Here's some details on that, coming from a long time GEOS user and programmer.
PC GEOS was originally released in 1990. Native GEOS files could have 32 character filenames, along with a bunch of extended attributes such as file type and creater info. This was accomplished by putting a 256 byte header onto every GEOS file. The header was transparent to GEOS applications - for all the apps knew, the header did not exist and the info was stored in the file system.
The filename stored in FAT was created by taking the first 8 letters of the filename, and changing any character not legal in a DOS filename to be an underscore. The extension would be.000, or if that name was already used,.001 or whatever was the first free number.
GEOS 2.0, released in 1993 (I think) added support for directories with long names and extended attributes. It also added support for symbolic links. This was done by creating a file called @dirname.000 in any directory that used any of these features. This file was completely invisible to GEOS apps. The file was 256 bytes, and contained the same information as a standard GEOS file header. If you used links the file was longer to store that info.
The whole longname process was transparent within GEOS - even the kernel didn't know about it. It was done entirely within the FS drivers.
The abstract for the first patent mentions providing a common namespace for long and short filenames, with files with long names also being assigned a short name. GEOS is definately prior art on that, but I haven't read the full patent to be sure. Odds are though that their patent includes the ~1 thing or some stupid detail to make it unique.
The GameFaqs top ten list isn't that good of a choice. GameFaqs is a huge hangout for RPG fans, and in particular Square fanboys. But overall, RPGs don't make up that big a percentage of games sales. Sure, in Japan RPGs are the biggest thing, but not elsewhere. I really doubt GameFaqs has very many readers from Japan.
Whenever there's a lull in high quality games, half the top ten will be Final Fantasy games.
A $2000 one time is nothing in software development costs. However, $2000 per developer adds up very quickly in a large company. Also keep in mind, if you want support, you have to pay that fee yearly. No big company is going to consider something like Qt without having support.
Also, the Qt licensing completely kills the potential for shareware apps for KDE. It's not really an issue now, but it would be if Linux were more mainstream.
One big problem with POSIX is the naming of functions. They aren't descriptive at all.
What does clone() do? It creates a new thread, which is not obvious at all.
connect() connects a socket, which isn't too bad a name. But the problem is the name gives no indication of what you're connecting. You'd only know you're connecting a socket and not say a pipe by looking it up.
This becomes a problem when you're trying to learn how to do something new. You can't easily figure out what functions you need to do a task.
Things would be much simplier with function names like SocketCreate, SocketConnect, etc. You would at least be able to search for function names beginning with Socket to find what you need. Win32 at least comes close to this goal with names like ReadFile, WriteFile, etc. Too bad the help viewer in Visual Studio doesn't support regexp searches on the index.
Theaters are usually good enough about enforcing their own rules regarding ratings (and the age restrictions for those ratings)
At least here in New Jersey, theaters don't care about age restrictions. The only time they ever cared was when the South Park movie came out. That movie caused such a huge outcry that theaters had to pretend to care for a while. Once that movie left theaters, they stopped caring again.
To most people Windows is still "free" because it comes with their computer. If anything, it's much harder to get a computer without Windows now than it was back in the OS/2 days.
The average person isn't going to download Linux ISO's and try to install it. If they are somehow convinced to use Linux, they'll pick up a boxed copy at the store.
Not really. Majora's Mask came out 2 years after Ocarina of Time, yet everyone complained it was too similar to Ocarina of Time. Fast forward another two years to Wind Waker, and reviewers seem to be happy with it, despite it being an inferior version of Ocarina of Time. Majora's Mask at least changed the flow of the game.
I got Mario Kart yesterday. I'm very happy with it. I've never played the original Mario Kart, but I do own Mario Kart 64.
In MK64, I've never been able to consistently manage to avoid slipping on a bananna peel. It was frustrating when I played against someone who could, as it made the peels useless. So I'm glad they took that out.
Item management is much more interesting now. You can now lose items by getting hit. If you hit people the right way, you can steal their items. Dropped items fall onto the course, and become live. Really sucks to get a turtle shell knocked out of your hand, then have it land right in front of you and hit you as soon as you start moving again.
The two characters adds to the handling of the cart as well. Weight distribution affects turning.
I greatly disagree with IGN's comments that the courses are uninspired. Although they seem to draw a lot from MK64's ideas, I find the new courses more interesting. I especially liked the cruise ship course; I thought it was an interesting new course.
Although I liked Mario Kart 64, I never got into it as much as a game like say Smash Bros. I'm really liking Double Dash so far, I definately think it's a much better game than the previous one.
Quite honestly, I don't see how people can trash Double Dash but give Wind Waker high scores. Wind Waker was a step backwards compared to the previous game (lots of flaws in the game compared to past Zeldas...), but Double Dash doesn't seem to have any steps backward, unless you're mad that they've taken away the ability for experts to totally destroy newbies.
The firm of David Boies, SCO's attorney in charge of their Linux IP cases, has announced their compensation (so far) from SCO: $1 millio USD in cash, and $8 million in SCO stock.
Taking stock in the company you are representing as payment? Is it just me, or does that seem wrong?
I don't see a problem with it. As a lawyer, your job is to try to win the case for your client. If you have stock in your client, then it just means you're going to try even harder to win.
If the law firm had large investments in IBM, then I'd see a problem.
What could Boies do here that would be wrong? If he does anything out of line it'll kill his career. This is a lawsuit against IBM with billions of dollars at stake. He's not going to be able to do anything illegal without it getting noticed.
When Mandrake first came out, their selling point was "We're RedHat but with KDE included."
I've only used 9.1 and 9.2, but all the Mandrake written code (most notably all the system configuration tools) in those releases uses GTK. So I wouldn't call that favoring KDE.
Sun (and most companies) prefer Gnome over KDE due to toolkit licensing. GTK is LGPL, but Qt is GPL. So you can release closed source apps for Gnome without buying any licenses, but you'd have to spend a few thousand on Qt licenses (remember, the Qt licensing is per developer) to make a closed source KDE app.
I personally consider KDE to be far better than Gnome, both from a user's standpoint and a developer's standpoint. I usually avoid C++ when possible, but I really like Qt. Unfortunately it's licensing will kill KDE in the long run.
Every mention of sales so far this year says that year-to-date sales of consoles are lower than they were last year. GameCube sales are up, but that's not enough to counter a large drop in PS2 sales combined with a small drop in Xbox sales.
Check Nintendo's recent press releases. I think the PS2 year-to-date sales are down 17%, Xbox 5%, and the GameCube up a few percent or so.
Looks like 2002 might've been the peak, unless something unexpected happens next year to drive up sales.
The biggest problem with rpgs, really, is the advancement of the action-rpg (Zelda being the primary example of this). There are generally so many more action-rpgs made these days, it's easy to get confused as to what a real traditional rpg is.
Zelda is an action/adventure game. The main people who call Zelda an RPG are people who pretty much only play RPGs, but like Zelda also. They just call Zelda an RPG so they can say they only play RPGs.
One thing you're forgetting. This is a cartridge based system. All your read-only data can be accessed directly from the cartridge, without need for RAM.
1-4 megs is a lot of RAM for 2D gaming when you've got most of your data stored in ROM.
The N64 had 4 megs of RAM (8 with the upgrade). The PS1 only had 2 megs. Putting 4 into this system would be overkill, considering it won't be powerful enough for real 3D. (Yes, it can run Doom type stuff fine, but you don't wanna try Quake on it).
standard protocols.
standard file formats.
open source software.
If you have standard protocols and standard file formats, it doesn't matter much if your software is open source or not. Standard protocols and file formats ensure you're not locked in to a vendor even if the source is closed.
By the time the above have obtained their degree the industry will have completely changed and the skills they have will be obsolete. Not to mention the possible avoidance of advanced topics that would be covered in a standard art or computer science degree. For example: Will these kids be scared of assembler?
People in a general CS program are scared of assembler.
Game programming is one of the few areas left where you're likely to drop down to assembly. If anything, I'd expect someone from a gaming school to be less afraid of assembly than someone from a standard CS program.
iQue seems cool, but IMHO you can get an N64 cheaper these days from places like eBay, and the iQue is more or less the N64.
How many Chinese people do you think buy video game consoles off Ebay?
Even if they could get a used n64 a little cheaper (which I doubt), don't you think they'd rather spend a little more to get a game in their native language?
They aren't selling it because they want to limit the supply. They want a strong Christmas for the GameCube. By making the disc limited, it makes people feel they should buy a GameCube now instead of waiting. If they sell the discs in stores, people will continue putting off a GameCube purchase.
The offer of buy 2 games, get the disc free is again designed to increase sales during the holidays.
Consider Nintendo Power to be targeted advertising. It's a magazine that heavily promotes Nintendo's upcoming games, and it's pretty much only read by people who buy a decent amount of Nintendo products. By making you get the magazine, odds are you'll read it. They're hoping that the magazine will make you buy at least one game that you wouldn't have bought otherwise.
Here's the deal with the N64 emulation. The N64 has 43 megs of RAM - 3 of which is video ram, so 40 megs working space. Of that, 24 megs is fast RAM and 16 is slow RAM.
Ocarina of Time is 32 megs, and the N64 has 4 megs RAM. That leaves 4 megs for the emulator, which is plenty. The only hiccups you get are when swapping data between the fast and slow RAM. The only noticable time is when going to the inventory menu.
I'm not 100% positive, but I think Majora's Mask is a 64 meg cartridge. Which means the game must be streamed off the disc. Even if it's only a 32 meg cartridge, it uses 8 megs of RAM, which means you still couldn't fit the ROM + RAM used + emulator in memory at once. So you've got to stream the ROM from the disc.
As for Metroid in Metroid Prime, I didn't notice anything odd looking. It was kinda funny when I tried it on a progressive scan TV though - you could very clearly see each pixel.
Give people platform freedom and more people will buy your product. Restrict them to a single platform and they will boycott your product.
The US has only kinda gotten that point. Yes, a lot of titles are made for all 3 consoles. But from the start, most ports to the GameCube were done very half assed - worse graphics and load times than the PS2 version, despite having significantly better hardware. On top of that, the GameCube version is commonly released later than the others. Then the publishers wonder why the GameCube version doesn't sell.
The Xbox only fares better because of the hard disk and having significantly more RAM than the other two consoles. Crappy ports aren't as obvious when you're porting to a system that much more overpowered.
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Here's some details on that, coming from a long time GEOS user and programmer.
.000, or if that name was already used, .001 or whatever was the first free number.
PC GEOS was originally released in 1990. Native GEOS files could have 32 character filenames, along with a bunch of extended attributes such as file type and creater info. This was accomplished by putting a 256 byte header onto every GEOS file. The header was transparent to GEOS applications - for all the apps knew, the header did not exist and the info was stored in the file system.
The filename stored in FAT was created by taking the first 8 letters of the filename, and changing any character not legal in a DOS filename to be an underscore. The extension would be
GEOS 2.0, released in 1993 (I think) added support for directories with long names and extended attributes. It also added support for symbolic links. This was done by creating a file called @dirname.000 in any directory that used any of these features. This file was completely invisible to GEOS apps. The file was 256 bytes, and contained the same information as a standard GEOS file header. If you used links the file was longer to store that info.
The whole longname process was transparent within GEOS - even the kernel didn't know about it. It was done entirely within the FS drivers.
The abstract for the first patent mentions providing a common namespace for long and short filenames, with files with long names also being assigned a short name. GEOS is definately prior art on that, but I haven't read the full patent to be sure. Odds are though that their patent includes the ~1 thing or some stupid detail to make it unique.
The GameFaqs top ten list isn't that good of a choice. GameFaqs is a huge hangout for RPG fans, and in particular Square fanboys. But overall, RPGs don't make up that big a percentage of games sales. Sure, in Japan RPGs are the biggest thing, but not elsewhere. I really doubt GameFaqs has very many readers from Japan.
Whenever there's a lull in high quality games, half the top ten will be Final Fantasy games.
Ever commute to work? A large portion of the people who take trains to work read books during the ride.
A $2000 one time is nothing in software development costs. However, $2000 per developer adds up very quickly in a large company. Also keep in mind, if you want support, you have to pay that fee yearly. No big company is going to consider something like Qt without having support.
Also, the Qt licensing completely kills the potential for shareware apps for KDE. It's not really an issue now, but it would be if Linux were more mainstream.
One big problem with POSIX is the naming of functions. They aren't descriptive at all.
What does clone() do? It creates a new thread, which is not obvious at all.
connect() connects a socket, which isn't too bad a name. But the problem is the name gives no indication of what you're connecting. You'd only know you're connecting a socket and not say a pipe by looking it up.
This becomes a problem when you're trying to learn how to do something new. You can't easily figure out what functions you need to do a task.
Things would be much simplier with function names like SocketCreate, SocketConnect, etc. You would at least be able to search for function names beginning with Socket to find what you need. Win32 at least comes close to this goal with names like ReadFile, WriteFile, etc. Too bad the help viewer in Visual Studio doesn't support regexp searches on the index.
Are you trying to say the Slashdot crowd likes to eat shit?
That would help explain why there's so many goatse.cx links around here...
Theaters are usually good enough about enforcing their own rules regarding ratings (and the age restrictions for those ratings)
At least here in New Jersey, theaters don't care about age restrictions. The only time they ever cared was when the South Park movie came out. That movie caused such a huge outcry that theaters had to pretend to care for a while. Once that movie left theaters, they stopped caring again.
Completely ignore rings 1 and 2. No one writing OS's today is brave enough to try using the more advanced features of Intel CPU's.
To most people Windows is still "free" because it comes with their computer. If anything, it's much harder to get a computer without Windows now than it was back in the OS/2 days.
The average person isn't going to download Linux ISO's and try to install it. If they are somehow convinced to use Linux, they'll pick up a boxed copy at the store.
Not really. Majora's Mask came out 2 years after Ocarina of Time, yet everyone complained it was too similar to Ocarina of Time. Fast forward another two years to Wind Waker, and reviewers seem to be happy with it, despite it being an inferior version of Ocarina of Time. Majora's Mask at least changed the flow of the game.
I got Mario Kart yesterday. I'm very happy with it. I've never played the original Mario Kart, but I do own Mario Kart 64.
In MK64, I've never been able to consistently manage to avoid slipping on a bananna peel. It was frustrating when I played against someone who could, as it made the peels useless. So I'm glad they took that out.
Item management is much more interesting now. You can now lose items by getting hit. If you hit people the right way, you can steal their items. Dropped items fall onto the course, and become live. Really sucks to get a turtle shell knocked out of your hand, then have it land right in front of you and hit you as soon as you start moving again.
The two characters adds to the handling of the cart as well. Weight distribution affects turning.
I greatly disagree with IGN's comments that the courses are uninspired. Although they seem to draw a lot from MK64's ideas, I find the new courses more interesting. I especially liked the cruise ship course; I thought it was an interesting new course.
Although I liked Mario Kart 64, I never got into it as much as a game like say Smash Bros. I'm really liking Double Dash so far, I definately think it's a much better game than the previous one.
Quite honestly, I don't see how people can trash Double Dash but give Wind Waker high scores. Wind Waker was a step backwards compared to the previous game (lots of flaws in the game compared to past Zeldas...), but Double Dash doesn't seem to have any steps backward, unless you're mad that they've taken away the ability for experts to totally destroy newbies.
The firm of David Boies, SCO's attorney in charge of their Linux IP cases, has announced their compensation (so far) from SCO: $1 millio USD in cash, and $8 million in SCO stock.
Taking stock in the company you are representing as payment? Is it just me, or does that seem wrong?
I don't see a problem with it. As a lawyer, your job is to try to win the case for your client. If you have stock in your client, then it just means you're going to try even harder to win.
If the law firm had large investments in IBM, then I'd see a problem.
What could Boies do here that would be wrong? If he does anything out of line it'll kill his career. This is a lawsuit against IBM with billions of dollars at stake. He's not going to be able to do anything illegal without it getting noticed.
When Mandrake first came out, their selling point was "We're RedHat but with KDE included."
I've only used 9.1 and 9.2, but all the Mandrake written code (most notably all the system configuration tools) in those releases uses GTK. So I wouldn't call that favoring KDE.
Sun (and most companies) prefer Gnome over KDE due to toolkit licensing. GTK is LGPL, but Qt is GPL. So you can release closed source apps for Gnome without buying any licenses, but you'd have to spend a few thousand on Qt licenses (remember, the Qt licensing is per developer) to make a closed source KDE app.
I personally consider KDE to be far better than Gnome, both from a user's standpoint and a developer's standpoint. I usually avoid C++ when possible, but I really like Qt. Unfortunately it's licensing will kill KDE in the long run.
Every mention of sales so far this year says that year-to-date sales of consoles are lower than they were last year. GameCube sales are up, but that's not enough to counter a large drop in PS2 sales combined with a small drop in Xbox sales.
Check Nintendo's recent press releases. I think the PS2 year-to-date sales are down 17%, Xbox 5%, and the GameCube up a few percent or so.
Looks like 2002 might've been the peak, unless something unexpected happens next year to drive up sales.
The biggest problem with rpgs, really, is the advancement of the action-rpg (Zelda being the primary example of this). There are generally so many more action-rpgs made these days, it's easy to get confused as to what a real traditional rpg is.
Zelda is an action/adventure game. The main people who call Zelda an RPG are people who pretty much only play RPGs, but like Zelda also. They just call Zelda an RPG so they can say they only play RPGs.
One thing you're forgetting. This is a cartridge based system. All your read-only data can be accessed directly from the cartridge, without need for RAM.
1-4 megs is a lot of RAM for 2D gaming when you've got most of your data stored in ROM.
The N64 had 4 megs of RAM (8 with the upgrade). The PS1 only had 2 megs. Putting 4 into this system would be overkill, considering it won't be powerful enough for real 3D. (Yes, it can run Doom type stuff fine, but you don't wanna try Quake on it).
say it with me:
standard protocols.
standard file formats.
open source software.
If you have standard protocols and standard file formats, it doesn't matter much if your software is open source or not. Standard protocols and file formats ensure you're not locked in to a vendor even if the source is closed.
By the time the above have obtained their degree the industry will have completely changed and the skills they have will be obsolete. Not to mention the possible avoidance of advanced topics that would be covered in a standard art or computer science degree. For example: Will these kids be scared of assembler?
People in a general CS program are scared of assembler.
Game programming is one of the few areas left where you're likely to drop down to assembly. If anything, I'd expect someone from a gaming school to be less afraid of assembly than someone from a standard CS program.
It's not just bad code. The whole procedure is bad. In fact, it's designed to make it impossible to prove if there's some kind of conspiracy going on.
By your logic, we shouldn't be complaining until we notice a candidate receiving 100 million votes from the state of Alaska.
iQue seems cool, but IMHO you can get an N64 cheaper these days from places like eBay, and the iQue is more or less the N64.
How many Chinese people do you think buy video game consoles off Ebay?
Even if they could get a used n64 a little cheaper (which I doubt), don't you think they'd rather spend a little more to get a game in their native language?
They aren't selling it because they want to limit the supply. They want a strong Christmas for the GameCube. By making the disc limited, it makes people feel they should buy a GameCube now instead of waiting. If they sell the discs in stores, people will continue putting off a GameCube purchase.
The offer of buy 2 games, get the disc free is again designed to increase sales during the holidays.
Consider Nintendo Power to be targeted advertising. It's a magazine that heavily promotes Nintendo's upcoming games, and it's pretty much only read by people who buy a decent amount of Nintendo products. By making you get the magazine, odds are you'll read it. They're hoping that the magazine will make you buy at least one game that you wouldn't have bought otherwise.
Here's the deal with the N64 emulation. The N64 has 43 megs of RAM - 3 of which is video ram, so 40 megs working space. Of that, 24 megs is fast RAM and 16 is slow RAM.
Ocarina of Time is 32 megs, and the N64 has 4 megs RAM. That leaves 4 megs for the emulator, which is plenty. The only hiccups you get are when swapping data between the fast and slow RAM. The only noticable time is when going to the inventory menu.
I'm not 100% positive, but I think Majora's Mask is a 64 meg cartridge. Which means the game must be streamed off the disc. Even if it's only a 32 meg cartridge, it uses 8 megs of RAM, which means you still couldn't fit the ROM + RAM used + emulator in memory at once. So you've got to stream the ROM from the disc.
As for Metroid in Metroid Prime, I didn't notice anything odd looking. It was kinda funny when I tried it on a progressive scan TV though - you could very clearly see each pixel.
Give people platform freedom and more people will buy your product. Restrict them to a single platform and they will boycott your product.
The US has only kinda gotten that point. Yes, a lot of titles are made for all 3 consoles. But from the start, most ports to the GameCube were done very half assed - worse graphics and load times than the PS2 version, despite having significantly better hardware. On top of that, the GameCube version is commonly released later than the others. Then the publishers wonder why the GameCube version doesn't sell.
The Xbox only fares better because of the hard disk and having significantly more RAM than the other two consoles. Crappy ports aren't as obvious when you're porting to a system that much more overpowered.
Ever install a version of Netscape with popup blocking?
By default, it whitelists netscape.com, aol.com, cnn.com, and a bunch of other sites associated with AOL and Time Warner.
MS could very easily do the same in IE.