What, no mention of Transgaming? Sure they don't actually port the games to Linux, but if it works it works. The only big problem is that the Transgaming versions have to deal with all of the copy protection crap the Windows users have to deal with. Has a CD Key ever kept someone from pirating a game? Do any games with SafeDisc (which don't work in my computer) actually avoid being 0-day Warez? How many hours of my life have I wasted installing games only to realize that it's got another CD protection scheme that breaks in my DVD drive? How many hours of tech support time have I wasted with these problem (at least Blizzard fixed it in a patch, unlike most companies that just ignore you)[1]?
I think Loki got it right. Too bad they were probably a bit too early (not enough users with cash) to make money. It's a shame, because the Loki versions usually ran better than the Windows versions on my machine.
[1] Well, not too many, I usually just return the game instead.
You think 7 years is a long development cycle for a game? Check out Stars! Supernova Genesis. The original release date for this game was in 1997. It's a sequel to a 16 bit Win3.1 game! If there was ever a game where the developers bit off more than they could chew, this is it. Even though they were delayed for several years, the developers did say they had something they were going to release around 2000, but even that seems to have gone nowhere.
I remember doing this back when I worked for SGI. You could have the filesystem log anywhere you wanted it, even on a seperate device. If you put the log on a RAM Disk, you would be doing pretty much exactly what the article suggested.
The problem is that it only helps in certain instances, where you are continually accessing the same files over and over. Because these systems were running big databases, that wasn't really the case. What it DID do was smooth out the access times (latencies) significantly.
When I read the article, I realized that it was Windows specific when I got to the part about the guy wanting to put his swap into a RAM-based disk. What's up with that? Wouldn't you simply buy more system RAM if swapping was becoming an issue?
He wants to do this because Windows has a braindamaged VM system. Windows tends to swap stuff out when you aren't looking at it, presumably to free up memory for whatever you're working on, weather it needs it or not. The result is that Mozilla can take several minutes to swap back in after you minimize it, even when you have 450M of free RAM. The workaround is usually to go to System Properties->Performance Options->Virtual Memory/Change and force the swap size down to the minimum (2MB), but the ramdisk would work too.
The thing is, they had to make her very feminine or people wouldn't have noticed. There were only a few pixels to play with on the original Metroid, and they had to break the assumption that Samus was a guy.
DOAEVB doesn't try to lie to the consumer. It's a game targeted at men. As they called it "a pinup game".
Tomb Raider had what was possibly a new Samus character, strong and independant. EA dumped all of that and turned her into a sex symbol. It was a major disappointement for these girls who wanted someone strong to identify with, not another Barbie clone.
I think they have a point. People like their character to have personality. It's like the Tomb Raider marketing department was run by 15 year olds who missed the whole notion that Women can have thoughts too. I'm not alone either, in a recent Penny Arcade contest (to see which one Gabe would draw) Samus came out way on top.
My Grandma used to be like that too, but one of my aunts finally bought her a computer a hooked her up with Juno. Before too long she was sending out Emails to everybody with the stuff she used to write up by hand. Now handwritten letters are reserved for Christmas cards and the like. I think she likes how people actually respond now (when was the last time you hand wrote a letter?) and the whole family keeps in touch a lot more. I have a life outside of computers, but E-mail is just a lot more efficent than regular mail.
Whoops, GW is a monopoly as well, at least for GW stuff. With FASA gone and WizKids only making extremely stupid games, it's hard to find anybody who plays stuff beyond GW games and card games in some areas. You're lucky to even find a local Heavy Gear chapter anymore.
It becomes illegal when they dump (sell below their cost) to drive a competitor out of business or multiple manufactures get together to fix the prices for the entire industry to gouge the customet.
Isn't this the point. GW has a monopoly on it's minis. Nobody is allowed to license them out and make knockoffs. GW also structures the rules of the tournaments such that non-GW products are excluded. In fact you have to own an official GW mini, painted in GW paint in line with your "army colors", for every unit you want to field if you're playing by the rules. That's why I never get into GW games, since I like using proxies for minis I don't have and hate GW's business practices. GW also won't sell to a store unless a certain (large) percentage of the store is devoted to GW products, this often turns out to be 50% of your shelf space that has to be devoted to GW products if you want to carry any GW products.
I don't know about Progressive scan (they have Component video, which you should not confuse with Progressive scan), but there is no IR port on the PS2. If you want to use one of those remote controls you have to plug a reciever into one of the memory card slots on the PS2 (and download an IR supporting DVD player to a PS2 flash card). The remote is a rip off at $20 to boot.
Are you sure your PS2 ins't broken? My (version 3) PS2 has a fan so quiet I have to put my ear right next to it to hear it running. The DVD drive's seeks are way louder than the fan for instance.
With Divx it is not hard to get a TV episode (22 minutes of video) down to the ~50 - 100MB range (at rather low quality settings). The flash cards for the GBA seem to go as high as 512MB.
I'd think it would chew through the batteries kinda fast though. YOu would definatly need some sort of external MPEG4 decoder chip to handle it.
I don't know about you, but my local Comcast services were always crashy as hell. I hated having every few messages get delayed by a couple of days because their mail server crashed again, or the DNS server going down yet again. That's I switched over to running the services myself, it was way more reliable that way. I still have the local DNS service, but I'm just going to have to live with the SMTP being lousy now and curse their local monopoly status.
Honestly you would be better off disabling those TCP simple services anyway. They're far to easy to exploit into a local DOS attack by just forging the packet headers.
I wonder if they're going to include some form of lossless compression (like flac) on the sound to squeeze more bits out of the 4GB CF card mentioned in the article. As it stand, you can only get about an hour of uncompressed 2 channel 192 Kilosample 24 bit audio on there. With compression it should be easy to get 2 hours out of the card. If you use a lossy compression (like ogg) it should be trivial to get many many hours on a 4GB CF card.
That really depends on how they're built. The Puppeteer Mk 4 with Hyperdrive 2 was like 95% (from memory) big heavy engine and 5% everything else (including living quarters). The Death Star's mass has been a source of in-depth analysis on the internet. The mass turns out to be important in determining the fate of one little moon of Endor (verdict: Doomed).
The only place I've seen these tanks for sale is Hobby Link Japan. They looked really cool, but at ~$50US + shipping they're a little expensive. Way cooler than those little cars though.
Huh? Was the Judge the dealer's brother or something? He should have appealed. It's obviously very misleading and almost certainly fraud. Tiny semantic changes (like saying "designed") shouldn't protect the scumbag from a jury. Who was your lawyer? Lionel Hutz?
The issue of CPU remarking by systems integrators is a real problem, and is not likely to go away as long as processors can be overclocked.
People still do this? I havn't heard of anyone buying an overclocked cpu in ages. Even when I did hear about it last (back in Penium II days), it was only from the most shady of merchant, usually the kind that hung out in computer trade shows. Have there been any recent reported cases of this happening?
Shitty marketting in the early '90s stopped Apple from taking its rightful place as the market leader in the computer industry.
That and sky high prices. Those early Macs were nice to use, but they cost you a pretty penny (they were technically workstation class machines instead of PCs). Some of the very early efforts (Lisa, 128k original Mac) had some serious limitations as well that made them unattractive to businesses (like small maximum document sizes)).
There is some truth to the idea that Apple didn't really market very well and didn't dislodge the IBM==Business Apple==play/school mentality people had back then.
MSFT is after all, a publicly traded for-profit company.
...and therefore does not have to consider the ethics of actions it takes? We have a lot of laws on the books that define "ethics" for individuals, so why do we allow companies (which are considered to be individuals in the eyes of the law) to be exempt from them?
Sometimes it feels like when the common good and the bottom line are at odds (even when a HUGE amount of common good can come out of a bit of the bottom line), the bottom line wins. Is this right?
Huh? That's going to be news to all of the third party parts manufacturers. If you want to make a replacement headlight for a Mustang, you are free to do so. It would be insane to take any other approach really, which doesn't seem to stop Microsoft.
Now you can't sell "Offical Ford Mustang Parts," but that's an entirely different area of the law. But you can sell "Viral Fly-by's Mustang head gasket replacement kit."
That's the rub. Many broadband providers are basically local monopolies due to technological limitations. Some lucky people can get Cable or DSL, but most people are stuck with one or the other (if they're lucky! Most of the time you have no option). Wireless is still small beans and doesn't even really factor into this equation.
The problem is that broadband providers know this, and they're making full use of their monopoly position to force these kind of agreements on the customer. The big companies are the worst with this, as they implement insane ToS agreements, sky high prices, upload/download caps, and often times maximum bit caps. What's a customer supposed to do? Switch back to modem? Have you ever tried to switch back to modem after getting used to downloading ISOs and whatnot on a regular basis? I've got friends who come over from a few miles away (no broadband at all) just to run windows update on their machines so they don't get hacked during the 10 minutes they get to be online because windows update takes too long to run over modem (especially if a new IE version comes out). Even efficent things like CVsup take a long time to run. Oh, and if you're an online gamer you can just forget about switching back to modem. As the world becomes more and more connected people are assuming more and more about your available bandwidth, to the detriment of anybody still using archaic technologies.
Slashdot Mirror
What, no mention of Transgaming? Sure they don't actually port the games to Linux, but if it works it works. The only big problem is that the Transgaming versions have to deal with all of the copy protection crap the Windows users have to deal with. Has a CD Key ever kept someone from pirating a game? Do any games with SafeDisc (which don't work in my computer) actually avoid being 0-day Warez? How many hours of my life have I wasted installing games only to realize that it's got another CD protection scheme that breaks in my DVD drive? How many hours of tech support time have I wasted with these problem (at least Blizzard fixed it in a patch, unlike most companies that just ignore you)[1]?
I think Loki got it right. Too bad they were probably a bit too early (not enough users with cash) to make money. It's a shame, because the Loki versions usually ran better than the Windows versions on my machine.
[1] Well, not too many, I usually just return the game instead.
You think 7 years is a long development cycle for a game? Check out Stars! Supernova Genesis. The original release date for this game was in 1997. It's a sequel to a 16 bit Win3.1 game! If there was ever a game where the developers bit off more than they could chew, this is it. Even though they were delayed for several years, the developers did say they had something they were going to release around 2000, but even that seems to have gone nowhere.
I remember doing this back when I worked for SGI. You could have the filesystem log anywhere you wanted it, even on a seperate device. If you put the log on a RAM Disk, you would be doing pretty much exactly what the article suggested.
The problem is that it only helps in certain instances, where you are continually accessing the same files over and over. Because these systems were running big databases, that wasn't really the case. What it DID do was smooth out the access times (latencies) significantly.
The thing is, they had to make her very feminine or people wouldn't have noticed. There were only a few pixels to play with on the original Metroid, and they had to break the assumption that Samus was a guy.
DOAEVB doesn't try to lie to the consumer. It's a game targeted at men. As they called it "a pinup game".
Tomb Raider had what was possibly a new Samus character, strong and independant. EA dumped all of that and turned her into a sex symbol. It was a major disappointement for these girls who wanted someone strong to identify with, not another Barbie clone.
I think they have a point. People like their character to have personality. It's like the Tomb Raider marketing department was run by 15 year olds who missed the whole notion that Women can have thoughts too. I'm not alone either, in a recent Penny Arcade contest (to see which one Gabe would draw) Samus came out way on top.
My Grandma used to be like that too, but one of my aunts finally bought her a computer a hooked her up with Juno. Before too long she was sending out Emails to everybody with the stuff she used to write up by hand. Now handwritten letters are reserved for Christmas cards and the like. I think she likes how people actually respond now (when was the last time you hand wrote a letter?) and the whole family keeps in touch a lot more. I have a life outside of computers, but E-mail is just a lot more efficent than regular mail.
Dang, and all this time I thought it was all of the crappy games that weren't any fun to play.
Whoops, GW is a monopoly as well, at least for GW stuff. With FASA gone and WizKids only making extremely stupid games, it's hard to find anybody who plays stuff beyond GW games and card games in some areas. You're lucky to even find a local Heavy Gear chapter anymore.
Isn't this the point. GW has a monopoly on it's minis. Nobody is allowed to license them out and make knockoffs. GW also structures the rules of the tournaments such that non-GW products are excluded. In fact you have to own an official GW mini, painted in GW paint in line with your "army colors", for every unit you want to field if you're playing by the rules. That's why I never get into GW games, since I like using proxies for minis I don't have and hate GW's business practices. GW also won't sell to a store unless a certain (large) percentage of the store is devoted to GW products, this often turns out to be 50% of your shelf space that has to be devoted to GW products if you want to carry any GW products.
I don't know about Progressive scan (they have Component video, which you should not confuse with Progressive scan), but there is no IR port on the PS2. If you want to use one of those remote controls you have to plug a reciever into one of the memory card slots on the PS2 (and download an IR supporting DVD player to a PS2 flash card). The remote is a rip off at $20 to boot.
Are you sure your PS2 ins't broken? My (version 3) PS2 has a fan so quiet I have to put my ear right next to it to hear it running. The DVD drive's seeks are way louder than the fan for instance.
With Divx it is not hard to get a TV episode (22 minutes of video) down to the ~50 - 100MB range (at rather low quality settings). The flash cards for the GBA seem to go as high as 512MB. I'd think it would chew through the batteries kinda fast though. YOu would definatly need some sort of external MPEG4 decoder chip to handle it.
I don't know about you, but my local Comcast services were always crashy as hell. I hated having every few messages get delayed by a couple of days because their mail server crashed again, or the DNS server going down yet again. That's I switched over to running the services myself, it was way more reliable that way. I still have the local DNS service, but I'm just going to have to live with the SMTP being lousy now and curse their local monopoly status.
Honestly you would be better off disabling those TCP simple services anyway. They're far to easy to exploit into a local DOS attack by just forging the packet headers.
I wonder if they're going to include some form of lossless compression (like flac) on the sound to squeeze more bits out of the 4GB CF card mentioned in the article. As it stand, you can only get about an hour of uncompressed 2 channel 192 Kilosample 24 bit audio on there. With compression it should be easy to get 2 hours out of the card. If you use a lossy compression (like ogg) it should be trivial to get many many hours on a 4GB CF card.
That really depends on how they're built. The Puppeteer Mk 4 with Hyperdrive 2 was like 95% (from memory) big heavy engine and 5% everything else (including living quarters). The Death Star's mass has been a source of in-depth analysis on the internet. The mass turns out to be important in determining the fate of one little moon of Endor (verdict: Doomed).
The only place I've seen these tanks for sale is Hobby Link Japan. They looked really cool, but at ~$50US + shipping they're a little expensive. Way cooler than those little cars though.
Huh? Was the Judge the dealer's brother or something? He should have appealed. It's obviously very misleading and almost certainly fraud. Tiny semantic changes (like saying "designed") shouldn't protect the scumbag from a jury. Who was your lawyer? Lionel Hutz?
People still do this? I havn't heard of anyone buying an overclocked cpu in ages. Even when I did hear about it last (back in Penium II days), it was only from the most shady of merchant, usually the kind that hung out in computer trade shows. Have there been any recent reported cases of this happening?
Yeah, like my representatives read the EULAs.
That and sky high prices. Those early Macs were nice to use, but they cost you a pretty penny (they were technically workstation class machines instead of PCs). Some of the very early efforts (Lisa, 128k original Mac) had some serious limitations as well that made them unattractive to businesses (like small maximum document sizes)).
There is some truth to the idea that Apple didn't really market very well and didn't dislodge the IBM==Business Apple==play/school mentality people had back then.
Sometimes it feels like when the common good and the bottom line are at odds (even when a HUGE amount of common good can come out of a bit of the bottom line), the bottom line wins. Is this right?
Huh? That's going to be news to all of the third party parts manufacturers. If you want to make a replacement headlight for a Mustang, you are free to do so. It would be insane to take any other approach really, which doesn't seem to stop Microsoft.
Now you can't sell "Offical Ford Mustang Parts," but that's an entirely different area of the law. But you can sell "Viral Fly-by's Mustang head gasket replacement kit."
That's the rub. Many broadband providers are basically local monopolies due to technological limitations. Some lucky people can get Cable or DSL, but most people are stuck with one or the other (if they're lucky! Most of the time you have no option). Wireless is still small beans and doesn't even really factor into this equation.
The problem is that broadband providers know this, and they're making full use of their monopoly position to force these kind of agreements on the customer. The big companies are the worst with this, as they implement insane ToS agreements, sky high prices, upload/download caps, and often times maximum bit caps. What's a customer supposed to do? Switch back to modem? Have you ever tried to switch back to modem after getting used to downloading ISOs and whatnot on a regular basis? I've got friends who come over from a few miles away (no broadband at all) just to run windows update on their machines so they don't get hacked during the 10 minutes they get to be online because windows update takes too long to run over modem (especially if a new IE version comes out). Even efficent things like CVsup take a long time to run. Oh, and if you're an online gamer you can just forget about switching back to modem. As the world becomes more and more connected people are assuming more and more about your available bandwidth, to the detriment of anybody still using archaic technologies.
Just my US$0.02.