I've had minor arthritis since I was a little kid. Agreed, the NES controls were brutal, but I found gripping the 90 degree corners to be the part that got me, my index fingers would "seize" up from holding the controls to long. I got Nintendo thumb to, but it wasn't as bad.
Of course the fix to this was I used the NES advantage on ALL games (except for Duck Hunt smart ass). The last truly all games usable joystick. I have bought joysticks for other systems, but they only fit certain games properly (like Street Fighter) and aren't all that useful for platformers.
Back when I was a kid one of my friends had a Decathlon/Olympics whatever game for the Atari 2600, I don't remember the exact title.
The foot race portion consisted of moving the control stick left to right as fast as you could, the winner obviously is the one who was best at doing that. Of course the Atari 2600 joysticks were rubber coated, and they were rather stiff. Long story short, I got blisters on my palms from shaking the joystick to vigorously to often.
Now that I reread that a lot of what I just posted sounds incredibly gay. In the interest of leaving the story in tact I'm leaving it, because it's NOT gay, and if it were what you're reading into it I assure you it would be the joystick that developed the blisters, not my palms.
I have never really understood portable gaming consoles.
You've obviously never had two jobs, long commutes, and lots of hurry up and wait.
I chose my types of games based on the play windows I have. I play a lot of RPG's, because I can get back into the mind set of playing them within a minute of two of picking them up, they tend to have good progress save features, and they usually don't have the demands of twitch reflex play and you don't necessarily have to hear them to play them well. Zelda, Final Fantasy, Brave Story, Broken Sword have all proven to be great on the go games for me. Right now I'm playing Crush on my PSP, it's more of a puzzle game with some platforming aspects (but not overwhelmingly so). It is also proving to be a great portable game.
Yeah, I agree. I used SuSE for quite a while, and I've found APT to beat the pants off of the RPM system. Without fail every RPM based system I used for a long time would eventually get a corrupted RPM database, that was real pain in the ass. Never had that problem with APT.
(I partially blame SuSE for having such a crappy database with built in incompatibilities)
I didn't read the details to know one way or the other, did you?
Since I mentioned OS X on normal PC's, what does it matter what Microsoft did after that? Microsoft doesn't make PC's and their involvement on OS X is limited to Office and a few other things we can easily do without.
There's no reason they couldn't profit off of selling the OS, other than possibly the increased need for tech support/hardware support.
I know Apple has had their own hardware from the start, but making a generic PC port wouldn't be such a bad idea. Seriously, the Hackintosh guys have proven it possible. If they were to sell their OS at the same price Windows usually goes for compatible with hardware the whole world uses they could take the crown.
I'm of course guessing there's a clause from when MS bailed them out that prevents that from happening.
Then of course if they did it they would just replace the old evil overlords with new evil overlords....
Seriously, as of a year ago I would rather have used an old AGP TNT2 than than the latest built in Intel graphics. I improved the performance of a relatives machine by 35% after putting in a PCI GeForce 5600 instead of using the built in Intel.
Did something happen over the past year or two that caused Intel to be able to publish papers like this? I mean their graphics are fine for a Windows desktop running Office and a browser, but it stops there unless something recently changed.
The only reason I could play this game to the end is that I had the NES Advantage control. There is no f-ing way I was gonna go up all those stairs without turbo.
You obviously never went on a high school trip with teenagers in a van eating pumpkin seeds. That was the highest efficiency matter to gas conversion I've ever seen.
1. Companies exist to make money 2. Each person in a company is expected to make money for the company. 3. I.T. people DO NOT make money for most companies therefore I.T. is an expense.
Most companies, especially the people with their eyes directly on company profits see I.T. people as a begrudgingly necessary expense. Sort of like tires on a commercial vehicle. Tires are expensive, but you have to have them to run a truck. You can buy new tires (hire lots of I.T.) or you can retread the old ones and make them last as long as you possibly can (abuse the ones you've got). Retreading is a way to stretch every penny.
In all but a few cases I.T. is an expense to a company that has no perceivable return on investment to the casual observer. This is why we're often disliked by bean counters, we're service people so we're treated like second class employees (if we are employees, often we're contracted outsiders). We get the dregs because "we like technology and gadgets, leftovers are a favor". Sometimes they are, but often it's leftover crap.
To many people at many companies having I.T. staff is akin to having the guy who just changed your oil and rotated your tires come home with you, sleep in one of your closets and drink your coffee, a lot of your coffee. You want to just kick the guy out, but you know as soon as you do your car's going to break down so you're better off just utilizing him for every little thing you can, he's going to be there anyways after all.
It is now appearant that Microsoft and Dell are teaming up, not only to outsource tech support to India, but to hire Indian tech support that cant even read!
Seriously, as is OpenOffice.org is slick, very usable, I love it.
If those 24 developers can continue to right filters for new file formats (24 of them should be able to handle that), make bug fixes, and make the occasional improvement here and there I say great!
OpenOffice.org does not need a rewrite from the ground up every six months to two years.
Seriously, the guys from Neo Office don't have near the funding or man power of the core OpenOffice.org team, look what they've accomplished on "Macing it" (Macking it?).
Between Neo Office and Go-oo making fixes that the upstream developers don't take, I would say there's some FUD going around and there's more people interested in developing for OpenOffice.org than Sun lets on. I'm thinking this may be the first artificial rublings to justify dumping the project sometime in the near future since it's not profitable and hasn't been a big enough thorn in the MS side.
exactly what is the canary we take down the shaft with us going to breathe?
Re:Users are branching out - game companies are no
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
·
· Score: 1
As someone who's been using linux for over 10 years, I find it hard to believe that anyone who plays video games gives up on windows. Yes, there is wine, but it is a hassle, has far too many problems with most games compared to just installing it on XP.
I am a gamer who gave up on Windows, close to 10 years ago. The last Windows game I bought for play on Windows was either Diablo 2 or Alice, and by that time I had been dual booting for years, I just slowly stopped dual booting and eventually chose to reclaim the drive. Once I got UT 99 working on Linux, along with Quake 3 I just didn't care anymore. It was around that time Blizzard pissed me off with over loaded Battle.net servers and lawsuits involving personal friends of mine who have connections to Bnetd. Blizzard actually helped to put the nail in the Windows coffin for me personally, Microsoft had already started the process with their anti-Novell and anti-Netscape campaign, both of those companies put food in my mouth. If it would have been a legitimate campaign instead of predatory patches and fake F.U.D I could have forgiven it and moved on. No, this gamer gave up on Windows during a great time of Windows gaming.
Portability comes with a cost, extra development time, and the benefit is that you gain access to a very niche market that you're not sure of if they will buy your games. Supporting Linux would mean that now they have to test not 1 or 2 platforms like with Windows, but all of the major distributions.
The Unreal Engine is the definition of portable. They brag about it. They were on the verge of releasing it and stopped. This game in particular is in a special nitch where the accusation I made can hold up. If you want to say that about any game not based on an Unreal or Quake Engine go ahead, in this case it stands.
The desktop environment alone offers enough diversity in one distribution to create an amount of testing cases that scares off most sane managers.
OpenGL. That's the answer, the question is why is it so scary? Most developers write their programs with ActiveX in mind, write with OpenGL in mind instead all of the sudden this desktop diversity you're talking about goes away. I don't care what if any window manager is used, these types of games don't talk to the window manager, they talk to X and OpenGL. I don't care what video card they use, if the driver works and it supports OpenGL (drivers being another issue all together) it should work. I buy my video cards based on their ability to support OpenGL - which means I stick with nVidia when possible, see I'm not one of those purist. I wish there was a fully GPL compliant video card and driver out there that was worth a shit, but there's not. ATI is trying, but ATI tends to be a DirectX pushover where nVidia trys to keep OpenGL in mind.
Re:Users are branching out - game companies are no
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
·
· Score: 1
The problem then is with users like you who chose to dual boot instead of telling the game companies to suck it. As long as people continue to dual boot and use Cedega they're telling the game companies it's ok to not support them.
Re:Users are branching out - game companies are no
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
·
· Score: 1
UT2K3 and UT2K4 are almost the same game. They didn't have the vehicles down before the 2K3 deadline so they skipped them, but there was a way to get one working with backdoor knowledge. Originally the intent was to have UT2K4 clients capable of joining 2K3 servers, but they worked in enough protocol changes and improvements near the end they dropped that idea. 2K3 is by and large considered replaced by 2K4, as a matter of fact there were some decent discounts offered to exchange 2K3 for 2K4.
Re:Users are branching out - game companies are no
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
·
· Score: 1
Far from defeat.
In 1994 if you would have told me (not yet an I.T. pro) and other I.T. professionals of the time that Windows was going to become a viable server OS they would have laughed. Novell Netware was king, Banyan Vines had a following, Apple had easy networking, Lantastic wasn't bad for a small network, but Windows was for a personal workstation.
There was a campaign of mailed letter F.U.D against Novell which Novell filed lawsuits over and won - after. There were "patches" to fix O.S. stability that broke the Netware client and Netscape, and every time Novell and Netscape fixed their products around the "patches" a new stability patch would come out for mysterious reasons and break them again.
After some time of this, Microsoft emerged as a leader in server networking.
Linux is established and respected in both the server and embedded devices arenas, desktop acceptance is gaining, but Linux folks are waiting for their inverse "NT Server" moment when they become a commonly accepted desktop.
Microsoft has actively strong armed retailers to keep them from distributing Linux machines, and even more so to thwart advertising them.
Why would strong arming software companies away from supporting other OS's be a stretch?
Re:Users are branching out - game companies are no
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
·
· Score: 1
I've seen quite a bit of that in the corporate world. An executive type user wants a Macbook Pro because they are really neat and have lots of features, then has no clue how to use one or gets completely perplexed with font changes, etc... in Office documents so uses Windows anyway.
On the other hand, the coffee shop/home users I've never seen use anything but OS X on modern Macs.
Personally my only Windows install is an XP virtual machine (VMWare Fusion) on my Macbook Pro. I rarely boot it, only when I want to update my contacts so my phone has a copy of the global address book (Entourage only allows 1 at a time where Outlook lets me highlight them all) or having a reference on my own machine is the only way to support a customer.
BTW - Bomgar is the most awesome remote support product I've ever used.
Re:Users are branching out - game companies are no
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
·
· Score: 1
Agreed -
I have a five year old. I got her a Power Mac Dual G5 off of eBay so it would play classic games (plenty of those out there) and new games. I will say first hand, the Mac ports of THQ Disney games SUCK ROCKS. Sure, you can actually get them to "work" but getting controls configured is a pain (why do I have to launch the installer hidden in some subdirectory to config a game pad?), the graphics are not written for a Mac. From what I've read they're PS2 games wrapped in a compatibility layer.
I will say the classic games seem to work fairly well most of the time, and most of the newer games that are NOT from THQ seem to work great. On my own Mac I have UT2K4 working great, just like the Linux version.
Cedega is sort of a cop-out to me. I'm all for just using SDL, OpenGL, and other cross platform programming utilities. Once a company gets set in their ways it's hard to change them sometimes.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had minor arthritis since I was a little kid. Agreed, the NES controls were brutal, but I found gripping the 90 degree corners to be the part that got me, my index fingers would "seize" up from holding the controls to long. I got Nintendo thumb to, but it wasn't as bad.
Of course the fix to this was I used the NES advantage on ALL games (except for Duck Hunt smart ass). The last truly all games usable joystick. I have bought joysticks for other systems, but they only fit certain games properly (like Street Fighter) and aren't all that useful for platformers.
Back when I was a kid one of my friends had a Decathlon/Olympics whatever game for the Atari 2600, I don't remember the exact title.
The foot race portion consisted of moving the control stick left to right as fast as you could, the winner obviously is the one who was best at doing that. Of course the Atari 2600 joysticks were rubber coated, and they were rather stiff. Long story short, I got blisters on my palms from shaking the joystick to vigorously to often.
Now that I reread that a lot of what I just posted sounds incredibly gay. In the interest of leaving the story in tact I'm leaving it, because it's NOT gay, and if it were what you're reading into it I assure you it would be the joystick that developed the blisters, not my palms.
I have never really understood portable gaming consoles.
You've obviously never had two jobs, long commutes, and lots of hurry up and wait.
I chose my types of games based on the play windows I have. I play a lot of RPG's, because I can get back into the mind set of playing them within a minute of two of picking them up, they tend to have good progress save features, and they usually don't have the demands of twitch reflex play and you don't necessarily have to hear them to play them well. Zelda, Final Fantasy, Brave Story, Broken Sword have all proven to be great on the go games for me. Right now I'm playing Crush on my PSP, it's more of a puzzle game with some platforming aspects (but not overwhelmingly so). It is also proving to be a great portable game.
Yeah, I agree. I used SuSE for quite a while, and I've found APT to beat the pants off of the RPM system. Without fail every RPM based system I used for a long time would eventually get a corrupted RPM database, that was real pain in the ass. Never had that problem with APT.
(I partially blame SuSE for having such a crappy database with built in incompatibilities)
as I said, GUESSING
I didn't read the details to know one way or the other, did you?
Since I mentioned OS X on normal PC's, what does it matter what Microsoft did after that? Microsoft doesn't make PC's and their involvement on OS X is limited to Office and a few other things we can easily do without.
There's no reason they couldn't profit off of selling the OS, other than possibly the increased need for tech support/hardware support.
I know Apple has had their own hardware from the start, but making a generic PC port wouldn't be such a bad idea. Seriously, the Hackintosh guys have proven it possible. If they were to sell their OS at the same price Windows usually goes for compatible with hardware the whole world uses they could take the crown.
I'm of course guessing there's a clause from when MS bailed them out that prevents that from happening.
Then of course if they did it they would just replace the old evil overlords with new evil overlords....
Fark is on the job!
User Comments
And of course the photoshop contest. Lots of criminals now.
I think I have another use for that,
they love me up here at work. /doh, hit the wrong reply earlier //no deletes on /. - you're stuck with the humiliation forever
They love me up here at work......
They don't like their pictures defaced? Let's sub their pictures and show them what defacement is!
Seriously, as of a year ago I would rather have used an old AGP TNT2 than than the latest built in Intel graphics. I improved the performance of a relatives machine by 35% after putting in a PCI GeForce 5600 instead of using the built in Intel.
Did something happen over the past year or two that caused Intel to be able to publish papers like this? I mean their graphics are fine for a Windows desktop running Office and a browser, but it stops there unless something recently changed.
The only reason I could play this game to the end is that I had the NES Advantage control. There is no f-ing way I was gonna go up all those stairs without turbo.
You obviously never went on a high school trip with teenagers in a van eating pumpkin seeds. That was the highest efficiency matter to gas conversion I've ever seen.
Of course Monty Python and the knight that loses all of it's limbs comes to mind as well.
1. Companies exist to make money
2. Each person in a company is expected to make money for the company.
3. I.T. people DO NOT make money for most companies therefore I.T. is an expense.
Most companies, especially the people with their eyes directly on company profits see I.T. people as a begrudgingly necessary expense. Sort of like tires on a commercial vehicle. Tires are expensive, but you have to have them to run a truck. You can buy new tires (hire lots of I.T.) or you can retread the old ones and make them last as long as you possibly can (abuse the ones you've got). Retreading is a way to stretch every penny.
In all but a few cases I.T. is an expense to a company that has no perceivable return on investment to the casual observer. This is why we're often disliked by bean counters, we're service people so we're treated like second class employees (if we are employees, often we're contracted outsiders). We get the dregs because "we like technology and gadgets, leftovers are a favor". Sometimes they are, but often it's leftover crap.
To many people at many companies having I.T. staff is akin to having the guy who just changed your oil and rotated your tires come home with you, sleep in one of your closets and drink your coffee, a lot of your coffee. You want to just kick the guy out, but you know as soon as you do your car's going to break down so you're better off just utilizing him for every little thing you can, he's going to be there anyways after all.
It is now appearant that Microsoft and Dell are teaming up, not only to outsource tech support to India, but to hire Indian tech support that cant even read!
Heck, I only take care of ground systems and I have to be certified for flight hardware.
Seriously, I'm trained and certified for wire types and connectors we never touch on ground based equipment and I'm held to the same standards.
Yeah, aerospace cares about safety and doing things right.
Seriously, as is OpenOffice.org is slick, very usable, I love it.
If those 24 developers can continue to right filters for new file formats (24 of them should be able to handle that), make bug fixes, and make the occasional improvement here and there I say great!
OpenOffice.org does not need a rewrite from the ground up every six months to two years.
Seriously, the guys from Neo Office don't have near the funding or man power of the core OpenOffice.org team, look what they've accomplished on "Macing it" (Macking it?).
Between Neo Office and Go-oo making fixes that the upstream developers don't take, I would say there's some FUD going around and there's more people interested in developing for OpenOffice.org than Sun lets on. I'm thinking this may be the first artificial rublings to justify dumping the project sometime in the near future since it's not profitable and hasn't been a big enough thorn in the MS side.
exactly what is the canary we take down the shaft with us going to breathe?
As someone who's been using linux for over 10 years, I find it hard to believe that anyone who plays video games gives up on windows. Yes, there is wine, but it is a hassle, has far too many problems with most games compared to just installing it on XP.
I am a gamer who gave up on Windows, close to 10 years ago. The last Windows game I bought for play on Windows was either Diablo 2 or Alice, and by that time I had been dual booting for years, I just slowly stopped dual booting and eventually chose to reclaim the drive. Once I got UT 99 working on Linux, along with Quake 3 I just didn't care anymore. It was around that time Blizzard pissed me off with over loaded Battle.net servers and lawsuits involving personal friends of mine who have connections to Bnetd. Blizzard actually helped to put the nail in the Windows coffin for me personally, Microsoft had already started the process with their anti-Novell and anti-Netscape campaign, both of those companies put food in my mouth. If it would have been a legitimate campaign instead of predatory patches and fake F.U.D I could have forgiven it and moved on. No, this gamer gave up on Windows during a great time of Windows gaming.
Portability comes with a cost, extra development time, and the benefit is that you gain access to a very niche market that you're not sure of if they will buy your games. Supporting Linux would mean that now they have to test not 1 or 2 platforms like with Windows, but all of the major distributions.
The Unreal Engine is the definition of portable. They brag about it. They were on the verge of releasing it and stopped. This game in particular is in a special nitch where the accusation I made can hold up. If you want to say that about any game not based on an Unreal or Quake Engine go ahead, in this case it stands.
The desktop environment alone offers enough diversity in one distribution to create an amount of testing cases that scares off most sane managers.
OpenGL.
That's the answer, the question is why is it so scary? Most developers write their programs with ActiveX in mind, write with OpenGL in mind instead all of the sudden this desktop diversity you're talking about goes away. I don't care what if any window manager is used, these types of games don't talk to the window manager, they talk to X and OpenGL. I don't care what video card they use, if the driver works and it supports OpenGL (drivers being another issue all together) it should work. I buy my video cards based on their ability to support OpenGL - which means I stick with nVidia when possible, see I'm not one of those purist. I wish there was a fully GPL compliant video card and driver out there that was worth a shit, but there's not. ATI is trying, but ATI tends to be a DirectX pushover where nVidia trys to keep OpenGL in mind.
The problem then is with users like you who chose to dual boot instead of telling the game companies to suck it. As long as people continue to dual boot and use Cedega they're telling the game companies it's ok to not support them.
UT2K3 and UT2K4 are almost the same game. They didn't have the vehicles down before the 2K3 deadline so they skipped them, but there was a way to get one working with backdoor knowledge. Originally the intent was to have UT2K4 clients capable of joining 2K3 servers, but they worked in enough protocol changes and improvements near the end they dropped that idea. 2K3 is by and large considered replaced by 2K4, as a matter of fact there were some decent discounts offered to exchange 2K3 for 2K4.
Far from defeat.
In 1994 if you would have told me (not yet an I.T. pro) and other I.T. professionals of the time that Windows was going to become a viable server OS they would have laughed. Novell Netware was king, Banyan Vines had a following, Apple had easy networking, Lantastic wasn't bad for a small network, but Windows was for a personal workstation.
There was a campaign of mailed letter F.U.D against Novell which Novell filed lawsuits over and won - after. There were "patches" to fix O.S. stability that broke the Netware client and Netscape, and every time Novell and Netscape fixed their products around the "patches" a new stability patch would come out for mysterious reasons and break them again.
After some time of this, Microsoft emerged as a leader in server networking.
Linux is established and respected in both the server and embedded devices arenas, desktop acceptance is gaining, but Linux folks are waiting for their inverse "NT Server" moment when they become a commonly accepted desktop.
Microsoft has actively strong armed retailers to keep them from distributing Linux machines, and even more so to thwart advertising them.
Why would strong arming software companies away from supporting other OS's be a stretch?
I've seen quite a bit of that in the corporate world. An executive type user wants a Macbook Pro because they are really neat and have lots of features, then has no clue how to use one or gets completely perplexed with font changes, etc... in Office documents so uses Windows anyway.
On the other hand, the coffee shop/home users I've never seen use anything but OS X on modern Macs.
Personally my only Windows install is an XP virtual machine (VMWare Fusion) on my Macbook Pro. I rarely boot it, only when I want to update my contacts so my phone has a copy of the global address book (Entourage only allows 1 at a time where Outlook lets me highlight them all) or having a reference on my own machine is the only way to support a customer.
BTW - Bomgar is the most awesome remote support product I've ever used.
Agreed -
I have a five year old. I got her a Power Mac Dual G5 off of eBay so it would play classic games (plenty of those out there) and new games. I will say first hand, the Mac ports of THQ Disney games SUCK ROCKS. Sure, you can actually get them to "work" but getting controls configured is a pain (why do I have to launch the installer hidden in some subdirectory to config a game pad?), the graphics are not written for a Mac. From what I've read they're PS2 games wrapped in a compatibility layer.
I will say the classic games seem to work fairly well most of the time, and most of the newer games that are NOT from THQ seem to work great. On my own Mac I have UT2K4 working great, just like the Linux version.
Cedega is sort of a cop-out to me. I'm all for just using SDL, OpenGL, and other cross platform programming utilities. Once a company gets set in their ways it's hard to change them sometimes.