Linux games have always had a very me-too nature. There are emulators for old systems, old commercial games that have had the source code made available, lots of little hobbyist remakes of Tron Light Cycles and Boulder Dash and some C64 games. There's some other stuff, too, but not much.
Back when the Apple IIgs was dying, and I paid attention to that system, there was a similar pattern. Oh so many programmers wanted to prove that the gs was an awesome system, so what did they do? They wrote clones of games that were available for other systems. Really, this was cool for the people who only owned a gs, because they couldn't play those games otherwise. But as an outsider looking in you saw all these versions of Tetris and Lunar Lander and so on. Some were spiffy, yes, but wow did it make the gs seem stale. The Amiga followed the same road. It would have been much better for the programmers of those systems to lean hard on creativity rather than getting in a pissing contest with other computers.
And don't say "I never heard of it, so it sucked" because that's what happened. It was a fantastic game for the Mac, only, so not many people even found out about it (unless you had mac gamer friends).
To be fair, Marathon made a much bigger splash because DOOM wasn't available for the Mac for a long time. There were a lot of other DOOM-alikes on the PC, some of which tried to be more story-based, but they were lost in the fray. So the Mac zealots saw Marathon as an amazing example of originality, and the PC gamers saw it as one of many similar and forgettable games. Note that I'm not saying Marathon was a bad game, just it wasn't the shining example of originality that Mac owners like to claim it is.
As a professional, I can't imagine supporting anyone without a copy of SystemRescueCd [sysresccd.org] on hand for just these kinds of problems. A single linux bootable CD image with GNU software such as GNUParted [gnu.org], QTParted [sourceforge.net], and Partimage [partimage.org], all of which are excellent and FREE replacements for PQMagic or Ghost.
Okay, I looked at those programs. GNUParted does not appear to allow re-partitioning on the fly, which is the whole point of Partition Magic. QTParted is a 0.4 beta version. Kinda scary for something that messes with filesystems and partitions. Partimage only includes "experimental" support for the NTFS file system, the Windows standard. I'll stick with Partition Magic and Ghost, thank you.
You forgot to mention running a firewall. Zone Alarm is excellent and free. If nothing else, enable the firewall that ships with XP.
If you as a third move install third-party software for netuse (Opera, Mozilla. That kind of stuff), you'll need some pretty clueless people in order to screw the machine over.
Though be careful with something that has pop-up blocking installed. I've been trying to switch my family PC over to Firefox as the default browser, but the pop-up blocker frequently blocks necessary pop-ups on safe commerce sites. This can be very confusing. You click on a link, then end up with a blank browser window, because the data is presented in a (blocked) pop-up.
The fourth and probably best move you can ever do, is setup a systempartition with only the system and applications (move documentfolders elsewhere), and take a Ghost-snapshot. Then if they somehow manage to screw up, you're recovered in 5 minutes with absolutely no hassle.
Agreed, but also realize that almost all PCs from Dell, etc., ship with one big partition. So you have two choices: either reinstall everything from scratch, doing the partition as part of the XP install (a long and painful job overall), or buy Partition Magic for $70. Then to do the ghosting, you need to buy another utility. This is at least $100 worth of software, which is a lot to ask (20% of the cost of a $500 PC). Or do you know of some cheaper or free alternatives? I'd (seriously!) love to hear about them. What software do you use for this?
This brings up something I've been wanting to ask: What slick, modern command shells are available for Windows? cmd.exe is crap, of course:) Ideally I'd like something like an OS X (or Linux GUI) terminal window. I've used 4NT, and the related Take Command, but I'm looking for alternatives. Surely there are some?
(Yes, you can run bash under Windows--as part of the Cygwin package--but it still runs in a crappy little console window.)
No, I'm not a Luddite or environmental wacko. But the PC industry is pretty messed up right now and really needs to change. To wit:
1. CPU power consumption keeps increasing at a dramatic rate, even though the vast majority of PCs are underutilized by ~80%. That is, people buy a 2.8GHz P4 because it's the lowest end model sold by Dell in a desktop (seriously!), even though they just do web browsing, play simple Flash games, and use Word. Fortunately, LCD monitors have more than balanced this out, at least for now, but with 150W CPUs coming before year's end, I don't know how long it will last.
2. Games drive things far too much. Why does every PC made since 1997 include AGP hardware? Why do you get a heatsink and fan-laden nVidia 5200 with most all-but-bottom-end PCs? Why have power supplies jumped up to the 400-450W range? Because there's a very vocal gamer market that has been driving PC hardware development. In reality, high-end PCs games don't even sell all that well. The huge selling games are things like The Sims and Roller Coaster Tycoon and generally not cutting edge 3D games.
3. PCs are far too general purpose. They're designed to do everything, but nothing really well. It's still far too common to see Xbox games that utterly blow away PC games, even though the Xbox has 64MB *total* RAM and a PC game requires 128MB of *video* RAM. You have people buying the P4 Extreme Edition solely because they spend most of their time doing video compression. Really, wouldn't a video compression chip that outperforms the CPU by 10x be preferrable? (Note: This is coming in the next nVidia chipset this spring.) Wouldn't we be better off with CPUs designed more for languages like Python, ones that use 1/10 the power of existing processors? Ericsson prototyped a CPU for their concurrent functional language Erlang, and they got *massive* speedups and a power consumption in the range of 1 watt.
4. Processor speed, memory requirements, they've all gotten very soft and meaningless. You see tables in Dell catalogs saying that 2.8GHz is good for email and web browsing, but 3.0GHz is much better for games. Hello? That's only a 7% performance difference! Similarly, people blindly advocate 1GB over 512MB without any real reason.
Oh, please. Can you actually name any of this "shackle-ware," "spyware," and "gagware?" Why are you blaming this on Windows?
Download Spybot Search & Destroy, and look at the list of stuff it scans for. It's massive. Pick a random Windows machine from an average user, then run Spybot S&D on it. You'll be amazed.
I agree, this is a huge concern. Reading the apocalypses, it feels like the language is expanding in every possible direction at the same time, and in the most complex way possible. Seriously, there are pages and pages and pages of rambling explanations for changes to something already solid and useful, like regular expressions (which are already fairly complex as it is). There are some gems in there, but do we really need it *all*? Perl 6 is already coming across as much more complex than any language I've seen, including Ada, PL/I, and C++, and I'm an experienced Perl 5 coder.
I'm much less concerned with Parrot. I'm still concerned, mind you, because this seems like a classic case of going off and attacking a major problem (a general, high-performance VM), before you really understand what it's for. But Parrot's problems are small compared to the language's, and Perl 6 could come to fruition without Parrot. The Mozilla team seemed way off track for many years, but they eventually pulled together a good product (Firefox), in the end.
Okay, this is an absolutely terrible analogy. Why?
Engines are mechanical devices and wear down and break, just from everyday use. This doesn't happen to software. It doesn't wear out and break because you use it every day.
The majority of street car engines are essentially the same. If you understand the principles, you'll understand the principles in any car. Software is not the same. Just because you understand the architecture of a particular database program doesn't mean you have a clue about the architecture of other database programs. Obviously it doesn't mean you have a clue about the architecture of random page layout programs, photo editing programs, C++ compilers, and so on.
Along the same lines, which do you think is more complex? A car engine or the source code to gcc? Theres absolutely no doubt that it's the latter by an order of magnitude.
Just because you can open the hood to your car doesn't mean you know what to do with all those big boxes of chips and wires and a computer controlled fuel injector and so on. If you're riding down the highway and all of a sudden your digital speedometer goes our--or even simpler, the "check engine" light comes on--explain to me how lifting the hood is going to help you. Maybe in the 1970s when cars were simpler. Ditto for most software.
One of the keys to open source, one that even the advocates miss, is that it goes hand in hand with SIMPLICITY. If you have a well-written, clear, and short program, then you can tinker with it. You can't tinker with 200,000 lines of code, unless you have someone to walk through it with you and answer your questions. In reality, odds are that a blind change, no matter how experienced you are, is not going to be a good match for an architecture you don't fully understand.
Please, so-called open source advocates, enough with the soundbites and naive viewpoints. Be realistic.
If that were the choice, I'd rather hate my job for 5 years making $100k/year, put $80k each year in the bank and then quit my job and pay myself $20k each year for the next 25 years out of the saved money to do what I want
Where do you live where you can keep 80% of your salary after taxes and living expenses?
The majority of this book is devoted to esoteric data structures. Sure, it starts with queues and stacks, but most of the book is devoted to exotic forms of trees and tries and heaps and so on. Very interesting stuff. In reality, though, you get by with a small subset of data structures: arrays and lists (both of which can be thought of as stacks or queues), binary trees, and hash tables / dictionaries. Almost always, once you start delving into crazy forms of trees, you can jump straight to a hash table and be done with it. Purely Functional Data structures is very light on information about hashing.
I'm speaking from experience as both a functional and imperative programmer. While I have enjoyed the book, I didn't find it to be something that I keep returning to over the years.
As an avid video gamer from the early 80's, I must congratulate you on your troll. If you think depravity didn't exist back in the day you are SORELY mistaken. [gamefaqs.com]
Don't make the exception be the rule. Custer's Revenge was a novelty game sold only via mail order. Stores didn't carry it. It's also a very rare game, as few copies were produced.
Price a PC at Dell or even lesser known geekier places like abspc.com. There's a list of preinstalled office software to choose from, and Word Perfect is almost always one of them. It's often the default, too, because it's the cheapest option. In the last year this has been getting more and more common in attempts to keep PC prices low.
(Aside: All the overreactions about Word Perfect coming back from the grave are from people with no clue.)
This is good news, but I'm curious if anyone knows what Intel did to piss microsoft off so much that they turn to IBM?
They didn't do anything except stop making high-end chips that are suitable for use in embedded systems. You simply cannout put a moden P4 (or Athlon, to be fair) in a box that doesn't have an extravagant heating system. High-end P4's are up in the 80+ watt range. Think shrinking from a 130nm to 90nm process will help? Intel did that, and the resultant chip is in the 100+ watt range. These are not meant for notebooks or any other kind of small consumer box.
IBM, on the other hand, started out with much lower power numbers, then cut those numbers in half when they switched to a smaller process.
The bottom line is that IBM is paying attention to power and heat issues, while Intel barrels along with their "performance at any cost" philosophy.
There's a great difference between advocating something--Linux, in this case--and really opening your eyes, seeing both the good points and the warts. Far, far too much Linux advocacy has been of the blind variety. People who use Linux for a handful of geeky uses rant and rave about how its superior and how everyone should use it. When someone asks "But is there a program as good as Blah that runs under Linux?" The response is almost always an enthusiastic "Yes! There are dozens! And they're open source! The best one is XYZ." Then in reality the dozens turn out to be half-baked personal projects unsuitable for general use, and XYZ tends to be better, but nowhere near what the person is wanting in terms of polish and quality. Those endearing advocates who insist that The GIMP is on par with Photoshop come to mind.
The next level of advocacy is realizing that this is true. JWZ, and now ESR, have followed this path, and many, many others who are not so egotistical.
Reading stuff like this always makes me ponder the fate of the small developer over the years. I know they're out there (Ambrosia on the MacOS side, etc.) and that they still create some fun stuff. But in the current sea of endlessly rehashed titles by Big Corporate Game Houses(tm) it sure does seem like they get lost in the noise
I'm not saying their games aren't fun, but let's be honest. Ambrosia has been copying old arcade games since they started (Asteroids, Centipede, Galaxian, Serpentine, Pengo). And some of Minter's best known games are new versions of Robotron and Tempest.
Bottom line: You can't single out the big corporate game houses for "endlessly rehashed titles" okay?
People like to think that AMD is a bunch of guys working out of someone's basement. In reality, AMD is a hulking monster of a corporation. This is a company with tens of thousands of employees and 2.7 billion (US) in revenue in 2002. So, yay, one monstrous corpororation is better than another!
Origin died when Garriot was forced out. That was pretty much the end of it IMO. Their Ultima Online was kept going but nothing new really came out of EA.
And really they died long before that. Remember Garriot's apology for Ultima VII, which was more an arcade game than an RPG? The Ultima games turned into lame 3D action games. The Wing Commander games kept getting less and less interactive. There wasn't a whole lot of substance at Origin.
can understand maybe with people just starting out in learning the guitar, but with someone that knows how to tune a guitar, and having a guitar that stays in tune (ie, don't buy cheap crap), is important. But learning to tune the guitar by ear is part of the learning process.
No, sorry. I attempted to learn the guitar years ago, before I knew about those nifty little $20 chromatic tuners with LCD displays, and I was frustrated as hell. It's the *new* players who need tuners. I would have given up completely, had I not started using a chromatic tuner. And now, after years of using one, I can immediately tell when a string is out of tune and get it back by ear.
Now days, playing pinball is another of the few reasons to go to an arcade, IMHO.
Of course you realize that pinball is in even worse shape than video games. The king of pinball, Williams, bowed out of the market a few years ago. Ditto for just about every other pinball manufacturer.
The first wave of games was the most interesting to me. Vector games, like Rip-Off, Crystal Castles, Asteroids, Tail Gunner, Armor Attack, and later Tempest!, all provided sharp clear visuals.
Of course those games were far from being the "first wave." You're essentially talking about games from 1979 to 1982 (i.e. the classic era). There were hundreds of games released prior to 1979. Lots of people remember Breakout, Night Driver, Fire Truck, and so on, but there were many many more.
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Linux games have always had a very me-too nature. There are emulators for old systems, old commercial games that have had the source code made available, lots of little hobbyist remakes of Tron Light Cycles and Boulder Dash and some C64 games. There's some other stuff, too, but not much.
Back when the Apple IIgs was dying, and I paid attention to that system, there was a similar pattern. Oh so many programmers wanted to prove that the gs was an awesome system, so what did they do? They wrote clones of games that were available for other systems. Really, this was cool for the people who only owned a gs, because they couldn't play those games otherwise. But as an outsider looking in you saw all these versions of Tetris and Lunar Lander and so on. Some were spiffy, yes, but wow did it make the gs seem stale. The Amiga followed the same road. It would have been much better for the programmers of those systems to lean hard on creativity rather than getting in a pissing contest with other computers.
Yeah, just like Marathon on the Mac.
And don't say "I never heard of it, so it sucked" because that's what happened. It was a fantastic game for the Mac, only, so not many people even found out about it (unless you had mac gamer friends).
To be fair, Marathon made a much bigger splash because DOOM wasn't available for the Mac for a long time. There were a lot of other DOOM-alikes on the PC, some of which tried to be more story-based, but they were lost in the fray. So the Mac zealots saw Marathon as an amazing example of originality, and the PC gamers saw it as one of many similar and forgettable games. Note that I'm not saying Marathon was a bad game, just it wasn't the shining example of originality that Mac owners like to claim it is.
You can turn on command line completion (search for "TweakUI" or "Windows Powertoys", I can't be bothered to link to them).
It's on by default in Windows XP Service Pack 1.
As a professional, I can't imagine supporting anyone without a copy of SystemRescueCd [sysresccd.org] on hand for just these kinds of problems. A single linux bootable CD image with GNU software such as GNUParted [gnu.org], QTParted [sourceforge.net], and Partimage [partimage.org], all of which are excellent and FREE replacements for PQMagic or Ghost.
Okay, I looked at those programs. GNUParted does not appear to allow re-partitioning on the fly, which is the whole point of Partition Magic. QTParted is a 0.4 beta version. Kinda scary for something that messes with filesystems and partitions. Partimage only includes "experimental" support for the NTFS file system, the Windows standard. I'll stick with Partition Magic and Ghost, thank you.
You forgot to mention running a firewall. Zone Alarm is excellent and free. If nothing else, enable the firewall that ships with XP.
If you as a third move install third-party software for netuse (Opera, Mozilla. That kind of stuff), you'll need some pretty clueless people in order to screw the machine over.
Though be careful with something that has pop-up blocking installed. I've been trying to switch my family PC over to Firefox as the default browser, but the pop-up blocker frequently blocks necessary pop-ups on safe commerce sites. This can be very confusing. You click on a link, then end up with a blank browser window, because the data is presented in a (blocked) pop-up.
The fourth and probably best move you can ever do, is setup a systempartition with only the system and applications (move documentfolders elsewhere), and take a Ghost-snapshot. Then if they somehow manage to screw up, you're recovered in 5 minutes with absolutely no hassle.
Agreed, but also realize that almost all PCs from Dell, etc., ship with one big partition. So you have two choices: either reinstall everything from scratch, doing the partition as part of the XP install (a long and painful job overall), or buy Partition Magic for $70. Then to do the ghosting, you need to buy another utility. This is at least $100 worth of software, which is a lot to ask (20% of the cost of a $500 PC). Or do you know of some cheaper or free alternatives? I'd (seriously!) love to hear about them. What software do you use for this?
This brings up something I've been wanting to ask: What slick, modern command shells are available for Windows? cmd.exe is crap, of course :) Ideally I'd like something like an OS X (or Linux GUI) terminal window. I've used 4NT, and the related Take Command, but I'm looking for alternatives. Surely there are some?
(Yes, you can run bash under Windows--as part of the Cygwin package--but it still runs in a crappy little console window.)
No, I'm not a Luddite or environmental wacko. But the PC industry is pretty messed up right now and really needs to change. To wit:
1. CPU power consumption keeps increasing at a dramatic rate, even though the vast majority of PCs are underutilized by ~80%. That is, people buy a 2.8GHz P4 because it's the lowest end model sold by Dell in a desktop (seriously!), even though they just do web browsing, play simple Flash games, and use Word. Fortunately, LCD monitors have more than balanced this out, at least for now, but with 150W CPUs coming before year's end, I don't know how long it will last.
2. Games drive things far too much. Why does every PC made since 1997 include AGP hardware? Why do you get a heatsink and fan-laden nVidia 5200 with most all-but-bottom-end PCs? Why have power supplies jumped up to the 400-450W range? Because there's a very vocal gamer market that has been driving PC hardware development. In reality, high-end PCs games don't even sell all that well. The huge selling games are things like The Sims and Roller Coaster Tycoon and generally not cutting edge 3D games.
3. PCs are far too general purpose. They're designed to do everything, but nothing really well. It's still far too common to see Xbox games that utterly blow away PC games, even though the Xbox has 64MB *total* RAM and a PC game requires 128MB of *video* RAM. You have people buying the P4 Extreme Edition solely because they spend most of their time doing video compression. Really, wouldn't a video compression chip that outperforms the CPU by 10x be preferrable? (Note: This is coming in the next nVidia chipset this spring.) Wouldn't we be better off with CPUs designed more for languages like Python, ones that use 1/10 the power of existing processors? Ericsson prototyped a CPU for their concurrent functional language Erlang, and they got *massive* speedups and a power consumption in the range of 1 watt.
4. Processor speed, memory requirements, they've all gotten very soft and meaningless. You see tables in Dell catalogs saying that 2.8GHz is good for email and web browsing, but 3.0GHz is much better for games. Hello? That's only a 7% performance difference! Similarly, people blindly advocate 1GB over 512MB without any real reason.
Oh, please. Can you actually name any of this "shackle-ware," "spyware," and "gagware?" Why are you blaming this on Windows?
Download Spybot Search & Destroy, and look at the list of stuff it scans for. It's massive. Pick a random Windows machine from an average user, then run Spybot S&D on it. You'll be amazed.
I'm much less concerned with Parrot. I'm still concerned, mind you, because this seems like a classic case of going off and attacking a major problem (a general, high-performance VM), before you really understand what it's for. But Parrot's problems are small compared to the language's, and Perl 6 could come to fruition without Parrot. The Mozilla team seemed way off track for many years, but they eventually pulled together a good product (Firefox), in the end.
Okay, this is an absolutely terrible analogy. Why?
Engines are mechanical devices and wear down and break, just from everyday use. This doesn't happen to software. It doesn't wear out and break because you use it every day.
The majority of street car engines are essentially the same. If you understand the principles, you'll understand the principles in any car. Software is not the same. Just because you understand the architecture of a particular database program doesn't mean you have a clue about the architecture of other database programs. Obviously it doesn't mean you have a clue about the architecture of random page layout programs, photo editing programs, C++ compilers, and so on.
Along the same lines, which do you think is more complex? A car engine or the source code to gcc? Theres absolutely no doubt that it's the latter by an order of magnitude.
Just because you can open the hood to your car doesn't mean you know what to do with all those big boxes of chips and wires and a computer controlled fuel injector and so on. If you're riding down the highway and all of a sudden your digital speedometer goes our--or even simpler, the "check engine" light comes on--explain to me how lifting the hood is going to help you. Maybe in the 1970s when cars were simpler. Ditto for most software.
One of the keys to open source, one that even the advocates miss, is that it goes hand in hand with SIMPLICITY. If you have a well-written, clear, and short program, then you can tinker with it. You can't tinker with 200,000 lines of code, unless you have someone to walk through it with you and answer your questions. In reality, odds are that a blind change, no matter how experienced you are, is not going to be a good match for an architecture you don't fully understand.
Please, so-called open source advocates, enough with the soundbites and naive viewpoints. Be realistic.
If that were the choice, I'd rather hate my job for 5 years making $100k/year, put $80k each year in the bank and then quit my job and pay myself $20k each year for the next 25 years out of the saved money to do what I want
Where do you live where you can keep 80% of your salary after taxes and living expenses?
The majority of this book is devoted to esoteric data structures. Sure, it starts with queues and stacks, but most of the book is devoted to exotic forms of trees and tries and heaps and so on. Very interesting stuff. In reality, though, you get by with a small subset of data structures: arrays and lists (both of which can be thought of as stacks or queues), binary trees, and hash tables / dictionaries. Almost always, once you start delving into crazy forms of trees, you can jump straight to a hash table and be done with it. Purely Functional Data structures is very light on information about hashing.
I'm speaking from experience as both a functional and imperative programmer. While I have enjoyed the book, I didn't find it to be something that I keep returning to over the years.
As an avid video gamer from the early 80's, I must congratulate you on your troll. If you think depravity didn't exist back in the day you are SORELY mistaken. [gamefaqs.com]
Don't make the exception be the rule. Custer's Revenge was a novelty game sold only via mail order. Stores didn't carry it. It's also a very rare game, as few copies were produced.
Price a PC at Dell or even lesser known geekier places like abspc.com. There's a list of preinstalled office software to choose from, and Word Perfect is almost always one of them. It's often the default, too, because it's the cheapest option. In the last year this has been getting more and more common in attempts to keep PC prices low.
(Aside: All the overreactions about Word Perfect coming back from the grave are from people with no clue.)
This is good news, but I'm curious if anyone knows what Intel did to piss microsoft off so much that they turn to IBM?
They didn't do anything except stop making high-end chips that are suitable for use in embedded systems. You simply cannout put a moden P4 (or Athlon, to be fair) in a box that doesn't have an extravagant heating system. High-end P4's are up in the 80+ watt range. Think shrinking from a 130nm to 90nm process will help? Intel did that, and the resultant chip is in the 100+ watt range. These are not meant for notebooks or any other kind of small consumer box.
IBM, on the other hand, started out with much lower power numbers, then cut those numbers in half when they switched to a smaller process.
The bottom line is that IBM is paying attention to power and heat issues, while Intel barrels along with their "performance at any cost" philosophy.
I say Sundog (on the ST) was one of the most amazing games of all time, given it fit on a 720k disk. It even had RPG
Remember that it was an Apple II game first. And don't forget Starflight for the IBM PC.
Note: I'm not trying to flame!
There's a great difference between advocating something--Linux, in this case--and really opening your eyes, seeing both the good points and the warts. Far, far too much Linux advocacy has been of the blind variety. People who use Linux for a handful of geeky uses rant and rave about how its superior and how everyone should use it. When someone asks "But is there a program as good as Blah that runs under Linux?" The response is almost always an enthusiastic "Yes! There are dozens! And they're open source! The best one is XYZ." Then in reality the dozens turn out to be half-baked personal projects unsuitable for general use, and XYZ tends to be better, but nowhere near what the person is wanting in terms of polish and quality. Those endearing advocates who insist that The GIMP is on par with Photoshop come to mind.
The next level of advocacy is realizing that this is true. JWZ, and now ESR, have followed this path, and many, many others who are not so egotistical.
But take Escape Velocity for example. A rehash? Yeah Sundog came out, what 15 years before it?
Escape Velocity was *heavily* inspired by Star Control and Star Control II. EV is still a great game.
Reading stuff like this always makes me ponder the fate of the small developer over the years. I know they're out there (Ambrosia on the MacOS side, etc.) and that they still create some fun stuff. But in the current sea of endlessly rehashed titles by Big Corporate Game Houses(tm) it sure does seem like they get lost in the noise
I'm not saying their games aren't fun, but let's be honest. Ambrosia has been copying old arcade games since they started (Asteroids, Centipede, Galaxian, Serpentine, Pengo). And some of Minter's best known games are new versions of Robotron and Tempest.
Bottom line: You can't single out the big corporate game houses for "endlessly rehashed titles" okay?
Also see Minter's entry in this list.
People like to think that AMD is a bunch of guys working out of someone's basement. In reality, AMD is a hulking monster of a corporation. This is a company with tens of thousands of employees and 2.7 billion (US) in revenue in 2002. So, yay, one monstrous corpororation is better than another!
Origin died when Garriot was forced out. That was pretty much the end of it IMO. Their Ultima Online was kept going but nothing new really came out of EA.
And really they died long before that. Remember Garriot's apology for Ultima VII, which was more an arcade game than an RPG? The Ultima games turned into lame 3D action games. The Wing Commander games kept getting less and less interactive. There wasn't a whole lot of substance at Origin.
can understand maybe with people just starting out in learning the guitar, but with someone that knows how to tune a guitar, and having a guitar that stays in tune (ie, don't buy cheap crap), is important. But learning to tune the guitar by ear is part of the learning process.
No, sorry. I attempted to learn the guitar years ago, before I knew about those nifty little $20 chromatic tuners with LCD displays, and I was frustrated as hell. It's the *new* players who need tuners. I would have given up completely, had I not started using a chromatic tuner. And now, after years of using one, I can immediately tell when a string is out of tune and get it back by ear.
These things are a godsend.
Now days, playing pinball is another of the few reasons to go to an arcade, IMHO.
Of course you realize that pinball is in even worse shape than video games. The king of pinball, Williams, bowed out of the market a few years ago. Ditto for just about every other pinball manufacturer.
The first wave of games was the most interesting to me. Vector games, like Rip-Off, Crystal Castles, Asteroids, Tail Gunner, Armor Attack, and later Tempest!, all provided sharp clear visuals.
Of course those games were far from being the "first wave." You're essentially talking about games from 1979 to 1982 (i.e. the classic era). There were hundreds of games released prior to 1979. Lots of people remember Breakout, Night Driver, Fire Truck, and so on, but there were many many more.