Tell me, how does the use of mini DVD's hurt anyone? Oh, it hurts the pirates. And maybe 2% of games feel an effect from it. A GameCube disc still holds 2.5x as much as a CD does, and is about equal in storage to a Dreamcast disc. It's not a big deal for a game to need a second disc - I've even seen four disc PlayStation 1 games.
On all disc based systems the manufacturer of the system produces the discs. Doesn't matter what format they're in, they all cost pennies to make. Nintendo cut their licensing fees a while ago to be competitive with Sony. The minidiscs are only an issue if you think a game should be 99% FMV.
You can do that now. You can get a free GameBoy Player when you buy a GameCube. The only reason to plug the GBA into the GameCube is if you'd prefer to use the GBA as a controller instead of the GameCube controller.
All Star Baseball sells better on the Cube than on the other systems. Probably because the series originated on the N64, and only went multiplatform this generation.
TimeSplitters 2 sold about equally on all 3 systems.
Don't know if there are others offhand.
Most ports don't sell well on the GameCube because they usually come out significantly later than for the other systems, and are straight ports, which usually means a bad framerate and/or low quality textures.
My guess is this guy is talking about the SkyOS EULA, which was just recently added. There was a big discussion of this on OSNews. The short story is the EULA was written by someone who speaks English as a second language, and doesn't have very good grammar. The EULA is trying to say that just because some of the apps that are ported to SkyOS are GPL'd doesn't mean that you are entitled to the source of the entire OS.
Yeah, the per unit profit is probably somewhere around there. But recording and mixing the album costs a lot of money, and most albums aren't going to make it all back, so they aren't completely unjustified charging what they do. Yeah, $20 a disc is rather unreasonable. $13 may or may not be. For me, $14 tends to be the cutoff in general, but it's a personal preference.
No, like, when he suspects his system is infected with trojan or worm and he wants to get the list of executable files installed in last five days.
The average user will give you a blank stare if you say something like that. They won't understand you at all, let alone be able to think of that themselves.
Another interesting approach was Virtual Memory files in GEOS. It was coded for the 8086, so the functionality of an MMU had to be emulated in software. Here's basically how it worked. You'd allocate a block of memory within the VM file. You'd be given a block handle, which you'd lock when you wanted to use it. When done, you'd mark the block dirty and unlock it. Dirty blocks would periodically be written into the file. If you wanted to make a linked list of blocks, rather than storing pointers, you'd store the block handles, as they would be persistant every time the file was opened. The system added very little overhead, and meant that the data you were working on in memory would be synced to disk.
If this was written for a 386, you'd be able to eliminate the need for marking things dirty, and probably for locking and unlocking blocks - you could just use the CPU's segmentation features to automatically do that, although it would result in a lower limit of how many blocks you could have.
There were some nice advantages to this. When a block was first marked dirty, the OS would back it up within the VM file. When a save operation was done on the file, all the backup blocks would be removed. The result of this was all applications using VM files for documents would automatically get an auto-save feature, with the ability to revert to the last time the user chose to save.
Documents would open and save practically instantly due to this design. I remember working on multi-megabyte files on my 286 with 1 meg of RAM without any noticable speed difference over a small file.
I can tell you right now from my game programming experience that 100ms is a very significant amount of time.
About 6 years ago or so I was writing a Pacman game that was based off a timer going off 10 times per second. I checked the keyboard status every time the timer went off. I found out that that approach would miss about 50% of all keystrokes. I had to modify the code to track keypresses via interrupts, and keep track of keys that were pressed and released between frames.
FPS's can get away with it because the exact time you're holding the button down usually doesn't make a difference. Prediction errors can be hidden very easily. Something like Smash Bros. or F-Zero would be a very different story.
checking gamespy stats shows that the most popular online games are FPS and RTS games, and both genres can't be played very well with consoles, due to the nature of console gamers and the console controls. I guess these are some reasons why online console gaming isn't that popular.
Those games are the most popular online games because they are the type of games that play well on PC's. Fighting and sports games don't control well with keyboard and mouse, so you won't find many of them on PC (yes, some exist, but they're no where near as popular as console versions).
Console gaming isn't popular because it's new. I'm sure there are a lot more people playing Xbox Live now than there were people playing multiplayer Doom when it first came out. Also, console gaming usually costs money (at least Xbox Live and PSO do, probably more as well). I'm sure you'd see a huge drop in the number of people on battle.net if Blizzard decided to charge money for it.
There's no way Microsoft is project 20-24 million for the year. The Xbox has been out for 2 years already and it's sold maybe half that. Do you really expect the remaining 4 months of the year to equal the sales of the past 2 years? I'm sure Microsoft isn't expecting anywhere near that.
Nintendo only shipped 80,000 units this past quarter because they shipped a huge number right before Zelda came out the quarter before. They expected Zelda to make a huge jump in system sales, unfortunately, it resulted in a barely noticable jump, hence an oversupply of GameCubes.
Oh, take a look at the Japanese sales charts for the past few weeks. PS2 sales have been going down and GameCube sales have been going up. GameCube sales were higher than PS2 sales last week. Oh, and as tends to happen occasionally, the PS1 outsold the Xbox in Japan last week. Although the Xbox did beat the Wonderswan Crystal last week, it still couldn't beat the Wonderswan Crystal + Color models combined.
The Composer++ project isn't aiming to make a standalone version of Composer. It's a testbed for new Composer features. Things get debugged there, then integrated into the main Mozilla tree.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next Nintendo system was backwards compatible. I think they've learned that backwards compatibility helped Sony this round. Besides, there are a lot of people that want to play a few GameCube games, but not enough games to warrent buying the system. Maybe those people could be swayed to buy the next system since it could also play the games they missed this time around.
Nintendo did try to make the SNES compatible with NES games. The SNES CPU is a 16 bit version of the NES CPU, which has an 8 bit mode. The rumor is they had trouble getting it to work well enough, and decided it wasn't worth the time and money to work out the kinks.
All Gameboy systems are backwards compatible.
They didn't attempt backwards compatibility with the N64 as the SNES showed they could get by without it. Besides, the SNES was a 2d system whereas the N64 was a 3d system, so the hardware wasn't even remotely similar.
Perfect Dark originally had support for face mapping, but it was pulled after Columbine. You needed a GameBoy, the GameBoy camera, and the GBN64 transfer pak. The transfer pak and camera never really caught on, so not many people would've been able to use the feature if it was included.
Nintendo did have some game called Talent Studio or something like that. Not sure of the details, but it's probably what you're thinking of. I remember you could create custom characters in it; I think that included mapping your face in somehow. But it seemed like a product that would only stand a chance of being successful in Japan.
The whole point of Firebird and Thunderbird was people complained Mozilla was too big. So Firebird was created to strip out everything but the browser. Fine, that was good. It resulted in a significantly smaller browser. But then Thunderbird came along. It includes almost all the code that's in Firebird, but adds in a bunch more for the mail support. But it doesn't share the code with Firebird. So if you use both, you end up using up significantly more disk space and RAM than you would use if you just used Mozilla.
Firebird is about 7 megs. The vast majority of that is the Gecko core. I can't picture people on dialup regularly sending 7 meg attachments.
This release should have a fix for the Win98 GDI leaks. That means you won't have UI problems after running it for a long time.
I tried a nightly build a few weeks ago, and the GDI leaks were gone. I went back to 1.4 though, as the mail client was broken in that nightly (couldn't delete messages). Hopefully that's fixed in this release...
They ditched the legacy code years ago. Netscape 5.0 was almost ready to go into beta when they decided the code totally blew, and releasing a 5.0 off that code base would piss off more people than it would make happy, so they went full on with the rewrite to create what Mozilla is today.
The one reason I care about 1.5 is it'll have a fix for the GDI leaks that have been in Mozilla since 1.3. It's not an issue if you're using an NT based Windows, but if you're using 9x it's a big deal.
MSIE isn't violating the TCP standard. It's using a feature of HTTP called Keep-Alive. The connections really do exist, even if you're using Apache or any other halfway decent http server.
Mozilla does it too. Check Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> HTTP Networking. There's a checkbox for keepalive there.
Actually, if you use both Firebird and Thunderbird, you're increasing the bloat. They both include their own seperate copies of the Gecko core libraries.
If you only use Mozilla for the browser, or only for email, then there isn't a significant difference in memory usage between Mozilla and *bird. *bird will use a little less memory though due to all the features removed from the UI. If you use Mozilla for both browsing and email, then you're actually going to get a large increase in memory usage by using *bird, as you will have seperate copies of the Gecko core for each app.
Firebird starts a little faster than Mozilla, but not as fast as Mozilla with preload turned on. Thunderbird starts noticably slower than Mozilla. Once the apps are started, they all run
The big difference between Mozilla and *bird is the design of the interface. The Mozilla UI is modeled after the Netscape 4.x interface. *bird is modeled after Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. You're also going to need to install a lot of extensions to get all the functionality out of *bird as you can out of Mozilla.
GTK for Windows barely works. There are constantly bugs in it. Unless they fixed it recently, GAIM for Windows hasn't had working drag and drop for months due to GTK bugs.
Doing GTK development on Windows is extremely difficult. Thought it was hard getting all the dependencies right in Linux? Try doing it in Windows where you don't have a package manager to help set it up.
> I guess this depends on how you define it. I tend to go by games, in which case Nintendo-published Rare titles were second-party, while non-Nintendo-published Rare titles were third-party. I've never seen second-party defined as being exclusive to a console (by that definition, Square would be considered a second-party developer for Sony, which I've never heard suggested before).
Rare had an exclusivity deal (accompanied by Nintendo owning 49% of the company). Square has never had one; they simply chose to only develop for Sony during a 5-6 year period. They developed for Nintendo before the PS1, and are developing for them again now.
> Of course I didn't go into it expecting Metroid Prime to be a FPS. That's still no justification for crappy controls. Perhaps you found the controls to be good, but you're in a definite minority.
I don't know anyone that had trouble with the controls. It took me about 5 minutes to get used to the controls. I'm totally convinced that the people who complain about the controls are simply heavy FPS players who can't deal with something different. If that's not your case, I dunno, you're in a very odd minority. But every other complaint I've seen, that was the case. If they made the controls dual-analog, that would completely kill your ability to easily use all of Samus's abilities.
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Tell me, how does the use of mini DVD's hurt anyone? Oh, it hurts the pirates. And maybe 2% of games feel an effect from it. A GameCube disc still holds 2.5x as much as a CD does, and is about equal in storage to a Dreamcast disc. It's not a big deal for a game to need a second disc - I've even seen four disc PlayStation 1 games.
On all disc based systems the manufacturer of the system produces the discs. Doesn't matter what format they're in, they all cost pennies to make. Nintendo cut their licensing fees a while ago to be competitive with Sony. The minidiscs are only an issue if you think a game should be 99% FMV.
You can do that now. You can get a free GameBoy Player when you buy a GameCube. The only reason to plug the GBA into the GameCube is if you'd prefer to use the GBA as a controller instead of the GameCube controller.
All Star Baseball sells better on the Cube than on the other systems. Probably because the series originated on the N64, and only went multiplatform this generation.
TimeSplitters 2 sold about equally on all 3 systems.
Don't know if there are others offhand.
Most ports don't sell well on the GameCube because they usually come out significantly later than for the other systems, and are straight ports, which usually means a bad framerate and/or low quality textures.
My guess is this guy is talking about the SkyOS EULA, which was just recently added. There was a big discussion of this on OSNews. The short story is the EULA was written by someone who speaks English as a second language, and doesn't have very good grammar. The EULA is trying to say that just because some of the apps that are ported to SkyOS are GPL'd doesn't mean that you are entitled to the source of the entire OS.
Yeah, the per unit profit is probably somewhere around there. But recording and mixing the album costs a lot of money, and most albums aren't going to make it all back, so they aren't completely unjustified charging what they do. Yeah, $20 a disc is rather unreasonable. $13 may or may not be. For me, $14 tends to be the cutoff in general, but it's a personal preference.
The worst I've ever seen is badly labelled pornography (which was still clearly labelled as pornography).
Yeah, that's really annoying. If you see a file on Kazaa called "Hardcore Midget Sex.mpg", DON'T DOWNLOAD IT! There aren't any midgets in it!
No, like, when he suspects his system is infected with trojan or worm and he wants to get the list of executable files installed in last five days.
The average user will give you a blank stare if you say something like that. They won't understand you at all, let alone be able to think of that themselves.
Another interesting approach was Virtual Memory files in GEOS. It was coded for the 8086, so the functionality of an MMU had to be emulated in software. Here's basically how it worked. You'd allocate a block of memory within the VM file. You'd be given a block handle, which you'd lock when you wanted to use it. When done, you'd mark the block dirty and unlock it. Dirty blocks would periodically be written into the file. If you wanted to make a linked list of blocks, rather than storing pointers, you'd store the block handles, as they would be persistant every time the file was opened. The system added very little overhead, and meant that the data you were working on in memory would be synced to disk.
If this was written for a 386, you'd be able to eliminate the need for marking things dirty, and probably for locking and unlocking blocks - you could just use the CPU's segmentation features to automatically do that, although it would result in a lower limit of how many blocks you could have.
There were some nice advantages to this. When a block was first marked dirty, the OS would back it up within the VM file. When a save operation was done on the file, all the backup blocks would be removed. The result of this was all applications using VM files for documents would automatically get an auto-save feature, with the ability to revert to the last time the user chose to save.
Documents would open and save practically instantly due to this design. I remember working on multi-megabyte files on my 286 with 1 meg of RAM without any noticable speed difference over a small file.
I can tell you right now from my game programming experience that 100ms is a very significant amount of time.
About 6 years ago or so I was writing a Pacman game that was based off a timer going off 10 times per second. I checked the keyboard status every time the timer went off. I found out that that approach would miss about 50% of all keystrokes. I had to modify the code to track keypresses via interrupts, and keep track of keys that were pressed and released between frames.
FPS's can get away with it because the exact time you're holding the button down usually doesn't make a difference. Prediction errors can be hidden very easily. Something like Smash Bros. or F-Zero would be a very different story.
checking gamespy stats shows that the most popular online games are FPS and RTS games, and both genres can't be played very well with consoles, due to the nature of console gamers and the console controls.
I guess these are some reasons why online console gaming isn't that popular.
Those games are the most popular online games because they are the type of games that play well on PC's. Fighting and sports games don't control well with keyboard and mouse, so you won't find many of them on PC (yes, some exist, but they're no where near as popular as console versions).
Console gaming isn't popular because it's new. I'm sure there are a lot more people playing Xbox Live now than there were people playing multiplayer Doom when it first came out. Also, console gaming usually costs money (at least Xbox Live and PSO do, probably more as well). I'm sure you'd see a huge drop in the number of people on battle.net if Blizzard decided to charge money for it.
Phantasy Star Online is great. All 3 versions of it have the same remote exploit in it.
All GameCube disc images and homebrew development are thanks to Phantasy Star Online.
Second time it happened. At launch the GameCube outsold the PS2 also.
There's no way Microsoft is project 20-24 million for the year. The Xbox has been out for 2 years already and it's sold maybe half that. Do you really expect the remaining 4 months of the year to equal the sales of the past 2 years? I'm sure Microsoft isn't expecting anywhere near that.
Nintendo only shipped 80,000 units this past quarter because they shipped a huge number right before Zelda came out the quarter before. They expected Zelda to make a huge jump in system sales, unfortunately, it resulted in a barely noticable jump, hence an oversupply of GameCubes.
Oh, take a look at the Japanese sales charts for the past few weeks. PS2 sales have been going down and GameCube sales have been going up. GameCube sales were higher than PS2 sales last week. Oh, and as tends to happen occasionally, the PS1 outsold the Xbox in Japan last week. Although the Xbox did beat the Wonderswan Crystal last week, it still couldn't beat the Wonderswan Crystal + Color models combined.
The Composer++ project isn't aiming to make a standalone version of Composer. It's a testbed for new Composer features. Things get debugged there, then integrated into the main Mozilla tree.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next Nintendo system was backwards compatible. I think they've learned that backwards compatibility helped Sony this round. Besides, there are a lot of people that want to play a few GameCube games, but not enough games to warrent buying the system. Maybe those people could be swayed to buy the next system since it could also play the games they missed this time around.
Nintendo did try to make the SNES compatible with NES games. The SNES CPU is a 16 bit version of the NES CPU, which has an 8 bit mode. The rumor is they had trouble getting it to work well enough, and decided it wasn't worth the time and money to work out the kinks.
All Gameboy systems are backwards compatible.
They didn't attempt backwards compatibility with the N64 as the SNES showed they could get by without it. Besides, the SNES was a 2d system whereas the N64 was a 3d system, so the hardware wasn't even remotely similar.
Eh, that's better than the people who demand 5+ years with Windows 2000, which unfortunately seems to be common.
Perfect Dark originally had support for face mapping, but it was pulled after Columbine. You needed a GameBoy, the GameBoy camera, and the GBN64 transfer pak. The transfer pak and camera never really caught on, so not many people would've been able to use the feature if it was included.
Nintendo did have some game called Talent Studio or something like that. Not sure of the details, but it's probably what you're thinking of. I remember you could create custom characters in it; I think that included mapping your face in somehow. But it seemed like a product that would only stand a chance of being successful in Japan.
Yeah, I know it's just a troll, but...
The whole point of Firebird and Thunderbird was people complained Mozilla was too big. So Firebird was created to strip out everything but the browser. Fine, that was good. It resulted in a significantly smaller browser. But then Thunderbird came along. It includes almost all the code that's in Firebird, but adds in a bunch more for the mail support. But it doesn't share the code with Firebird. So if you use both, you end up using up significantly more disk space and RAM than you would use if you just used Mozilla.
Firebird is about 7 megs. The vast majority of that is the Gecko core. I can't picture people on dialup regularly sending 7 meg attachments.
This release should have a fix for the Win98 GDI leaks. That means you won't have UI problems after running it for a long time.
I tried a nightly build a few weeks ago, and the GDI leaks were gone. I went back to 1.4 though, as the mail client was broken in that nightly (couldn't delete messages). Hopefully that's fixed in this release...
They ditched the legacy code years ago. Netscape 5.0 was almost ready to go into beta when they decided the code totally blew, and releasing a 5.0 off that code base would piss off more people than it would make happy, so they went full on with the rewrite to create what Mozilla is today.
The one reason I care about 1.5 is it'll have a fix for the GDI leaks that have been in Mozilla since 1.3. It's not an issue if you're using an NT based Windows, but if you're using 9x it's a big deal.
MSIE isn't violating the TCP standard. It's using a feature of HTTP called Keep-Alive. The connections really do exist, even if you're using Apache or any other halfway decent http server.
Mozilla does it too. Check Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> HTTP Networking. There's a checkbox for keepalive there.
Actually, if you use both Firebird and Thunderbird, you're increasing the bloat. They both include their own seperate copies of the Gecko core libraries.
If you only use Mozilla for the browser, or only for email, then there isn't a significant difference in memory usage between Mozilla and *bird. *bird will use a little less memory though due to all the features removed from the UI. If you use Mozilla for both browsing and email, then you're actually going to get a large increase in memory usage by using *bird, as you will have seperate copies of the Gecko core for each app.
Firebird starts a little faster than Mozilla, but not as fast as Mozilla with preload turned on. Thunderbird starts noticably slower than Mozilla. Once the apps are started, they all run
The big difference between Mozilla and *bird is the design of the interface. The Mozilla UI is modeled after the Netscape 4.x interface. *bird is modeled after Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. You're also going to need to install a lot of extensions to get all the functionality out of *bird as you can out of Mozilla.
GTK for Windows barely works. There are constantly bugs in it. Unless they fixed it recently, GAIM for Windows hasn't had working drag and drop for months due to GTK bugs.
Doing GTK development on Windows is extremely difficult. Thought it was hard getting all the dependencies right in Linux? Try doing it in Windows where you don't have a package manager to help set it up.
> I guess this depends on how you define it. I tend to go by games, in which case Nintendo-published Rare titles were second-party, while non-Nintendo-published Rare titles were third-party. I've never seen second-party defined as being exclusive to a console (by that definition, Square would be considered a second-party developer for Sony, which I've never heard suggested before).
Rare had an exclusivity deal (accompanied by Nintendo owning 49% of the company). Square has never had one; they simply chose to only develop for Sony during a 5-6 year period. They developed for Nintendo before the PS1, and are developing for them again now.
> Of course I didn't go into it expecting Metroid Prime to be a FPS. That's still no justification for crappy controls. Perhaps you found the controls to be good, but you're in a definite minority.
I don't know anyone that had trouble with the controls. It took me about 5 minutes to get used to the controls. I'm totally convinced that the people who complain about the controls are simply heavy FPS players who can't deal with something different. If that's not your case, I dunno, you're in a very odd minority. But every other complaint I've seen, that was the case. If they made the controls dual-analog, that would completely kill your ability to easily use all of Samus's abilities.