They sure as hell did make a mess of 8 (it wouldn't even work on a GeForce without looking like crap!) I thought 7 worked out pretty well, but i dunno.
FF9 does indeed work on PS2, that's where I'm playing it now. Same with Chrono Cross. I played 7 and 8 PC-only. I gotta say, though, the low resolution of the 3d sprites of FF9 on PS is really horrible, relative to 8 on the PC. Thought the animation and background look better than 8, because everything is at such low resolution, you can hardly tell who anyone is. I would certainly have bought a PC version of 9, assuming it didn't have the incompatibility problems of 8.
And 10 on the PC would totally kick ass. The whole problem of the PS1 conversions was the abundance of lowres prerendered graphics. But 10 didn't haveanything prerendered outside of movies--it would have looked so awesome at 1024x768, and more importantly ANTI-ALIASED. Oh my God, poor FFX needs to be anti-aliased so horribly bad.
But both despite being on the wrong platform, both games are way better than the horrible FF8...
Re:No, that's not it at all.
on
P2P Television?
·
· Score: 2
I dunno, I find myself a lot less opposed to DRMish TV than DRM on my computer.
DRM on my computer requires me to run THEIR binaries, THEIR operating systems, and totally trust THEM with the physical object in the world that is most personal to me, my computer.
However, if they start distributing a device that is SOLELY for watching television, I wouldn't mind seeing it managed by content companies so much, since presumably it's pay-per-view model would be more encouraging of new content.
So while I'm not as completely opposed to copy restrictions on p2p tv, there are still some requirements I'd have for it: no infringing on my privacy, and the ability to produce copy-restricted content made available to EVERYONE, not just current broadcast stations and movie studios.
The reason that public access TV sucks, but personal web pages can be pretty good (obviously with incredible varying levels of consistency) is because TV isn't on demand--which means it isn't persistent. If your goal as an amateur television producer is just to get people to watch your silly show, there isn't much incentive to put it on public access, because no one will be watching it at the time you show it.
With a web page on the other hand, you can put it on the web, and allow word of mouth to build support for it. Not to mention you can appeal beyond the limited geographic range of your local public access.
Thus there are many great totaly noncommercial websites--and perhaps in a p2p tv world, we would see noncommercial tv shows of equally great quality.
Come up with a new idea yourself, see how easy it is.
This confuses me so much. Coming up with ideas is easy. I come up with great ideas for video games all the time--everyone who plays video games and gives the idea some creative thought in their daydreams probably does too. Game companies never buy ideas from people, because EVERYONE has ideas. Ideas are cheap, it's the implementations that are hard.
Thus, I can find no fathomable reason for the INCREDIBLE number of "me too" games that are, as you say, in all genres. Why is it that they avoid doing the work that everyone who dreams of working in the video game industry dreams of doing--that is , coming up with a great (or at least different) idea for a video game? The only resolution to the paradox I can think of is that video games today are made by so many different people, that a "many cooks spoil the pot" effect plagues them all--that getting all of those people to work on a new, original idea doesn't work--it's easier to sell them (or your boss) on an idea that's already proven to work.
Which leaves gamers like myself, who basically have one phrase in mind when looking for a video game: "something different", scratching their heads in wonder at how so many man hours of programmers and artists (but apparently no game designers!) goes to such terrific waste.
we also all know that copyright infringement is wrong.
Why the heck would you say that on slashdot? While most people here probably put some small iota of faith in copywright law, I'm sure there are lots more who oppose all intellectual property, and therefore see no ethical reason to pay attention to the intellectual property of others.
And I totally oppose this line of logic that we need to avoid doing things that piss off corporations so they don't crack down on our rights--I say piss 'em off, then piss 'em off even more when they find out that there is no damn way at all to stop piracy--the harder you try, the harder pirates try to steal it.
Let's fight these battles with bytes, not legal briefs! We can't win their rules--make them play by ours!
But, like it or not, the school systems in all but the most underdeveloped Bible Belt backwaters already teach young people about the basics of sex. The problem is, it's taught as something they're not supposed to do, which naturally makes some really want to do it, and the rest develop unnatural sexual inhibitions which can sometimes become full-blown dysfunctions in later life.
My non-Bible belt school district had very minimal sex education, and I'm not aware of any great plague of promiscuity or neurosis from the place. I graduated in '97, though, maybe, just like metal detectors, sex education magic appeared everywhere sometime in the half decade since then...
That's a fucked-up system. That's the system we have today.
You condemn your point of view with such strong words. Your example shows the system being slightly flawed in one particular state. It needs slight modification, an increase in the difference between ages, and punishments in proportion to the difference between ages of the partners, perhaps.
There will always be some variance in the laws among the states, thus if your standard is that no state ever, ever err on the side of prohibition, we will have a drastically more liberalized system, in which many states will err on the side of tolerance. And in this particular issue, most Americans have decided that errors on the side of tolerance are completely unacceptable and horrific--as soon as there is one case of it being legal for a 22 year old man to have sex with a 12 year old anyone, you'll see a rapid switch back to Puritanism immediately.
I mean who wants to watch the decimination of food to poor people?
I want to watch the decimation of food for poor people! "Hey, you look hungry their? Care for this steak dinner?" *BOOM* "Too bad, I made it go boom!" ha ha what a riot. truly this program would dissemenate yuks to the affluent like nothing else would.
I dunno, from what I hear of that book, they are correct that our culture is somewhat insane regarding children, but the proposed culture is far more insane. I think our current overreaction is simply forming a useful "buffer zone"--there is an age of child before which it is among the most reprhensible things on Earth to engage him or her in sexual acts, but we aren't sure which age, so it makes sense to error on the side of over-prohibition. I also think psychology and science in general are completely incapable of measuring the value and quality of our lives, so any argument along the lines of 'children at age X who had sexual contact with adults show no mental damage discenable to psychologists' carries little weight with me.
I'd like to read the book, to decide for myself, but if my suspicion of its wrongfulness is correct then I really don't want to find myself supporting it.
Thus unless you move all potentially abusable functionality to the server side, open source gaming will be limited except for games which tolerate low bandwidth and slow ping times.
Another solution is to limit your games to small networks of players that you trust (the solution in the article's second to last paragraph.)
I'm afraid it may come to this, as cheats can always be made, closed source or not, and with all the virus/trojan/spyware nonsense we see even in legal, commercial products, closed source programs outside video game consoles are going to be trusted less and less.
When you look at it objectively, computer "science" isn't really science at all: where's the hypothesizing, the Scientific Method? Computer "science" programs teach basic IT and office skills to the future paper-pushers of America. They have no place in our ivory towers.
To the extent that it's stolen so much Logic from the Math and Philosophy towers, of course it deserves a place. If you're school's CS curriculum is actually IT and business, that's it's own fault. I managed to spend 4 CS years at my school completely insulated from XML and Oracle databases and J2EE and C# and anything else you'd want on your resume, and if a greedy bastard like myself can do it, you can too!
I can't make any promises on application launching times--having more memory makes it more likely the application is cached it will start up faster, but if it's the first time you start the application up since last reboot, it likely takes just as long no matter how much ram you've got, at least that's my guess.
What I was referring to was, having already started both IE and Terminal, switching in the dock from one to the other frequently I had to wait two seconds or more (because only one application could be in physical memory at once)--whereas after I got more memory, switching between tasks became instantaneous.
So, I suppose if you don't have a problem waiting when switching between tasks, perhaps I'm wrong and memory won't help that much--but it certainly made my computing experience easier. Maybe it's because my mind wanders too much and I switch tasks way too often;)
Because if Antarctica is the future of off-world activity, we might as well stay home. I don't necessarily think it's a bad policy for Antarctica, but if anyone intends to view the entire solar system as one big Rock Preserve, they deserve to be ignored. Exploitation of resources in space is a bold, beautiful, fantastic thing. But if no country can claim sovereignty of any piece of it, if no individual or corporation can stake a claim, than absolutely no one will waste money trying to get us this planet.
I'm using 128 megs on an G3 iMac (circa Jan 2000) and Mac OS X works great. Of course I don't use it for high end game playing, photoshop or other workhorse apps.
For typical use (e-mail, browsing, an office suite), digital hub stuff (iPhoto, iTunes) and for unix-y program-y stuff, the eMac is likely to be a pretty good choice.
Well, your experience is totally different from mine. I was running my iBook with OS X's newest version (10.1.4, I think) with 128 megs, and I took darn near forever staring at that rainbow disk switching between Internet Explorer and Terminal. It was intolerably slow, and it really seemed to fly once I put it up to 384 megs. If you consider web browsing and emacs workhorse apps...
Don't expect a machine billed as an 'educational computer' to blow the doors off your expectations.
My fear is that people don't know what expectations to have--even if they're expecting OS 9-like performance with 128 megs, OS X will leave a bitter taste in their mouths. How much does another 128 megs cost, 50 bucks? Given the purpose of these machines is to introduce macs to kids, so they later buy more macs, is it really so wise to give kids the impression that "macs are slow"?
Wow, what are they thinking? I really think they should have thrown more RAM in there, even if it cost a little more. OS X would probably go a lot faster.
As it is, people will buy this eMac, complain about it being slow and tell all their friends, who will just assume Macs are slow.
But is UnitedLinux itself based solely on free software? Can I make my own United Linux compliant distro, or is that protected by trademark? It's all unclear to me.
I keep wondering if an Xbox with keyboard, mouse & montior, running Linux, might not make a good, inexpensive classroom computer? I mean, the box is already rad-hardened against hyperactive game-playing children, right?
Well, for $400, you can get a Playstation 2 with hard drive, mouse, keyboard, ethernet, and an adapter to work with SOME vga monitors, and a copy of ps2linux. http://www.playstation2-linux.com/
That's why I have a gamepad for my PC for those games that work best with it.
Unfortunately, the games that work best with it are all on the Console. I've considered getting a game pad for my PC--but only to play emulated games from earlier consoles. You don't see too many fighting games or platform games on PCs.
I would rather type certain commands or memorize some hotkeys rather than use the cumbersome interfaces that console developers come up with to deal with complexity and compensate for the dearth of buttons available on the controllers.
I only find that to be a problem on games designed on PCs and brought to consoles, mostly first person shooters. Games designed for consoles tend to be simple enough to use with the console interface, and usually have nearly as much depth.
That flexibility allows me to play in whatever way is most comfortable for me.
Almost, but not quite. It lets you pick from a mouse or joystick, but it doesn't let you stop developers from throwing in 100 worthless weapons and magic spells into your game just so they can write "we've got 100 weapons!!!! This game is bigger than ever!!!" on the back of the box. You can't stop developers from fetishizing complication as a twisted virtue.
You speak of flexibility, but purchasing a console is my way of exercising flexibility over game developers--by buying into a market that encorages simplicity, I've communicated my anticomplexity preferences to anyone interested in selling to me.
And that's actually why I like console controllers better--giving PC developers more freedom in controls just gives them an excuse to make their games more complicated. They don't understand the true art of games--to make them deep without making them complicated. The Console is where you find games that appreciate my time is valuable and not to be squandered without great reward.
Also, launch a super nintendo emulator on your pc, then try to tell me you wouldn't rather have a controller. Controllers are simply the best input device for certain games.
The issue is not preventing you from using the data it's destroying your system. If these computers are executing program data as soon as the disk is put in, that's a serious design flaw. As far as making it dangerous to play an audio section of a CD, I can't comprehend why it can't be made impossible for audio data to crash the computer.
Slashdot Mirror
And it seems a lot of people who do work at Microsoft can be trusted to tell you whether or not they're doing a good job.
FF9 does indeed work on PS2, that's where I'm playing it now. Same with Chrono Cross. I played 7 and 8 PC-only. I gotta say, though, the low resolution of the 3d sprites of FF9 on PS is really horrible, relative to 8 on the PC. Thought the animation and background look better than 8, because everything is at such low resolution, you can hardly tell who anyone is. I would certainly have bought a PC version of 9, assuming it didn't have the incompatibility problems of 8.
And 10 on the PC would totally kick ass. The whole problem of the PS1 conversions was the abundance of lowres prerendered graphics. But 10 didn't haveanything prerendered outside of movies--it would have looked so awesome at 1024x768, and more importantly ANTI-ALIASED. Oh my God, poor FFX needs to be anti-aliased so horribly bad.
But both despite being on the wrong platform, both games are way better than the horrible FF8...
DRM on my computer requires me to run THEIR binaries, THEIR operating systems, and totally trust THEM with the physical object in the world that is most personal to me, my computer.
However, if they start distributing a device that is SOLELY for watching television, I wouldn't mind seeing it managed by content companies so much, since presumably it's pay-per-view model would be more encouraging of new content.
So while I'm not as completely opposed to copy restrictions on p2p tv, there are still some requirements I'd have for it: no infringing on my privacy, and the ability to produce copy-restricted content made available to EVERYONE, not just current broadcast stations and movie studios.
With a web page on the other hand, you can put it on the web, and allow word of mouth to build support for it. Not to mention you can appeal beyond the limited geographic range of your local public access.
Thus there are many great totaly noncommercial websites--and perhaps in a p2p tv world, we would see noncommercial tv shows of equally great quality.
This confuses me so much. Coming up with ideas is easy. I come up with great ideas for video games all the time--everyone who plays video games and gives the idea some creative thought in their daydreams probably does too. Game companies never buy ideas from people, because EVERYONE has ideas. Ideas are cheap, it's the implementations that are hard.
Thus, I can find no fathomable reason for the INCREDIBLE number of "me too" games that are, as you say, in all genres. Why is it that they avoid doing the work that everyone who dreams of working in the video game industry dreams of doing--that is , coming up with a great (or at least different) idea for a video game? The only resolution to the paradox I can think of is that video games today are made by so many different people, that a "many cooks spoil the pot" effect plagues them all--that getting all of those people to work on a new, original idea doesn't work--it's easier to sell them (or your boss) on an idea that's already proven to work.
Which leaves gamers like myself, who basically have one phrase in mind when looking for a video game: "something different", scratching their heads in wonder at how so many man hours of programmers and artists (but apparently no game designers!) goes to such terrific waste.
Why the heck would you say that on slashdot? While most people here probably put some small iota of faith in copywright law, I'm sure there are lots more who oppose all intellectual property, and therefore see no ethical reason to pay attention to the intellectual property of others.
And I totally oppose this line of logic that we need to avoid doing things that piss off corporations so they don't crack down on our rights--I say piss 'em off, then piss 'em off even more when they find out that there is no damn way at all to stop piracy--the harder you try, the harder pirates try to steal it.
Let's fight these battles with bytes, not legal briefs! We can't win their rules--make them play by ours!
My non-Bible belt school district had very minimal sex education, and I'm not aware of any great plague of promiscuity or neurosis from the place. I graduated in '97, though, maybe, just like metal detectors, sex education magic appeared everywhere sometime in the half decade since then...
That's a fucked-up system. That's the system we have today.
You condemn your point of view with such strong words. Your example shows the system being slightly flawed in one particular state. It needs slight modification, an increase in the difference between ages, and punishments in proportion to the difference between ages of the partners, perhaps.
There will always be some variance in the laws among the states, thus if your standard is that no state ever, ever err on the side of prohibition, we will have a drastically more liberalized system, in which many states will err on the side of tolerance. And in this particular issue, most Americans have decided that errors on the side of tolerance are completely unacceptable and horrific--as soon as there is one case of it being legal for a 22 year old man to have sex with a 12 year old anyone, you'll see a rapid switch back to Puritanism immediately.
I want to watch the decimation of food for poor people! "Hey, you look hungry their? Care for this steak dinner?" *BOOM* "Too bad, I made it go boom!" ha ha what a riot. truly this program would dissemenate yuks to the affluent like nothing else would.
I'd like to read the book, to decide for myself, but if my suspicion of its wrongfulness is correct then I really don't want to find myself supporting it.
Another solution is to limit your games to small networks of players that you trust (the solution in the article's second to last paragraph.)
I'm afraid it may come to this, as cheats can always be made, closed source or not, and with all the virus/trojan/spyware nonsense we see even in legal, commercial products, closed source programs outside video game consoles are going to be trusted less and less.
TV Network cracking down on Tivo commercial skipping: bad
Microsoft cracking down on security hole advertisers: bad
AT&T cracking down on cable theft: bad
Game developers cracking down on cheating: good
To summarize:
Minority restricting a majority: bad
Majority protecting itself from minority: good.
To the extent that it's stolen so much Logic from the Math and Philosophy towers, of course it deserves a place. If you're school's CS curriculum is actually IT and business, that's it's own fault. I managed to spend 4 CS years at my school completely insulated from XML and Oracle databases and J2EE and C# and anything else you'd want on your resume, and if a greedy bastard like myself can do it, you can too!
What I was referring to was, having already started both IE and Terminal, switching in the dock from one to the other frequently I had to wait two seconds or more (because only one application could be in physical memory at once)--whereas after I got more memory, switching between tasks became instantaneous.
So, I suppose if you don't have a problem waiting when switching between tasks, perhaps I'm wrong and memory won't help that much--but it certainly made my computing experience easier. Maybe it's because my mind wanders too much and I switch tasks way too often ;)
Because if Antarctica is the future of off-world activity, we might as well stay home. I don't necessarily think it's a bad policy for Antarctica, but if anyone intends to view the entire solar system as one big Rock Preserve, they deserve to be ignored. Exploitation of resources in space is a bold, beautiful, fantastic thing. But if no country can claim sovereignty of any piece of it, if no individual or corporation can stake a claim, than absolutely no one will waste money trying to get us this planet.
They certainly made mistakes, but they sure did a heck of a lot better job colonizing the new world than we have colonizing the moon or anything else.
For typical use (e-mail, browsing, an office suite), digital hub stuff (iPhoto, iTunes) and for unix-y program-y stuff, the eMac is likely to be a pretty good choice.
Well, your experience is totally different from mine. I was running my iBook with OS X's newest version (10.1.4, I think) with 128 megs, and I took darn near forever staring at that rainbow disk switching between Internet Explorer and Terminal. It was intolerably slow, and it really seemed to fly once I put it up to 384 megs. If you consider web browsing and emacs workhorse apps...
Don't expect a machine billed as an 'educational computer' to blow the doors off your expectations.
My fear is that people don't know what expectations to have--even if they're expecting OS 9-like performance with 128 megs, OS X will leave a bitter taste in their mouths. How much does another 128 megs cost, 50 bucks? Given the purpose of these machines is to introduce macs to kids, so they later buy more macs, is it really so wise to give kids the impression that "macs are slow"?
As it is, people will buy this eMac, complain about it being slow and tell all their friends, who will just assume Macs are slow.
But is UnitedLinux itself based solely on free software? Can I make my own United Linux compliant distro, or is that protected by trademark? It's all unclear to me.
Crap, why am I defending MS?
Well, for $400, you can get a Playstation 2 with hard drive, mouse, keyboard, ethernet, and an adapter to work with SOME vga monitors, and a copy of ps2linux. http://www.playstation2-linux.com/
Unfortunately, the games that work best with it are all on the Console. I've considered getting a game pad for my PC--but only to play emulated games from earlier consoles. You don't see too many fighting games or platform games on PCs.
I would rather type certain commands or memorize some hotkeys rather than use the cumbersome interfaces that console developers come up with to deal with complexity and compensate for the dearth of buttons available on the controllers.
I only find that to be a problem on games designed on PCs and brought to consoles, mostly first person shooters. Games designed for consoles tend to be simple enough to use with the console interface, and usually have nearly as much depth.
That flexibility allows me to play in whatever way is most comfortable for me.
Almost, but not quite. It lets you pick from a mouse or joystick, but it doesn't let you stop developers from throwing in 100 worthless weapons and magic spells into your game just so they can write "we've got 100 weapons!!!! This game is bigger than ever!!!" on the back of the box. You can't stop developers from fetishizing complication as a twisted virtue.
You speak of flexibility, but purchasing a console is my way of exercising flexibility over game developers--by buying into a market that encorages simplicity, I've communicated my anticomplexity preferences to anyone interested in selling to me.
That's probably why Xbox live is supposed to have fancy voice technologies.
Also, launch a super nintendo emulator on your pc, then try to tell me you wouldn't rather have a controller. Controllers are simply the best input device for certain games.
I don't agree with your point, but I just gotta say, your lobster analogy rocks. LOBSTER BOATS ARE ALWAYS FUNNY!
The issue is not preventing you from using the data it's destroying your system. If these computers are executing program data as soon as the disk is put in, that's a serious design flaw. As far as making it dangerous to play an audio section of a CD, I can't comprehend why it can't be made impossible for audio data to crash the computer.