Firebird and Thunderbird current can't share the same Gecko runtime. So if you use both you're getting two copies of the Mozilla core loaded into memory. Might as well stick to Mozilla until that changes.
They tried porting Zelda 1 before they ported Zelda 3. The problem with Zelda 1 is each dungeon room is exactly 1 screen. The only scrolling is when you move to a new room. The GBA screen isn't tall enough for the game to be playable.
Why release them all together for $20 when they're selling fine for $30-35 each?
Right now, the games they're releasing are about 10-15 years old. Most owners of a GameBoy haven't played them before, so they're taking advantage of that. I think it would make sense if they waited until sales of the individual games died down, and then released a compilation. That'll catch the interest of the older people who already bought the games the first time around.
SNES carts maxed out at 4 megabytes. GBA carts are a minimum of I think 4 MB, although just about everything uses an 8 MB cart. A few games use 16 MB. I think 64 MB is the max.
For comparison, Mario 64 was on an 8 MB cart. The largest N64 carts were 64 MB.
The reason to use tables for layout is because a large portion of Slashdot readers use alternate OS's and browsers. The site will be viewable in a lot more browsers if you use tables than if you use CSS.
The GameCube is cheap, but I've heard more like $100 than $50. The GameCube is a more powerful system than the PS2, so I can't see that huge of a price difference between them. But it still would be significant, as the GC drive can only read GC discs, whereas the PS2 has a second laser for readings CDs, plus also includes DVD playback licensing fees.
Nintendo's royalty rates are rumored to be as follows (according to IGN): Publishers must pay a licensing fee of $10 to Nintendo for games with a $50 MSRP, $8.50 for $40 games, $7 for $30 games, and $5.50 for $20 games. Nintendo's rates are also supposedly still the highest, so it's no where near the $20 figure you said.
Also, I think an 8 MB GBA cartridge costs $7-$8 from Nintendo. I'm assuming that price includes the royalty fees, but I don't know for sure.
Translating isn't the appropriate word for Animal Crossing. It needs to be localized.
On pretty much every even semi major holiday, the animals in the game will celebrate it in some way. These events need to be appropriate for each country.
So far, the game has only been released in the Northern Hemisphere. The seasons would have to be changed for an Australian release.
There's a lot of furniture you can buy in the game which wouldn't fit in in other countries. They'd have to customize it.
Animal Crossing is very expensive to localize. They're not gonna do it without a decent expected return.
The Wavebird is either 800 or 900mhz, not sure. Definately not 2.4ghz.
Amongst my friends, the Wavebird is the controller of choice in Smash Bros games. No one has noticed any latency issues. I watched carefully for latency when I first got the controller, but has far as I could tell, it was just as responsive as the wired controllers.
The controller does suck though when the batteries are low.
Motif is older than Windows 3.x. PCGEOS was developed at the same time as Windows 3.x, and shipped around the same time. It licensed Motif for its interface, which means Motif had to have already existed before Windows 3.x.
1. Get a GameBoy Player and a GBA Flash Rom cartridge 2. Load a special ROM onto the GBA cart 3. Run it on the GBA Player like a normal GBA game 4. The GBA cart will transfer data to GC's main memory 5. Press the reset button on the GC - this is a soft reset, it simply jumps to a fixed memory address, without reading off the disc at all 6. Game data can then be transferred thru the serial port on the bottom of the GC
The question is, is step #4 possible? The rest of the story is definately possible (if you don't believe step 5, put in Animal Crossing, wait til the title screen comes up, take out the disc, and press reset. You can still play, without any need to put the disc in again.)
Zelda 2 had some text clips that were translated but not used. There was a bug where if you were in the town where you learned the upward thrust skill - I think it was Darunia - you could get to a secret town. Cast the jump spell, and jump on the roofs of the houses. From certain roofs you could jump high enough that link would overlap with the status displays at the top. While overlapping the status, cast the fairy spell. You'll start falling, and land in another town. Some of the people there would say things that aren't aren't anywhere else in the game. When you finally left the town, you'd end up in the middle of the ocean a little west of the final palace. You'd be stuck and have to reset the game.
We only had a budget surplus because of creative accounting. Money Social Security collected - money Social Security paid out = budget surplus. There would've been a deficit if the Social Security money actually stayed where it belonged. Instead, we're just going to spend the extra it takes in, and then in a few years we're going to bitch there isn't enough money for Social Security.
I wouldn't be too worried about it, as Nintendo is helping also with the development. Rare was a strictly average developer before Nintendo bought a stake in them and started helping out. Look what they pulled off during their days with Nintendo.
* Ever have one of those days where you want to get going, but people keep messaging you right before you put up your away message? Now you can put it up, to stop the random ims, but still respond to those you got before it went up.
* You're busy working on something. You still want to get the more important messages, but don't want to be bothered with random chitchat.
* Yes, there are times you want to avoid people on your buddy list. There are plenty of times you don't want to talk to a coworker or some guy in one of your classes.
One great thing Miranda has going for it is it's the only multi-protocol IM client I've seen that supports single message mode. Finally a way to use AIM without windows popping up over what you're doing.
For most jobs, the CPU will be idle the vast majority of the time while you sit there thinking about what you're going to do. The actual processing time for most jobs isn't a high percentage of the time.
Key point: All computers wait at the same speed.
If you're writing code, unless you're working on a huge project and make a change equivalent to changing stdlib.h, then compile time won't be a significant factor in your work. You spend very little time compiling code compared to the time it takes to write it and test it.
Yes, video editing is the big exception to this. But most stuff that takes a long time you're going to leave running overnight anyway, so who cares if the new CPU makes it finish at 5am instead of 6am? So for video editing large speed increases are useful, but not incremental ones.
The reason consoles are good is because the hardware is always going to be 100% identical. The games are only as good as they are because developers are able to optimize the code for the exact system its running on. If you've ever played a console game ported to another console, you'll notice its crap. The GameCube and Xbox both blow away the PS2 power wise. Yet a PS2 game straight ported to one of the other consoles will run terribly. Unfortunately, many companies do that and wonder why the game doesn't sell...
Final Fantasy has a huge amount of dialog to be translated. Why not release it in Japan when its ready? It doesn't make sense to have the Japanese version sit and collect dust while waiting for the English translation.
Also, by getting the English version later, you usually end up with fixes to bugs in the Japanese release. Or tweaks to fix things people complained about (i.e. in Zelda: Wind Waker, a section of the game towards the end was made much less tedious for the US release, because Japanese gamers complained about it). Considering you can't just download updates to a console game, its not necessarily a bad thing to get the game a little later.
The ones who think the Earth is only 6,000 years old are a small minority who are ignored by everyone else. The church considers the story in Genesis a methaphor designed to be understandable by people living several thousand years ago, not the way it actually happened.
As to Intel, I don't really see a good reason to blindly hate them. Having a preference between Athlon and Pentium chips is fine. Neither is a bad chip, but each is better in certain situations.
But as to Microsoft, there are two types of people bashing them. I'm going to ignore the "MS bad, Linux good, end of story" people. The other type is the people that have a problem with how Microsoft got where they are. If you paid attention when Windows 3.0 came out, there were several other OS's out that were flat out better than Windows in every way. But MS's illegal tactics made Windows win. The government didn't do anything until around 95, and that amounted to nothing. "We're not saying we were wrong, or that we were right, just that we'll stop doing what we're doing. But we'll do really similar things instead." Microsoft products only look good now because they illegally killed the competition a long time ago. It's actually rather disappointing that it took MS as long as it did to get Windows to its current state.
Also, if you look at the Win32 API some time, it's an awful mess that barely works. Would live in a house if it looked great but the foundation was made of spaghetti?
TicketMaster has also recently started increasing their service charges. I bought $17 concert tickets last week, and the service charge was about $7 per ticket. In the past it would've been about $3, which wouldn't be too bad. But $7 is 41% of the ticket price.
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I'm not getting the link toolbar in 1.4R3. Doesn't matter if I tell it Show Only if Needed or if I say Show Always. Does it work for anyone else?
Firebird and Thunderbird current can't share the same Gecko runtime. So if you use both you're getting two copies of the Mozilla core loaded into memory. Might as well stick to Mozilla until that changes.
They tried porting Zelda 1 before they ported Zelda 3. The problem with Zelda 1 is each dungeon room is exactly 1 screen. The only scrolling is when you move to a new room. The GBA screen isn't tall enough for the game to be playable.
Why release them all together for $20 when they're selling fine for $30-35 each?
Right now, the games they're releasing are about 10-15 years old. Most owners of a GameBoy haven't played them before, so they're taking advantage of that. I think it would make sense if they waited until sales of the individual games died down, and then released a compilation. That'll catch the interest of the older people who already bought the games the first time around.
SNES carts maxed out at 4 megabytes. GBA carts are a minimum of I think 4 MB, although just about everything uses an 8 MB cart. A few games use 16 MB. I think 64 MB is the max.
For comparison, Mario 64 was on an 8 MB cart. The largest N64 carts were 64 MB.
The reason to use tables for layout is because a large portion of Slashdot readers use alternate OS's and browsers. The site will be viewable in a lot more browsers if you use tables than if you use CSS.
The GameCube is cheap, but I've heard more like $100 than $50. The GameCube is a more powerful system than the PS2, so I can't see that huge of a price difference between them. But it still would be significant, as the GC drive can only read GC discs, whereas the PS2 has a second laser for readings CDs, plus also includes DVD playback licensing fees.
Nintendo's royalty rates are rumored to be as follows (according to IGN): Publishers must pay a licensing fee of $10 to Nintendo for games with a $50 MSRP, $8.50 for $40 games, $7 for $30 games, and $5.50 for $20 games. Nintendo's rates are also supposedly still the highest, so it's no where near the $20 figure you said.
Also, I think an 8 MB GBA cartridge costs $7-$8 from Nintendo. I'm assuming that price includes the royalty fees, but I don't know for sure.
It probably won't be too long until someone rips the NES emulator out of Animal Crossing and gets it working with other ROMs.
Translating isn't the appropriate word for Animal Crossing. It needs to be localized.
On pretty much every even semi major holiday, the animals in the game will celebrate it in some way. These events need to be appropriate for each country.
So far, the game has only been released in the Northern Hemisphere. The seasons would have to be changed for an Australian release.
There's a lot of furniture you can buy in the game which wouldn't fit in in other countries. They'd have to customize it.
Animal Crossing is very expensive to localize. They're not gonna do it without a decent expected return.
I think Nintendo has said that Australia isn't getting Animal Crossing, but they will be getting Animal Crossing 2.
The Wavebird is either 800 or 900mhz, not sure. Definately not 2.4ghz.
Amongst my friends, the Wavebird is the controller of choice in Smash Bros games. No one has noticed any latency issues. I watched carefully for latency when I first got the controller, but has far as I could tell, it was just as responsive as the wired controllers.
The controller does suck though when the batteries are low.
Motif is older than Windows 3.x. PCGEOS was developed at the same time as Windows 3.x, and shipped around the same time. It licensed Motif for its interface, which means Motif had to have already existed before Windows 3.x.
Pirating Dreamcast games was easy. Look what happened to the system.
The rumor I've heard is as follows:
1. Get a GameBoy Player and a GBA Flash Rom cartridge
2. Load a special ROM onto the GBA cart
3. Run it on the GBA Player like a normal GBA game
4. The GBA cart will transfer data to GC's main memory
5. Press the reset button on the GC - this is a soft reset, it simply jumps to a fixed memory address, without reading off the disc at all
6. Game data can then be transferred thru the serial port on the bottom of the GC
The question is, is step #4 possible? The rest of the story is definately possible (if you don't believe step 5, put in Animal Crossing, wait til the title screen comes up, take out the disc, and press reset. You can still play, without any need to put the disc in again.)
Zelda 2 had some text clips that were translated but not used. There was a bug where if you were in the town where you learned the upward thrust skill - I think it was Darunia - you could get to a secret town. Cast the jump spell, and jump on the roofs of the houses. From certain roofs you could jump high enough that link would overlap with the status displays at the top. While overlapping the status, cast the fairy spell. You'll start falling, and land in another town. Some of the people there would say things that aren't aren't anywhere else in the game. When you finally left the town, you'd end up in the middle of the ocean a little west of the final palace. You'd be stuck and have to reset the game.
We only had a budget surplus because of creative accounting. Money Social Security collected - money Social Security paid out = budget surplus. There would've been a deficit if the Social Security money actually stayed where it belonged. Instead, we're just going to spend the extra it takes in, and then in a few years we're going to bitch there isn't enough money for Social Security.
I wouldn't be too worried about it, as Nintendo is helping also with the development. Rare was a strictly average developer before Nintendo bought a stake in them and started helping out. Look what they pulled off during their days with Nintendo.
Uses for talking while in Away mode:
* Ever have one of those days where you want to get going, but people keep messaging you right before you put up your away message? Now you can put it up, to stop the random ims, but still respond to those you got before it went up.
* You're busy working on something. You still want to get the more important messages, but don't want to be bothered with random chitchat.
* Yes, there are times you want to avoid people on your buddy list. There are plenty of times you don't want to talk to a coworker or some guy in one of your classes.
One great thing Miranda has going for it is it's the only multi-protocol IM client I've seen that supports single message mode. Finally a way to use AIM without windows popping up over what you're doing.
For most jobs, the CPU will be idle the vast majority of the time while you sit there thinking about what you're going to do. The actual processing time for most jobs isn't a high percentage of the time.
Key point: All computers wait at the same speed.
If you're writing code, unless you're working on a huge project and make a change equivalent to changing stdlib.h, then compile time won't be a significant factor in your work. You spend very little time compiling code compared to the time it takes to write it and test it.
Yes, video editing is the big exception to this. But most stuff that takes a long time you're going to leave running overnight anyway, so who cares if the new CPU makes it finish at 5am instead of 6am? So for video editing large speed increases are useful, but not incremental ones.
The reason consoles are good is because the hardware is always going to be 100% identical. The games are only as good as they are because developers are able to optimize the code for the exact system its running on. If you've ever played a console game ported to another console, you'll notice its crap. The GameCube and Xbox both blow away the PS2 power wise. Yet a PS2 game straight ported to one of the other consoles will run terribly. Unfortunately, many companies do that and wonder why the game doesn't sell...
Final Fantasy has a huge amount of dialog to be translated. Why not release it in Japan when its ready? It doesn't make sense to have the Japanese version sit and collect dust while waiting for the English translation.
Also, by getting the English version later, you usually end up with fixes to bugs in the Japanese release. Or tweaks to fix things people complained about (i.e. in Zelda: Wind Waker, a section of the game towards the end was made much less tedious for the US release, because Japanese gamers complained about it). Considering you can't just download updates to a console game, its not necessarily a bad thing to get the game a little later.
The ones who think the Earth is only 6,000 years old are a small minority who are ignored by everyone else. The church considers the story in Genesis a methaphor designed to be understandable by people living several thousand years ago, not the way it actually happened.
As to Intel, I don't really see a good reason to blindly hate them. Having a preference between Athlon and Pentium chips is fine. Neither is a bad chip, but each is better in certain situations.
But as to Microsoft, there are two types of people bashing them. I'm going to ignore the "MS bad, Linux good, end of story" people. The other type is the people that have a problem with how Microsoft got where they are. If you paid attention when Windows 3.0 came out, there were several other OS's out that were flat out better than Windows in every way. But MS's illegal tactics made Windows win. The government didn't do anything until around 95, and that amounted to nothing. "We're not saying we were wrong, or that we were right, just that we'll stop doing what we're doing. But we'll do really similar things instead." Microsoft products only look good now because they illegally killed the competition a long time ago. It's actually rather disappointing that it took MS as long as it did to get Windows to its current state.
Also, if you look at the Win32 API some time, it's an awful mess that barely works. Would live in a house if it looked great but the foundation was made of spaghetti?
TicketMaster has also recently started increasing their service charges. I bought $17 concert tickets last week, and the service charge was about $7 per ticket. In the past it would've been about $3, which wouldn't be too bad. But $7 is 41% of the ticket price.