I don't work in IT, but somebody always mentions Nethack http://www.nethack.org/in the comments of these kinds of stories. They often also mention that you can always tell your boss it's a "vi training tool" (if you use vi-keys, which I don't even though I do use vim) Might as well do it myself.
My mother can't type (rheumatoid arthritis) so I bought DNR for her. She couldn't get past the first training sentence, it simply would not recognize her voice, but it worked perfectly well for me. So we called up ScanSoft and tried everything they suggested, and went back to them: No refunds.
You post on Slashdot, you're a geek, you don't "get" Second Life. Now if you were an art student on the other hand, or a stay at home mom on the other hand.
Also remember than the PS3's media center or the PSP aren't going to be able to play FairPlay'd music files from Apple. They probably won't use PlaysForSure either because of their war with Microsoft. They could make a 3rd DRM format for their own players/consoles/computers, but then they lose the iPod. I think they're realizing that Sony BMG is hurting their other businesses to stop the inevitable.
They did have their own DRM format, the Magicgate protected version of ATRAC, which they just recently they announced they're dropping.
This decision is probably due to Sony Hardwarefoo finally laying the smackdown on Sony Mediafoo and telling them what to do, rather than the other way around. This also probably explains certain other things happening:
The addition of AAC and WMA support on the PSP (PS3 too)
The fact that the PS3's default ripping format for audio Cd's is not ATRAC but AAC.
Those are all shooters, which is one of the genres that's keeping PC gaming alive, for now. If you look outside the shooters and RTS's, there's a lot of console to PC ports, a few indie games and games from crappy small Eurpean dev houses too poor to go console.
Sooner or later even the FPS games will have the consoles as their primary platform. You can see the chages even now, Orange Box (including the new games Portal and Team Fortress 2) was pretty much a simultaneous release over PC, Xbox, PS3 (I don't consider the delay for the PS3 version that significant)
if you want to play a first-person shooter or something similar where a dedicated screen is essentially mandatory, you're still better off with a PC (which also has a much better interface than a joystick for shooters and RTS, though the Wii gets closer than other consoles to having a decent interface).
No.
Suppose you want to play an RTS on a console, with mouse support. It wouldn't be a Nintendo console, it would be a Sony.
Suppose you wanted to play an FPS, with mouse and keyboard support, on a console. Again, which console would you want? It would be by Sony.
Then again, I'm finding it difficult to open my old Macwrite documents (from 1992) on my current iMac because the old Macwrite format isn't supported...
e17 gets good bang for it's buck, it's reasonably easy to configure, it looks nice and it looks more like Windows or OSX than fluxbox does. That's probably why it's the default window manager on Yellow Dog 5.foo too.
Are you sane? We already had a war over this. Because sometimes, some states do shit that just isn't right, even if it's legal under their laws. "Jim Crow" remember that?
And who says the states even know what they're doing any better than the feds.
Taking your philosphy to it's logical conclusion would lead to no public services at all. "Lets get rid of public libraries, people can buy their own books" Or getting rid of public education entirely, "hey, it's a parent's responsibility to teach their kids, not any governments. If they can't aford a private tutor, then fuck them. The kids can be my farmhands, laborers, etc."
Let me ask you, do you truly believe this shit, or do you just say this stuff because you're a greedy selfish asshole who just simply doesn't want to pay any taxes.
you can't run a nation of 300 million people and god knows how many corporations all working at cross purposes to each other like a frickin village in 1760, or worse, like the frickin Confederacy in 1860. It just doesn't work, no matter what the privleged adolescent type libertarian cranks and crackpots say.
He has a point. When I first heard that Sega was working with Microsoft, I thought:
Don't do it, they're just using you to learn as much about the console gaming business as they can. Once they've milked you for all the info, market research and money they can, they'll do their own console. Which they did.
And lets put it this way, there's a lot of former Dreamcasters that are now Xboxers. Some of that's just anti-Sony sentiment, but some of that is because the original Xbox was probably designed from market research learned from Sega. The original Xbox controllers are far more like Dreamcast controllers than they are PS2 controllers.
Is it just me who remembers when the name "Activision" wasn't a curse word? They date back to the Atari days you know, though they're really just a publisher now. I'm just hoping they'll crack the whip on Blizzard to up their dev speed (and perhaps do some console games too) Blizzard should have ported Diablo II to the PS2, but they left the action RPG market on the consoles to Snowblind/SOE and all those games that used their engine.
"Release it when it's done" sounds great, until you realize that there's developers out there that can put out ouput equal in quality and polish to what Blizzard has done and do it twice as often.
Personally, I don't at all see the appeal of "second life". If you're going to be involved in something that is just like real life, but is not real life, and is an inferior low resolution copy to boot, why not just go to a park and watch the squirrels play?
Second LIfe is not like RL, for one, I can't fly in RL. Neither could I meet a tiny squirrel, hop in Ornithopters and shoot at each other. Or play En Garde with the squirrel, or go to a musical performance with the squirrel, or say build something really impressive, say a replica of the London Eye, with the squirrel.
Not that I have done any of that with a Squirrel in SL.
Anonymous coward is telling the truth. I've seen one that someone made. Pictures? Wouldn't you like to know.:-) But this might be a location to check out:
I'll help you out. You post on Slasdot, you're a geek.
Second Life appeals to non-geeks, even more so than WoW. It also appeals to creative types, say the folks who are art students, jewelry designers, graphic designers.
When you played SL for those five minutes, what did you do? Did you try out the building and scripting tools? Did you try Googling for interesting stuff to do? Did you try the "head for a clump of green dots and see what's up game"? Did you talk to anyone at Orientation Island?
I know, the Amiga was useful for things other than games, but the biggest chunk of Amiga owners used them mostly for games. Lots of them used their Amiga's not much differently than they would a PSfoo/Xboxfoo these days. Which explains the CDTV and the Amiga CD32.
Actually the computer industry was healthier in the 80's with all that competition, when it wasn't totally a monoculture (at least outside of business)
You had IBM (and clones) in the workplace, Apple in desktop publishing, Atari ST with musicians, Amiga with gamers. There were tons of small software houses making various software for all the machines. The only people paying more than 50 bucks for their word processors were IBM PC users.( I utterly loathe what the Microsoft/Intel dominance did for software prices, because business users were willing to pay lots of money for software, when they dominated the homes that meant home users were faced with higher software prices. And because home users weren't willing to pay $500 for a word processor, that led to bundling of things like Works, which helped entrench Microsoft formats in the home, as well as the office.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't work in IT, but somebody always mentions Nethack http://www.nethack.org/in the comments of these kinds of stories. They often also mention that you can always tell your boss it's a "vi training tool" (if you use vi-keys, which I don't even though I do use vim) Might as well do it myself.
My mother can't type (rheumatoid arthritis) so I bought DNR for her. She couldn't get past the first training sentence, it simply would not recognize her voice, but it worked perfectly well for me. So we called up ScanSoft and tried everything they suggested, and went back to them: No refunds.
You post on Slashdot, you're a geek, you don't "get" Second Life.
Now if you were an art student on the other hand, or a stay at home mom on the other hand.
You don't need the downloader to get individual songs, just albums.
They did have their own DRM format, the Magicgate protected version of ATRAC, which they just recently they announced they're dropping.
This decision is probably due to Sony Hardwarefoo finally laying the smackdown on Sony Mediafoo and telling them what to do, rather than the other way around. This also probably explains certain other things happening:
The addition of AAC and WMA support on the PSP (PS3 too)
The fact that the PS3's default ripping format for audio Cd's is not ATRAC but AAC.
Those are all shooters, which is one of the genres that's keeping PC gaming alive, for now. If you look outside the shooters and RTS's, there's a lot of console to PC ports, a few indie games and games from crappy small Eurpean dev houses too poor to go console.
Sooner or later even the FPS games will have the consoles as their primary platform. You can see the chages even now, Orange Box (including the new games Portal and Team Fortress 2) was pretty much a simultaneous release over PC, Xbox, PS3 (I don't consider the delay for the PS3 version that significant)
No.
Suppose you want to play an RTS on a console, with mouse support. It wouldn't be a Nintendo console, it would be a Sony.
Suppose you wanted to play an FPS, with mouse and keyboard support, on a console. Again, which console would you want? It would be by Sony.
BasiliskII http://basilisk.cebix.net/
Emulate an old mac running Clarisworks, MacWrite, whatever. open old MacWrite file, print to file (as postscript), copy back to host OS.
It'll run SL? Wow, I didn't expect that. What frame rates are you getting?
They probably went with e17 for the following reason:
It's less system intensive than XFCE is. Here's the results from testing them on my PS2 Linux kit:
Enlightenment 16.999
7398 CronoClo 0 0 11520 11M 4080 S 3312 1.7 37.7 0:34 enlightenmen
XFCE 4.2
7506 CronoClo 0 0 10200 9940 7056 S 5996 0.0 32.5 0:18 xfce4-panel
7504 CronoClo 0 0 5980 5684 4124 S 3560 0.0 18.6 0:15 xfdesktop
7502 CronoClo 0 0 4424 4036 3408 S 2532 0.0 13.2 0:01 xfwm4
7497 CronoClo 0 0 2808 2412 2000 S 1868 0.0 7.9 0:00 xfce4-sessio
7499 CronoClo 0 0 3100 1780 1312 S 1296 0.0 5.8 0:00 xfce-mcs-man
Of course, fluxbox would be better resource wise
12227 CronoClo 0 0 2164 1368 1084 S 364 0.0 4.4 0:17 fluxbox
But that leads into this point:
e17 gets good bang for it's buck, it's reasonably easy to configure, it looks nice and it looks more like Windows or OSX than fluxbox does. That's probably why it's the default window manager on Yellow Dog 5.foo too.
Are you sane? We already had a war over this. Because sometimes, some states do shit that just isn't right, even if it's legal under their laws. "Jim Crow" remember that?
And who says the states even know what they're doing any better than the feds.
Taking your philosphy to it's logical conclusion would lead to no public services at all. "Lets get rid of public libraries, people can buy their own books" Or getting rid of public education entirely, "hey, it's a parent's responsibility to teach their kids, not any governments. If they can't aford a private tutor, then fuck them. The kids can be my farmhands, laborers, etc."
Let me ask you, do you truly believe this shit, or do you just say this stuff because you're a greedy selfish asshole who just simply doesn't want to pay any taxes.
you can't run a nation of 300 million people and god knows how many corporations all working at cross purposes to each other like a frickin village in 1760, or worse, like the frickin Confederacy in 1860. It just doesn't work, no matter what the privleged adolescent type libertarian cranks and crackpots say.
Poor Dreamcast, even when it comes to cooling the PS2 has the DC beat. 12 hours is nothing, Try 12 days, or a month of 24/7 operation.
Poor Dreamcast, even when it comes to Linux the PS2 has the DC beat.
Good luck on the project though.
He has a point. When I first heard that Sega was working with Microsoft, I thought:
Don't do it, they're just using you to learn as much about the console gaming business as they can. Once they've milked you for all the info, market research and money they can, they'll do their own console. Which they did.
And lets put it this way, there's a lot of former Dreamcasters that are now Xboxers. Some of that's just anti-Sony sentiment, but some of that is because the original Xbox was probably designed from market research learned from Sega. The original Xbox controllers are far more like Dreamcast controllers than they are PS2 controllers.
There are 900MHz digital phones so you don't have to worry about the neighbors (or your WiFi) but they're hard to find now.
yes, Thanks to the New Deal, Great Society and the TVA. Before those it used to be worse.
They were successful. From what my dad tells me, he was born in Kentucky and had relatives there, it used to be worse.
Is it just me who remembers when the name "Activision" wasn't a curse word? They date back to the Atari days you know, though they're really just a publisher now. I'm just hoping they'll crack the whip on Blizzard to up their dev speed (and perhaps do some console games too) Blizzard should have ported Diablo II to the PS2, but they left the action RPG market on the consoles to Snowblind/SOE and all those games that used their engine.
"Release it when it's done" sounds great, until you realize that there's developers out there that can put out ouput equal in quality and polish to what Blizzard has done and do it twice as often.
Second LIfe is not like RL, for one, I can't fly in RL. Neither could I meet a tiny squirrel, hop in Ornithopters and shoot at each other. Or play En Garde with the squirrel, or go to a musical performance with the squirrel, or say build something really impressive, say a replica of the London Eye, with the squirrel.
Not that I have done any of that with a Squirrel in SL.
SL is what one makes of it.
Anonymous coward is telling the truth. I've seen one that someone made. Pictures? Wouldn't you like to know. :-) But this might be a location to check out:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/bel%20Highland/171/143/33
Should be near where you can get the baby unicorn. NSFW link:
http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/09/afternoon-delig.html#more
It might be a custom thing though so it might not actually be there.
I'll help you out. You post on Slasdot, you're a geek.
Second Life appeals to non-geeks, even more so than WoW. It also appeals to creative types, say the folks who are art students, jewelry designers, graphic designers.
When you played SL for those five minutes, what did you do? Did you try out the building and scripting tools? Did you try Googling for interesting stuff to do? Did you try the "head for a clump of green dots and see what's up game"? Did you talk to anyone at Orientation Island?
I know, the Amiga was useful for things other than games, but the biggest chunk of Amiga owners used them mostly for games. Lots of them used their Amiga's not much differently than they would a PSfoo/Xboxfoo these days. Which explains the CDTV and the Amiga CD32.
Actually the computer industry was healthier in the 80's with all that competition, when it wasn't totally a monoculture (at least outside of business)
You had IBM (and clones) in the workplace, Apple in desktop publishing, Atari ST with musicians, Amiga with gamers. There were tons of small software houses making various software for all the machines. The only people paying more than 50 bucks for their word processors were IBM PC users.( I utterly loathe what the Microsoft/Intel dominance did for software prices, because business users were willing to pay lots of money for software, when they dominated the homes that meant home users were faced with higher software prices. And because home users weren't willing to pay $500 for a word processor, that led to bundling of things like Works, which helped entrench Microsoft formats in the home, as well as the office.