at home...
We to this day have commercial department problems with using things like emacs, perl and g++, not to mention linux. The attitude being "we want a supported product".
I say "hang on, isn't this how GNU/Linux was supposed to be making the money?"
Ok, so the source developers are probably too busy to do it, but surely the distros could sell product by product support contracts for a very lucrative price. Their paid support could feed back into the original source...
Ah. Don't believe everything you watch on the simpsons...
Smid
Another slashdot stories which says
"Jeez, maybe I should have trained in the stuff before trying to do it as a job"
I get the feeling M$ are entering a territory they haven't completely thought about...
I've always said the difference between console and PC games are simply the controllers. M$ make a fair bit of money with their controllers for PCs which is fair enough, but the markets huge and they have their little niche which works (flight sims etc).
But in consoles its different. A deviation from the norm doesn't sell games, and its the mass market which counts for those games. A game which uses the standard controller, but is mediocre will likely outsell an outstanding game which needs a keyboard and a mouse...
Its not just the "buy these extra bits to play it" which is the problem, its also the place people play them... A keyboard and mouse doesn't work while squatting on the floor. Big multi buttoned controllers are likely to fall face down onto the floor at vital moments...
Diversity like that needs a really large market. Xbox isn't there quite yet...
Well, looks like there really is a market for online Solitaire Microsoft.