> 3) Real people will not instantly label you as a snob.
Going to an Ivy League school tends to have that effect. Especially Harvard. From my experience, most people are impressed if you made your way through an engineering school
> 4) You have a much broader range of educational opportunity, and employers value this. Employers want engineers who took a few humanities classes. You will enjoy the opportunity to take a few humanities classes.
For science and engineering degree programs to be accredited, there is a required number of humanities courses to be in the program. At least for computer science, you're required to take 9. At least one of which must be about ethics & technology.
> 6) Social Fraternities
There are plenty of them at engineering schools. Sororities on the other hand are rather limited.
> 8) You'll still have access to everything you would have had at an engineering-only school.
I'm going to disagree with that. The more funding your engineering department has, the more you will have available to you. A small engineering school is at a significant disadvantage to a large one. That said, the small engineering school will still be at an advantage to a school that doesn't focus on engineering. Another thing to remember is that a significant amount of the equipment at engineering schools comes from doing projects for the Army and Navy. Non-engineering schools aren't going to get those projects.
The rest of what you said I will completely agree with though.
You said that after your first year, your financial aid went up because your assests had been exhausted. That's definately not the norm. I just graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in May. Every year tuition went up and my aid went down. Everyone else I talked to had the same thing happen to them.
Towards the end of the.com boom, I got a part time coding job making decent pay. That resulted in a huge drop in my financial aid, despite the fact that almost all the money went towards covering the drop that I already had in my financial aid. I eventually got another job on campus for half the pay of my previous job, and combined with what was left of my savings, it was almost enough to cover the bills for the rest of my degree. I would've had to take out additional loans (in addition to the financial aid package loans) to cover my last semester, but family bailed me out.
Schools are very much aware that the more credits you've taken, the less likely you are to switch schools. So they charge you progressively more as your stay there goes on.
Mario Sunshine also had a nice, alternate solution to that problem. Oh, realize you're not going to land that jump? Press down the R button and the water pack will make you hover and you can land the jump. Takes a LOT of the frustration out of the game.
Correction: Retro Studios is 1st party. Nintendo bought them out 100% about halfway through Metroid Prime development. You're a little off on the 2nd vs 3rd party thing though. Being a second party does not necessarily mean the console developer publishes your games. Rare published a lot of their own games towards the end of their N64 days. 2nd party means you have an exclusivity deal with the console developer.
As to your comment on the controls: they only suck if you're trying to play the game like you'd play Quake or something like that. But if you go into the game expecting anything remotely like an FPS, you're going to be sorely disappointed. If you try to play the game like a Metroid game, then the controls are damn near perfect. The grappling beam could've been done a little better, but even that I can only think of 1 or 2 spots in the entire game where I had an issue with it.
Sierra's Quest For Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness had great voice acting. I don't know if it's true, but they claimed it was the first PC game to have voice acting. The acting was all very good. They had John Rhys-Davies (Gimli in the LOTR movies) do the narration. Unfortunately, the game suffers from CPU speed bugs. Certain parts were a little hard on my Pentium 75. They're impossible on my P3-850. The game is definately worth playing though if you can. It has a lot of replay value, as you can play as either a Fighter, Magic User, Theif, or Paladin. The subplots are different with the different character types, and the puzzles that are shared between types usually have different solutions for different characters.
Another good one is Eternal Darkness on the GameCube. Some of the acting at the very end of the game is a little painful, but I think that's more because of the really cheesy writing than anything else.
You can get a decent DVD player for about $60 nowadays. The GameCube started out $100 less than the PS2, now it's $50 less. So a GameCube + DVD player is $10 more than a PS2, but you're getting a better quality DVD player.
You're forgetting that Microsoft has to play catchup with AOL when it comes to IM market share.
If Linux users want to do all the work of support MSN for them, I don't see MS having anything to lose right now. If MS was in AOL's position, then I could see them shutting out the Linux people making sense. But if someone is willing to help you fight a war that you're losing, why fight them?
What tops world 8 of Super Mario Bros is world 9 of the Japanese Super Mario Bros 2 (Lost Levels here in the US).
One level features every land enemy in the game (i.e. goombas, turtles, hammer bros) in a water stage. You can just swim along the top of the water through the whole thing, but it's cool to see.
Another stage is basically an outdoor castle. It's like a castle stage, where all the blocks are made of castle blocks. But there usually isn't a ceiling, it's a blue sky, the normal Mario theme, vines to climb into the sky, etc. There's also lava pits and all the castle enemies. You fight Bowser at the end in an abnormal setting. I forget exactly what it's like. There's another water stage, where there are blocks in the water spelling out a message in Japanese. I forget what the translation is. Something like thanks for playing I think. There's one more stage to world 9, but I forget what it's like.
There's a Java assembler out there, called Jazmin. I might be wrong on the spelling of it though. I worked with it a bit in my compilers class. We wrote a Java compiler that outputted code for Jazmin to assemble into.class files.
Coding Java in assembly isn't very interesting. Calling functions is a bitch, and since it's just a simple stack machine, you aren't going to get any better performance than you would by using a compiler unless your compiler really blows.
On the bright side, the GBA is by far the most friendly console/portable ever released for homebrew development. I'm going to ignore the special limited edition PlayStations you could program that were only released in Japan, as you could only run programs that fit in RAM, which made it extremely limited.
For under $100, you can get a flash ROM cartridge and the cable necessary to program it. The GBA is high powered enough that development is usually done in C using GCC rather than in assembly like on most 2d systems. The hardware is very well documented. The system is simple enough that it can be emulated at full speed on any Pentium 3 based system. It's hard to top that for homebrew development.
PS2 - either 40 million Gamecube - 9.55 million Xbox - 9.4 million
The PS2 lead isn't as big as it seems though, as the production quality of them is very low. Many of those purchases are replacements. EVERYONE I know who owns a PS1 or PS2 has had to have their system replaced.
Shinji Mikame, the creator of Resident Evil, has publicly said that one of the reasons RE is GameCube exclusive is because he dislikes the PS2, due to having to replace his system 3 times.
Nintendo is making a huge profit. Sony is making a (relatively) small profit. Microsoft is taking a loss the size of Nintendo's income (not profit). Very different picture there.
Oh, and the SNES outsold the Genesis 2:1. Profit wise it was probably an even wider gap, although I've never seen financial figures for the two companies from back then.
You're forgetting, on the Xbox it's running at 640x480, where you'd probably run it at 1024x768 or higher on your PC.
Also keep in mind you can get a big performance gain by coding for a fixed hardware platform rather than trying to make something that runs on thousands of possible configurations.
If the Stampers are still there, they probably won't be for a lot longer. The word going round was the sale came about because the Stampers wanted out, but Nintendo didn't want to pay them what they were asking.
I have to agree. I held such high hopes for Starfox Adventures, as Rare had a history of good games, even if the later ones weren't as good as the previous ones. But not only is it an extremely blatent Ocarina of Time knockoff, but a second rate one at that. The game was totally linear. I don't think there are any events you have a choice of the order you do them in. Combat is easier than in Wind Waker, as even if you are in the middle of a group of enemies, only one will ever attack at a time. The sidekick, Tricky, was incredibly annoying. On the bright side, if you hit him enough, he'd try to attack you, which was entertaining.
The game took me 2 months to beat because after about halfway through, I had trouble bringing myself to play it. I said good riddance to Rare, and was very glad Nintendo sold them off.
> I mean, is it *really* that much harder to grab some video in Windows vs Linux?
Although I've never tried video programming in Windows, I did try it in Linux. I ended up giving up fairly quickly, because although the individual V4L API calls are documented, there is no documentation stating which calls are necessary to get something to happen, or in what order you have to call the different functions. Getting something working involves a lot of trial and error. So I'm sure for video purposes, Windows would be easier to code.
Anyway, that completely misses the point of the line you quoted. The author chose Linux because he wanted an OS that wouldn't crash, not one that was easy to program for. If OS #1 provides an easy to use but crash prone API, and OS #2 provides a harder to use but stable API, #2 is the better choice.
Oh, and from my personal experience on lots of systems, Windows NT/2000/XP are terribly unstable when doing video capture. Both with consumer and professional grade capture devices.
Nope sorry, the GameCube does not have a Radeon in it. It's a custom graphics chip designed by ArtX. The SGI engineers that designed the N64 graphics chip left SGI to form ArtX after the Nintendo/SGI partnership fell apart.
ATI bought ArtX after the chip was finalized but before the GameCube was released.
1) When SNES games sold for $50/each, the extra cost of the SuperFX chip was high enough that it only ended up being used in a few games, only one of which was a 3rd party game. GBA games are only $30-$35 each, so there's less room to make money.
2) It wouldn't generate much interest. If that's all it was, they wouldn't hint at it 6 months in advance like this. If a new chip to put in GBA cartridges in the announcement, a lot of people will be disappointed because they would've expected something better.
They've had them where I work for about a year. It's ok, but you have to get used to it first. When I don't use it regularly, I end up scrolling a little horizontally when I'm trying to go straight down. You have to be more deliberate with your actions - you can't just flick it really fast to scroll down.
The uncertainty is probably WHEN the sequel will be made, not IF it will be made.
It's been well known that Nintendo has been in the works with a 3D Kirby game for a while. They probably weren't intending on making a Smash Bros sequel until the next console. There isn't really a need for a 2nd GameCube Smash Bros - it would just dilute the franchise. Online Smash Bros as a launch title for the next system would be a BIG seller, provided they don't rush out another Smash Bros towards the end of the GameCube's lifespan.
There are 3 rows of characters on the character select screen, with a total of 25 characters to pick from. The first and last character on each row is a clone of the character next to it. That makes 6 clones out of 25 characters. But the clones are different enough that if you try to use the same strategy with both the clone and the original character, you'll get destroyed.
I don't remember the exact count of the stages, but it's somewhere around 30. Maybe 5 of the levels you have to put some effort into making sure the stage doesn't kill you. There's an option in the menus to pick what stages are included in the random selection, so you can completely avoid those stages if you want.
There's a lot more depth to the fighting in SSB:M, and there are also a lot more modes to play and secrets to unlock. The only complaint I have about the game is the choice of stages from the original to include in the new game. Some of the classic stages they included are almost identical to the new stages. They shouldn't picked classic stages that didn't have equivalant new stages.
I was almost positive Nintendo fully owned HAL. I remember back when Nintendo sold Rare, there was a financial report floating around that had an organizational chart of Nintendo, which listed HAL as a subsidy of Nintendo.
Anyway, as to Smash Bros, there's no way Nintendo would stop further development of it. Smash Bros Melee is by far the top selling GameCube game. The N64 version was somewhere in the top 10 of the N64.
Slashdot Mirror
> 3) Real people will not instantly label you as a snob.
Going to an Ivy League school tends to have that effect. Especially Harvard. From my experience, most people are impressed if you made your way through an engineering school
> 4) You have a much broader range of educational opportunity, and employers value this. Employers want engineers who took a few humanities classes. You will enjoy the opportunity to take a few humanities classes.
For science and engineering degree programs to be accredited, there is a required number of humanities courses to be in the program. At least for computer science, you're required to take 9. At least one of which must be about ethics & technology.
> 6) Social Fraternities
There are plenty of them at engineering schools. Sororities on the other hand are rather limited.
> 8) You'll still have access to everything you would have had at an engineering-only school.
I'm going to disagree with that. The more funding your engineering department has, the more you will have available to you. A small engineering school is at a significant disadvantage to a large one. That said, the small engineering school will still be at an advantage to a school that doesn't focus on engineering. Another thing to remember is that a significant amount of the equipment at engineering schools comes from doing projects for the Army and Navy. Non-engineering schools aren't going to get those projects.
The rest of what you said I will completely agree with though.
You said that after your first year, your financial aid went up because your assests had been exhausted. That's definately not the norm. I just graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in May. Every year tuition went up and my aid went down. Everyone else I talked to had the same thing happen to them.
.com boom, I got a part time coding job making decent pay. That resulted in a huge drop in my financial aid, despite the fact that almost all the money went towards covering the drop that I already had in my financial aid. I eventually got another job on campus for half the pay of my previous job, and combined with what was left of my savings, it was almost enough to cover the bills for the rest of my degree. I would've had to take out additional loans (in addition to the financial aid package loans) to cover my last semester, but family bailed me out.
Towards the end of the
Schools are very much aware that the more credits you've taken, the less likely you are to switch schools. So they charge you progressively more as your stay there goes on.
Mario Sunshine also had a nice, alternate solution to that problem. Oh, realize you're not going to land that jump? Press down the R button and the water pack will make you hover and you can land the jump. Takes a LOT of the frustration out of the game.
Correction: Retro Studios is 1st party. Nintendo bought them out 100% about halfway through Metroid Prime development. You're a little off on the 2nd vs 3rd party thing though. Being a second party does not necessarily mean the console developer publishes your games. Rare published a lot of their own games towards the end of their N64 days. 2nd party means you have an exclusivity deal with the console developer.
As to your comment on the controls: they only suck if you're trying to play the game like you'd play Quake or something like that. But if you go into the game expecting anything remotely like an FPS, you're going to be sorely disappointed. If you try to play the game like a Metroid game, then the controls are damn near perfect. The grappling beam could've been done a little better, but even that I can only think of 1 or 2 spots in the entire game where I had an issue with it.
Sierra's Quest For Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness had great voice acting. I don't know if it's true, but they claimed it was the first PC game to have voice acting. The acting was all very good. They had John Rhys-Davies (Gimli in the LOTR movies) do the narration. Unfortunately, the game suffers from CPU speed bugs. Certain parts were a little hard on my Pentium 75. They're impossible on my P3-850. The game is definately worth playing though if you can. It has a lot of replay value, as you can play as either a Fighter, Magic User, Theif, or Paladin. The subplots are different with the different character types, and the puzzles that are shared between types usually have different solutions for different characters.
Another good one is Eternal Darkness on the GameCube. Some of the acting at the very end of the game is a little painful, but I think that's more because of the really cheesy writing than anything else.
You can get a decent DVD player for about $60 nowadays. The GameCube started out $100 less than the PS2, now it's $50 less. So a GameCube + DVD player is $10 more than a PS2, but you're getting a better quality DVD player.
Nope, was CS494 at Stevens Institute of Technology, spring 2002.
You're forgetting that Microsoft has to play catchup with AOL when it comes to IM market share.
If Linux users want to do all the work of support MSN for them, I don't see MS having anything to lose right now. If MS was in AOL's position, then I could see them shutting out the Linux people making sense. But if someone is willing to help you fight a war that you're losing, why fight them?
What tops world 8 of Super Mario Bros is world 9 of the Japanese Super Mario Bros 2 (Lost Levels here in the US).
One level features every land enemy in the game (i.e. goombas, turtles, hammer bros) in a water stage. You can just swim along the top of the water through the whole thing, but it's cool to see.
Another stage is basically an outdoor castle. It's like a castle stage, where all the blocks are made of castle blocks. But there usually isn't a ceiling, it's a blue sky, the normal Mario theme, vines to climb into the sky, etc. There's also lava pits and all the castle enemies. You fight Bowser at the end in an abnormal setting. I forget exactly what it's like. There's another water stage, where there are blocks in the water spelling out a message in Japanese. I forget what the translation is. Something like thanks for playing I think. There's one more stage to world 9, but I forget what it's like.
There's a Java assembler out there, called Jazmin. I might be wrong on the spelling of it though. I worked with it a bit in my compilers class. We wrote a Java compiler that outputted code for Jazmin to assemble into .class files.
Coding Java in assembly isn't very interesting. Calling functions is a bitch, and since it's just a simple stack machine, you aren't going to get any better performance than you would by using a compiler unless your compiler really blows.
www.success-hk.com
I got a 128megabit Flash2Advance with USB Linker. Works perfectly. Only tested it with my own games, no idea how to use it otherwise.
On the bright side, the GBA is by far the most friendly console/portable ever released for homebrew development. I'm going to ignore the special limited edition PlayStations you could program that were only released in Japan, as you could only run programs that fit in RAM, which made it extremely limited.
For under $100, you can get a flash ROM cartridge and the cable necessary to program it. The GBA is high powered enough that development is usually done in C using GCC rather than in assembly like on most 2d systems. The hardware is very well documented. The system is simple enough that it can be emulated at full speed on any Pentium 3 based system. It's hard to top that for homebrew development.
Approx...
PS2 - either 40 million
Gamecube - 9.55 million
Xbox - 9.4 million
The PS2 lead isn't as big as it seems though, as the production quality of them is very low. Many of those purchases are replacements. EVERYONE I know who owns a PS1 or PS2 has had to have their system replaced.
Shinji Mikame, the creator of Resident Evil, has publicly said that one of the reasons RE is GameCube exclusive is because he dislikes the PS2, due to having to replace his system 3 times.
Look at it this way:
Nintendo is making a huge profit. Sony is making a (relatively) small profit. Microsoft is taking a loss the size of Nintendo's income (not profit). Very different picture there.
Oh, and the SNES outsold the Genesis 2:1. Profit wise it was probably an even wider gap, although I've never seen financial figures for the two companies from back then.
You're forgetting, on the Xbox it's running at 640x480, where you'd probably run it at 1024x768 or higher on your PC.
Also keep in mind you can get a big performance gain by coding for a fixed hardware platform rather than trying to make something that runs on thousands of possible configurations.
If the Stampers are still there, they probably won't be for a lot longer. The word going round was the sale came about because the Stampers wanted out, but Nintendo didn't want to pay them what they were asking.
I have to agree. I held such high hopes for Starfox Adventures, as Rare had a history of good games, even if the later ones weren't as good as the previous ones. But not only is it an extremely blatent Ocarina of Time knockoff, but a second rate one at that. The game was totally linear. I don't think there are any events you have a choice of the order you do them in. Combat is easier than in Wind Waker, as even if you are in the middle of a group of enemies, only one will ever attack at a time. The sidekick, Tricky, was incredibly annoying. On the bright side, if you hit him enough, he'd try to attack you, which was entertaining.
The game took me 2 months to beat because after about halfway through, I had trouble bringing myself to play it. I said good riddance to Rare, and was very glad Nintendo sold them off.
> I mean, is it *really* that much harder to grab some video in Windows vs Linux?
Although I've never tried video programming in Windows, I did try it in Linux. I ended up giving up fairly quickly, because although the individual V4L API calls are documented, there is no documentation stating which calls are necessary to get something to happen, or in what order you have to call the different functions. Getting something working involves a lot of trial and error. So I'm sure for video purposes, Windows would be easier to code.
Anyway, that completely misses the point of the line you quoted. The author chose Linux because he wanted an OS that wouldn't crash, not one that was easy to program for. If OS #1 provides an easy to use but crash prone API, and OS #2 provides a harder to use but stable API, #2 is the better choice.
Oh, and from my personal experience on lots of systems, Windows NT/2000/XP are terribly unstable when doing video capture. Both with consumer and professional grade capture devices.
Nope sorry, the GameCube does not have a Radeon in it. It's a custom graphics chip designed by ArtX. The SGI engineers that designed the N64 graphics chip left SGI to form ArtX after the Nintendo/SGI partnership fell apart.
ATI bought ArtX after the chip was finalized but before the GameCube was released.
I doubt it for two reasons:
1) When SNES games sold for $50/each, the extra cost of the SuperFX chip was high enough that it only ended up being used in a few games, only one of which was a 3rd party game. GBA games are only $30-$35 each, so there's less room to make money.
2) It wouldn't generate much interest. If that's all it was, they wouldn't hint at it 6 months in advance like this. If a new chip to put in GBA cartridges in the announcement, a lot of people will be disappointed because they would've expected something better.
They've had them where I work for about a year. It's ok, but you have to get used to it first. When I don't use it regularly, I end up scrolling a little horizontally when I'm trying to go straight down. You have to be more deliberate with your actions - you can't just flick it really fast to scroll down.
The uncertainty is probably WHEN the sequel will be made, not IF it will be made.
It's been well known that Nintendo has been in the works with a 3D Kirby game for a while. They probably weren't intending on making a Smash Bros sequel until the next console. There isn't really a need for a 2nd GameCube Smash Bros - it would just dilute the franchise. Online Smash Bros as a launch title for the next system would be a BIG seller, provided they don't rush out another Smash Bros towards the end of the GameCube's lifespan.
There are 3 rows of characters on the character select screen, with a total of 25 characters to pick from. The first and last character on each row is a clone of the character next to it. That makes 6 clones out of 25 characters. But the clones are different enough that if you try to use the same strategy with both the clone and the original character, you'll get destroyed.
I don't remember the exact count of the stages, but it's somewhere around 30. Maybe 5 of the levels you have to put some effort into making sure the stage doesn't kill you. There's an option in the menus to pick what stages are included in the random selection, so you can completely avoid those stages if you want.
There's a lot more depth to the fighting in SSB:M, and there are also a lot more modes to play and secrets to unlock. The only complaint I have about the game is the choice of stages from the original to include in the new game. Some of the classic stages they included are almost identical to the new stages. They shouldn't picked classic stages that didn't have equivalant new stages.
You expect the administration that let Microsoft off the hook to be on our side here? I don't see that as very likely.
I was almost positive Nintendo fully owned HAL. I remember back when Nintendo sold Rare, there was a financial report floating around that had an organizational chart of Nintendo, which listed HAL as a subsidy of Nintendo.
Anyway, as to Smash Bros, there's no way Nintendo would stop further development of it. Smash Bros Melee is by far the top selling GameCube game. The N64 version was somewhere in the top 10 of the N64.