That's it, of course! SCO's not being funded by Microsoft, they're being funded by extreme Free-Software cyberterrorists! Programs want to be free (as in speech)!...but seriously.
Law school teaches you that it doesn't matter if you're proving someone innocent of a murder or proving 2+2=5 -- you must be right, because you convinced a dozen yokels of that point.
Haven't checked out the pics myself-- I hate spoiling anything about an FF game, but that's personal preference-- but I'm not terribly bothered by Nomura's designs. I like them a little bit better than Amano's (but not by much-- naturally, being an old fart, I still think FF6 was the best so far), but to be honest they aren't all that great either way. FF's character design does need a kick in the pants-- get someone like, oh, I don't know, Ken Akamatsu or CLAMP to design the characters for a Final Fantasy game (or hell, have Toriyama design the cast for Chrono Break again), and then we'll talk.
...on second thought, CLAMP in an FF would be suspiciously like a Kingdom Hearts game with crossovers that about only 10% of the US population would get...
By the way, is it just me, or does FF:CC seem to look and feel an awful lot like a Zelda game, almost more so than an FF game? Judging by the trailer and the seemingly action-oriented combat, it looks that way to me. Of course, I'll buy it either way, but I'm more looking forward to Sword of Mana first...
What a strange coincidence. At my workplace (tech support for a major ISP) the recent trend, at least among the 2nd-tier agents like myself, has been laptop computers loaded with games. Specifically, the cube I work in has been introduced to Final Fantasy XI, and we're all working diligently to level ourselves to a point where grouping will be feasible. Since the laptops haven't been banned (and there's a wireless router in back connected to our service), we've had our call times plummet and our average Quality Assurance scores rise significantly. In short, we look forward to being at work. (It should be noted that I work the night shift. During days the situation may be different.)
In almost fifteen years of owning and playing consoles, only one machine has ever completely quit on me. That one was my original PS unit, purchased brand new in 1999. It survived just over three years of near-daily use. Near the end I had it tilted at some cockamamie angle, upside-down, and elevated. The struggles I had with that machine were almost legendary. At that point I picked up a factory refurbished PS2, which had similar use for about six months before I got a Cube. The PS2 has performed wonderfully in the almost two years that I've had it; and thanks to a cleaning disc I picked up about the time I got the Cube, I see no reason why it won't last me another two years.
A furry is a person, usually an internet user, who has a strong attachment to stuffed animals or the like. This can evidence itself ranging from a mere predilection towards anthropomorphized animals as their online avatar, to (at the extreme) "modifying" stuffed animals for sexual purposes. Gatherings of furries can usually result in many of them wearing full-body costumes to turn themselves into living stuffies (of course, this is no different than cosplay at an anime convention or wearing makeup at a KISS concert). Occasionally, the... attraction... can become so strong that... well, you saw the episode and you can read the comments, so I don't feel a need to go into it here.
And before you ask, no, I'm not. It's an old nickname from when I was a kid. (All right, so I'm on the low end of the spectrum. Sue me.)
I think that episode exaggerated some aspects just a tad.
What made it scary wasn't that they exaggerated any of it (which they did), but that they actually did research and got about 80% truth to it. (OK, so a grown balding man wouldn't break down crying that he'd been discovered to be "Sexy Kitty", but the terminology was correct at least.)
And before you ask, hell no. My website's named after a nickname my little sister gave me years ago.
By "useless" I meant "serves absolutely no other purpose than copy protection". Most dongles have no additional beneficial function and are designed for security only. An Ethernet port is designed to function as a general-purpose communications device and not specifically for copy-protection. A human interface port (or telephone) is designed for vocal communications function and not computer software copy protection.
A "dongle" is a piece of otherwise useless computer hardware that attaches to a port (parallel, serial, USB, or otherwise) and contains a simple or complex "black box" chip. Software that relies on a dongle sends a signal to the port that the dongle is attached to, and if it receives a "proper" signal back, it allows the use of the software. Otherwise the software remains locked and unusable. We used to use these at a place where I interned for a summer.
Re:Independent radio can still be good
on
Who Needs Radio?
·
· Score: 1
Agreed. When I went to Gannon University in Erie, PA, one of the first things I did was join the radio station. Admittedly, it was primarily to be weird in public for two hours or more a week, but for the most part I did it to play music. And we played good stuff, too-- new alternative and eclectic music; basically, everything that the normal "alternative" stations would be playing to death in six months. If you're in the area, I suggest you check it out-- 89.9 FM, WERG.
I happen to really like pinball, but it's impossible to find machines in arcades anymore. I actually spoke with the manager of the arcade near me, and he says pinball went out of style because the machines were too hard to repair. What's more, the Stern-brand machines are pretty poor in quality-- they arrive broken, or so it seems (every time I've played a machine by Stern, there's been something wrong with it). I'm excited that there's a new machine announced, of course, and I'll play it if I find it, but part of me wishes Sega or even Midway had developed it instead of Stern.
Seriously, if you are complaining about the space that this takes up in a landfill then you got your priorities wrong. There are far more important things to worry about.
But the article says:
The International Recording Media Association estimates world demand for CDs at around 9 billion annually[.]
Pick up 9,000,000,000 CDs and look at them. If you're not worried about the space these take up, what are you smoking and would you mind sharing? That's not even considering how long the CD has been in existence. What, 20 years? (Google says 1981.)
Admittedly, a hell of a lot of those CDs are still in active use and may never see a landfill in your lifetime. But even if the industry switched right now, today, that's 22 years worth of old, "immortal" CDs. Let's count... We'll say the first five years, they only needed one billion per year. Then for the next five years, they needed three billion. Then five billion, seven billion, and for these past three years (2003 is almost over) nine billion.
(1*5)+(3*5)+(5*5)+(7*5)+(9*3)=5+15+25+35+27=107 billion CDs. (Yes, the math is ludicrously inaccurate.)
We have over a hundred billion CDs out there, and they're more than likely not going anywhere. So yes, this is an important problem, because 100 billion of almost anything produced by humans still takes up a shitload of space.
A few years ago-- maybe ten by now, I'm not sure-- my aunt brought back some kind of candy from Japan that had an edible wrapper-- maybe made out of rice-paper or something. Well, being 13, I spat it out because it was orange-flavored (recall that physical age is not proportional to emotional maturity in the teenage male-- and besides, I really don't like oranges). But now I think that maybe if I found some non-orange-flavored type of that candy, I might have a greater appreciation or, nay, enjoyment of it. (Having become a massive anime fan during the past decade doesn't hurt my chances either.) Anyone know what this candy is? And, uh, Aunt Ruth? If you're reading this, I'm sorry and would you mind telling me?
Well, I suppose this definitively proves that/. readers actually do RTFA. When they can.
On a more serious note, now that the webserver has lost touch with reality... yeah. Some of the dumb things I see being done on these sites really scares me whenever I think I might want to save money and build my next machine myself... I've been doing a lot of searching for components and suchlike, and I managed to scavenge a PC Gamer feature on building it yourself from about a year ago, but I'm still apprehensive. Money is tight for me, and I really wouldn't appreciate watching a $300 component become an amusing anecdote for a "how-not-to" article. So, are there any sites out there that actually show, step-by-step, what one SHOULD do?
You know, since people are really against the nGage-- and with good reason, as it's an unplayable piece of garbage-- the easiest, fastest, and most efficient way to get it off the market would be to code up a Game Boy Color emulator for it and release it into the wild with a "(c) 2003 Nokia" line in there somewhere. Nintendo would be all over that in a heartbeat...
On a completely unrelated note, the phrase "ngage sucks" or some variant has showed up in my page's search string reports more times than I care to count.
I will, because the closest used CD store is 50+ miles from me, and because I'm not guaranteed to find what I want there. iTunes + old music instantly = people paying $1 for Elvis, Beatles, etc.
What bugs me isn't ignoring the age of the music, but the length. I was looking through a few albums from folks like Monty Python and Primus. A 30-second track ("Farewell to John Denver" by MP) costs the same as a 6-minute track ("Rabbit of Seville" by the Warner Brothers Symphony Orchestra-- and don't look at me like that, I like Mel Blanc). So I won't buy the shorter tracks-- or rather I'll think twice about some of them.
So far the only "album only" tracks I've seen have been longer than ten minutes in length (Star Wars: A New Hope/Return of the Jedi soundtracks). Admittedly, I haven't scoured the entire store, but so far I haven't seen anything that looks foul to me. (Except country music, but that's a matter of taste.)
Well, I'll say this about the soundtrack for FFTA. The music was really, really good, but it was also very short and very repetitive. Come to think of it, most original GBA games don't seem to have 50+ song soundtracks. IIRC, Tactics Ogre's soundtrack was just over 25 or so. I don't see myself getting that one were it offered here.
The vast majority of games do have good music, but for the most part it's the songs that we don't get to hear very often that we tend to like. For games that only have maybe fifteen or twenty different songs, and that are played for 40+ hours, a soundtrack would be a bad idea because the gamers are likely sick of the song from having heard it for so long. Remixed or orchestral/live versions would be preferable, and that's part of the reason the old Final Fantasy orchestral/piano albums sold well-- they were familiar tunes, but listeners weren't getting the same thing they'd already heard for ten hours straight while leveling up.
I thought Xenogears had an excellent score, and it fit the game well, but I get more use out of a burned copy of Creid (the orchestral "remix" version of the soundtrack) than I do the tracks I've found from the actual game. I'm sure it's the same way for many gamers.
Bottom line is basically, "Sega had the right idea and expect Nintendo to do the same."
In all fairness, I love Nintendo's games, but don't care much for its hardware. Microsoft has very few games I care to play, but the hardware is (grudgingly) the best. As a guy who owns all three systems solely out of the desire to play good games, I'd love to see "commoditization" of gaming hardware but don't reasonably expect to see it for quite some time. Besides... commoditization of gaming consoles would basically create a situation similar to the GBA's dominance over the handheld market. The market is saturated and anyone who wants a piece had better go in with a bang or get forced out just as fast.
Just seems that the Gobi Desert, which I assume was chosen more for remoteness than anything else, wouldn't have been the best spot for them to stick their space program (but I guess if they have a launch failure it will impact Mongolia, not China, so maybe thats why).
More importantly, China has a hell of a lot higher population density in parts. You would not want a major launch accident occurring over a more populated center. I'm sure the Chinese engineers weighed the extra costs of fuel etc. against the risk of loss of life and chose the desert as the best compromise between safe and economical.
Slashdot Mirror
That's it, of course! SCO's not being funded by Microsoft, they're being funded by extreme Free-Software cyberterrorists! Programs want to be free (as in speech)! ...but seriously.
Law school teaches you that it doesn't matter if you're proving someone innocent of a murder or proving 2+2=5 -- you must be right, because you convinced a dozen yokels of that point.
...on second thought, CLAMP in an FF would be suspiciously like a Kingdom Hearts game with crossovers that about only 10% of the US population would get...
Thanks for pointing out the trailer.
By the way, is it just me, or does FF:CC seem to look and feel an awful lot like a Zelda game, almost more so than an FF game? Judging by the trailer and the seemingly action-oriented combat, it looks that way to me. Of course, I'll buy it either way, but I'm more looking forward to Sword of Mana first...
What about the ButtseXBox?
What a strange coincidence. At my workplace (tech support for a major ISP) the recent trend, at least among the 2nd-tier agents like myself, has been laptop computers loaded with games. Specifically, the cube I work in has been introduced to Final Fantasy XI, and we're all working diligently to level ourselves to a point where grouping will be feasible. Since the laptops haven't been banned (and there's a wireless router in back connected to our service), we've had our call times plummet and our average Quality Assurance scores rise significantly. In short, we look forward to being at work. (It should be noted that I work the night shift. During days the situation may be different.)
In almost fifteen years of owning and playing consoles, only one machine has ever completely quit on me. That one was my original PS unit, purchased brand new in 1999. It survived just over three years of near-daily use. Near the end I had it tilted at some cockamamie angle, upside-down, and elevated. The struggles I had with that machine were almost legendary. At that point I picked up a factory refurbished PS2, which had similar use for about six months before I got a Cube. The PS2 has performed wonderfully in the almost two years that I've had it; and thanks to a cleaning disc I picked up about the time I got the Cube, I see no reason why it won't last me another two years.
[swallows pride]
A furry is a person, usually an internet user, who has a strong attachment to stuffed animals or the like. This can evidence itself ranging from a mere predilection towards anthropomorphized animals as their online avatar, to (at the extreme) "modifying" stuffed animals for sexual purposes. Gatherings of furries can usually result in many of them wearing full-body costumes to turn themselves into living stuffies (of course, this is no different than cosplay at an anime convention or wearing makeup at a KISS concert). Occasionally, the... attraction... can become so strong that... well, you saw the episode and you can read the comments, so I don't feel a need to go into it here.
And before you ask, no, I'm not. It's an old nickname from when I was a kid. (All right, so I'm on the low end of the spectrum. Sue me.)
I think that episode exaggerated some aspects just a tad.
What made it scary wasn't that they exaggerated any of it (which they did), but that they actually did research and got about 80% truth to it. (OK, so a grown balding man wouldn't break down crying that he'd been discovered to be "Sexy Kitty", but the terminology was correct at least.)
And before you ask, hell no. My website's named after a nickname my little sister gave me years ago.
By "useless" I meant "serves absolutely no other purpose than copy protection". Most dongles have no additional beneficial function and are designed for security only. An Ethernet port is designed to function as a general-purpose communications device and not specifically for copy-protection. A human interface port (or telephone) is designed for vocal communications function and not computer software copy protection.
A "dongle" is a piece of otherwise useless computer hardware that attaches to a port (parallel, serial, USB, or otherwise) and contains a simple or complex "black box" chip. Software that relies on a dongle sends a signal to the port that the dongle is attached to, and if it receives a "proper" signal back, it allows the use of the software. Otherwise the software remains locked and unusable. We used to use these at a place where I interned for a summer.
Agreed. When I went to Gannon University in Erie, PA, one of the first things I did was join the radio station. Admittedly, it was primarily to be weird in public for two hours or more a week, but for the most part I did it to play music. And we played good stuff, too-- new alternative and eclectic music; basically, everything that the normal "alternative" stations would be playing to death in six months. If you're in the area, I suggest you check it out-- 89.9 FM, WERG.
I happen to really like pinball, but it's impossible to find machines in arcades anymore. I actually spoke with the manager of the arcade near me, and he says pinball went out of style because the machines were too hard to repair. What's more, the Stern-brand machines are pretty poor in quality-- they arrive broken, or so it seems (every time I've played a machine by Stern, there's been something wrong with it). I'm excited that there's a new machine announced, of course, and I'll play it if I find it, but part of me wishes Sega or even Midway had developed it instead of Stern.
All right, lay off. I'm tech support. I fix things, I don't count them.
And yeah, I though of that "massive" thing when I wrote it.
You wrote:
Seriously, if you are complaining about the space that this takes up in a landfill then you got your priorities wrong. There are far more important things to worry about.
But the article says:
The International Recording Media Association estimates world demand for CDs at around 9 billion annually[.]
Pick up 9,000,000,000 CDs and look at them. If you're not worried about the space these take up, what are you smoking and would you mind sharing? That's not even considering how long the CD has been in existence. What, 20 years? (Google says 1981.)
Admittedly, a hell of a lot of those CDs are still in active use and may never see a landfill in your lifetime. But even if the industry switched right now, today, that's 22 years worth of old, "immortal" CDs. Let's count... We'll say the first five years, they only needed one billion per year. Then for the next five years, they needed three billion. Then five billion, seven billion, and for these past three years (2003 is almost over) nine billion.
(1*5)+(3*5)+(5*5)+(7*5)+(9*3)=5+15+25+35+27=107 billion CDs. (Yes, the math is ludicrously inaccurate.)
We have over a hundred billion CDs out there, and they're more than likely not going anywhere. So yes, this is an important problem, because 100 billion of almost anything produced by humans still takes up a shitload of space.
A few years ago-- maybe ten by now, I'm not sure-- my aunt brought back some kind of candy from Japan that had an edible wrapper-- maybe made out of rice-paper or something. Well, being 13, I spat it out because it was orange-flavored (recall that physical age is not proportional to emotional maturity in the teenage male-- and besides, I really don't like oranges). But now I think that maybe if I found some non-orange-flavored type of that candy, I might have a greater appreciation or, nay, enjoyment of it. (Having become a massive anime fan during the past decade doesn't hurt my chances either.) Anyone know what this candy is? And, uh, Aunt Ruth? If you're reading this, I'm sorry and would you mind telling me?
You just know someone's going to try eating one of these...
Oooh, ooh, how about this headline for 2007: "AOL Ends World Hunger, Ushers In New Era Of Crappy Internet Service"
Well, I suppose this definitively proves that /. readers actually do RTFA. When they can.
On a more serious note, now that the webserver has lost touch with reality... yeah. Some of the dumb things I see being done on these sites really scares me whenever I think I might want to save money and build my next machine myself... I've been doing a lot of searching for components and suchlike, and I managed to scavenge a PC Gamer feature on building it yourself from about a year ago, but I'm still apprehensive. Money is tight for me, and I really wouldn't appreciate watching a $300 component become an amusing anecdote for a "how-not-to" article. So, are there any sites out there that actually show, step-by-step, what one SHOULD do?
From the top of the page:
There are 14 registered and 1986 anonymous users currently online. Current bandwidth usage: 1532.31 kbit/s
It's like watching the sun set, or a bonfire burn....
You know, since people are really against the nGage-- and with good reason, as it's an unplayable piece of garbage-- the easiest, fastest, and most efficient way to get it off the market would be to code up a Game Boy Color emulator for it and release it into the wild with a "(c) 2003 Nokia" line in there somewhere. Nintendo would be all over that in a heartbeat...
On a completely unrelated note, the phrase "ngage sucks" or some variant has showed up in my page's search string reports more times than I care to count.
I will, because the closest used CD store is 50+ miles from me, and because I'm not guaranteed to find what I want there. iTunes + old music instantly = people paying $1 for Elvis, Beatles, etc.
What bugs me isn't ignoring the age of the music, but the length. I was looking through a few albums from folks like Monty Python and Primus. A 30-second track ("Farewell to John Denver" by MP) costs the same as a 6-minute track ("Rabbit of Seville" by the Warner Brothers Symphony Orchestra-- and don't look at me like that, I like Mel Blanc). So I won't buy the shorter tracks-- or rather I'll think twice about some of them.
So far the only "album only" tracks I've seen have been longer than ten minutes in length (Star Wars: A New Hope/Return of the Jedi soundtracks). Admittedly, I haven't scoured the entire store, but so far I haven't seen anything that looks foul to me. (Except country music, but that's a matter of taste.)
Well, I'll say this about the soundtrack for FFTA. The music was really, really good, but it was also very short and very repetitive. Come to think of it, most original GBA games don't seem to have 50+ song soundtracks. IIRC, Tactics Ogre's soundtrack was just over 25 or so. I don't see myself getting that one were it offered here.
The vast majority of games do have good music, but for the most part it's the songs that we don't get to hear very often that we tend to like. For games that only have maybe fifteen or twenty different songs, and that are played for 40+ hours, a soundtrack would be a bad idea because the gamers are likely sick of the song from having heard it for so long. Remixed or orchestral/live versions would be preferable, and that's part of the reason the old Final Fantasy orchestral/piano albums sold well-- they were familiar tunes, but listeners weren't getting the same thing they'd already heard for ten hours straight while leveling up.
I thought Xenogears had an excellent score, and it fit the game well, but I get more use out of a burned copy of Creid (the orchestral "remix" version of the soundtrack) than I do the tracks I've found from the actual game. I'm sure it's the same way for many gamers.
Ah. I stand corrected. Thanks.
Bottom line is basically, "Sega had the right idea and expect Nintendo to do the same."
In all fairness, I love Nintendo's games, but don't care much for its hardware. Microsoft has very few games I care to play, but the hardware is (grudgingly) the best. As a guy who owns all three systems solely out of the desire to play good games, I'd love to see "commoditization" of gaming hardware but don't reasonably expect to see it for quite some time. Besides... commoditization of gaming consoles would basically create a situation similar to the GBA's dominance over the handheld market. The market is saturated and anyone who wants a piece had better go in with a bang or get forced out just as fast.
Just seems that the Gobi Desert, which I assume was chosen more for remoteness than anything else, wouldn't have been the best spot for them to stick their space program (but I guess if they have a launch failure it will impact Mongolia, not China, so maybe thats why).
More importantly, China has a hell of a lot higher population density in parts. You would not want a major launch accident occurring over a more populated center. I'm sure the Chinese engineers weighed the extra costs of fuel etc. against the risk of loss of life and chose the desert as the best compromise between safe and economical.