Its not a lot, its more then average sure, but its affordable for everybody and has been for a while. Its not like its a thing that only super-computers have. It however happens that most people just don't need that much RAM. The RAM limits are however still a huge issue, since there are people that do need more RAM and could easily afford it, but neither the hardware or OS support as much RAM as the consumer is able to throw at it.
The blame however is on the hardware manufacturers, not so much on Microsoft, with 32bit hardware more then 4GB RAM is problematic, motherboards only having a limited amount of RAM slots and RAM modules only available up to a certain size contribute their share to the issue. RAM simply has grown a faster then the amount of RAM that actually is supported by the hardware.
Not really, my gnome-panel takes a good 20-30 seconds to even react to the first mouse click, till Firefox and friends then start up can take quite a while longer again. Thats definitvly not what I would call instantly usable after boot.
The fun part is that even a perfect reproduction of what a human can see would still be only a tiny minority of what is actually there. This is most easily demonstrated with a TV remote and a digicam, which registers the IR light, which the human eye doesn't. Other side effects is that the human eye will register certain very different mixtures of wavelength as the exact same color, while a digicam will register them as two different ones.
### As long as the games keep coming for the system, which they appear to be,
The games are already a huge issue on the Wii, just look at what is out now and what will be out till the end of the year, short summary: not much. Half the game are ports from last years 'last-gen' games, Tiger Woods, Prince Of Persia, Zelda (delay doesn't change the fact), etc. This can't go on forever, since last-gen won't be there for much longer. Once the last-gen is dead the Wii will have a real issue, since it just doesn't have the power to make ports from next-gen consoles doable. Scaling down the graphics only works till the developers have figured out how to turn some of that power into AI, physics and stuff that is actually gameplay relevant.
I mean, just look at the release list, what top titles are on them that don't have Mario or Metroid in the name? Even the PS3 with all its problems has a whole bunch of possible AAA titles in the line, so far I haven't spotted any of that on the Wii and I just can't see it coming. Heck, even when you look at the totally different direction, i.e. not the big titles, but the small independent games, the XBox360 and the PS3 have a much more solid offering, while the Wii again has basically none at all.
### If you want to introduce yourself to assembly language programming, start with something sane and simple. To that end, you can't get much simpler than the Motorola 68000 family of processors. ###
This might be right, my question is, how does one get started? My desktop computer isn't a Motorola 68000, so how does one get a Motorola 68000? Shall one use a Amiga emulator? Is there some hardware to buy? Anything that can be done with qemu, Dosbox, Dosemu or similar emulation software? I know that assembler is important for some things and I would like to learn it one day, however every time I tried I ended up in the situation that there simply wasn't much interesting to do with it, since all the interesting things where either impossible (no more 0xA000 for graphic access, etc.) or a lot easier done with other languages. Its also hard to find a good tutorial, since most stuff applies to DOS or other systems.
So how does one learn assembly today? Is going retro with Amiga and C64 emulation the only way or are there any practical applications left to get started? Last not least there is also the question of what to do with assembler skills if acquired? Say I would learn 68000 Assembler, would that knowledge be much useful when switching to x86? Or would I have to restart from scratch since all the Syscalls, Opcodes and Mnemonics are different?
Get a flash card, copy DSlinux to it, telnet or ssh into the next computer and use links, w3m or links, not as pretty as Opera, but you won't have any issues with rendering speed.
Concurrency is a problem, but its one that you *can't* avoid. Everything in todays CPU development points very strongly into a multi-core direction, in a few years you can't buy single cores any more and in a few years down the road again something like eight cores might be the norm. So how exactly do you want to write programs then? Single thread, using only 12.5% of the available computing power? I don't think so. Now it is of course hard to write multi-threading in C++, but other languages such as Erlang or function languages in general have a lot less issues with it, sooner or later we actually might need a big switch in the programming languages, since C++ simply seems to be no longer up for the task.
Not scalable? I beg to differ. Thousands threads for sure scale are a lot better then when you just have two or four or whatever, since with thousands you don't really have an upper limit of how many CPU you want to throw at the problem. The real issue with threads is that OS threads are extremely slow, so you can't have thousands threads or your machine would go to a crawl. Threads also are painful to work with since the languages just aren't up to the task.
However for both these issues there exist solutions, namely Erlang, using user-level threads there is no upper limits and you really can have each chicken have its own thread without a problem and the language is also build from the base up to work nicely with threads.
Now I haven't yet seen the talk, bittorrent still busy downloading it, but I seriously doubt that it will just be yet-another-simple-wrapper class.
The intention of the law doesn't sound all that bad, but why does it have to be a law in the first place? Can't a little line in some ESRB contract accomplish the same? And why make all the fuss about it anyway? HotCoffee was totally harmless and as far as I know the only case where it ever happened, but even then only by accident and not on purpose (unused/disabled data and code in video games is pretty common).
If those politicians actually want to protect the children they should better try to make ESRB ratings mandatory, since that might actually change something, instead of worrying about laws which never ever would have been used anyway.
ACK, back when the SNES was up to date basically all third party titles cost around 65EUR over here, some even up in the 75EUR, only some first party titles where sold at 50EUR and even then those prices aren't adjusted to inflation. If video games actually would adjust to inflation we would probably pay around 100EUR today.
There is really nothing to complain about the current prices, even if one doesn't like the 60EUR price tag, there are a ton of used games out there and all those cheap platinum/classic rereleases, which weren't available back then either.
### On a desktop, Debian "Sid" (the unstable development branch) is quite bleeding edge
That however is only true for most packages, not all. From time to time things get delayed in Debian a lot (thanks to stable release cycles), Xorg for example took a long while to make it into Debian, far longer then everywhere else, that was quite annoying. Debian Sid also lacks a lot of preconfiguration that Ubuntu has. I still use Sid since the last time I tried Ubuntu it indeed had more breakage then Debian, however that was a few years ago. When I ever need to do a clean reinstall I would probably go with Ubuntu due to the preconfiguration and the more focused development (i.e. no delays holding back on important new software due to one reason or the other).
Because its the easiest/only way to substantially pump up the CPU power with todays machines. Its not exactly a PS3 exclusive, Microsoft is doing it with the XBox360, Intel is doing it with their DualCore, AMD is doing it as well. Multiple processors is the way of the future, its still a bumpy road till they are installed everywhere and fully utilized by applications, but it can't be avoided anymore.
Now why Sony used Cell and not a more conventional design is a different question, but probably because they thought that the long-time benefits out weight the short-time problems. Also the Cell is very well suited for multimedia applications, which beside the gaming, is one of the PS3 strongest points.
The price tag for basically all electronics is higher in Europe thanks to the VST which is included in the price and the longer warranty that you get on all products here, its nothing PS3 specific, Apple does the same, Nintendo does the same and Microsoft as well, == $.
### On a standard set Wii titles look better than the last gen,
Since when? I have yet to see a Wii game that looks as good as the good looking Gamecube games (RE4, RebelStrike, etc.), let alone the good looking XBox ones (Riddick, Ninja Gaiden, etc). Sure, the latest Wii incarnation of MonkeyBall might look better then the last on the Gamecube, but that is kind of expected with new version of the same game and it never looked very impressive to begin with.
### Monkey's Audio is free software under at least one definition of the word free.
If you want to refer to the no-money aspect of software you should use the word "Freeware", no need to trying to hijack the term Free Software for something for which the software world already has a perfectly fitting word.
In the last years Debian has become more and more the base for other distros, while Debians very own distro, namely the "Debian stable" branch has faded away into total obscurity. Sure it might still run on a few server here and there and I have it running on my router myself. But its basically a total failure. Why? Simple, sure you might want a distro that doesn't ship the newest stuff of everything and instead focuses on stable software, but that is *not* what Debian stable is doing. Debian stable is simply old software without RC bugs assigned that doesn't get updated any longer. That often means that you won't see the bug fixes that happen in upstream. More then once it has happened to me that upstream already long fixed critical bugs that never made it into stable, would I have run 'unstable' I would have never run into the bugs in the first place. And of course it also happens a lot that I run into software that either isn't available in stable or so outdated that its just of no use any more, so I have to compile it myself, use untrustworthy third party repositories and do all that security update thing completly manually, since Debian stable of course doesn't provide any updates for unofficial packages.
Debian should just give up on the whole stable thing is it is now and instead turn it into a branch that is really worth its name, i.e. only package software there that is really stable and proven to work and not some FooBar 0.0.6 stuff that just happens to be floating around in unstable without RC bugs assigned, since that will be obsolete in a matter of weeks anyway and provides basically zero value at a point where stable is released, let alone years after that.
Debian testing/unstable as become an important core of other distros and they should really focus much more on that instead of trying to pretend that unstable one day will become stable, since that simply isn't what is happening.
I wouldn't call it "desensitize" but instead simply "training". The closer a game gets to the real thing, the more the things that you learned in the game apply to the real world. With driving games we already are extremely close to the real thing, since both a real car and a game car are controlled with an abstract controller and since many driving games try to recreate real world physics. There is of course still a barrier that doesn't let you use your "trained" skills of GTA in the real world, but it shouldn't come to anybodies surprise that you might remember a few of the lessons you learn in GTA while sitting in a real car.
Now to bring the good old first person shooters back into the picture: FPSs are still extremely abstract, playing a person in a FPS feels nothing like walking in the real world, physics basically never try to be realistic and unless with a car you don't exactly use a rocket launcher every day. You still learn stuff in a FPS, but what you learn is playing an abstract video game that has little to do with the real world. Killing a 'person' in a FPS is really no different then killing a ghost in Pacman, the graphic style differs, but aside from that they are almost the same creatures (aka brainless video game characters). The day where FPS really start to get realistic and the NPCs behave realistically, so that they are almost indistinguishable from a real person, that is the day where I would really worry about the influence FPS have, but today we aren't even close to that and once we get there I kind of doubt that the game designers will continue to make mass-killing the core gameplay, there should be more interesting things to do by then.
Depends, especially with older games it is often hard to find a patch that works with your exact version of the game, so its often easier to just download the right version then to try to find the right patch, if it exists at all.
### Hopefully, since there's an actual UI in place on the Wii, they'll make adding people to your addressbook more streamlined, without requiring you to manually enter in codes.
The whole point of the friend code system is that there is no way to obtain them from withing the Wii system itself, this forces you to contact the other players outside of the Wii system, so that the Wii system itself can stay completly clean of any kind of player to player contact (aka chat, forums, lobbies, etc.). The only thing the system provides is random match making without a way to talk to other players.
Given that the Wii comes with a fully featured webbrowser and build in parental controls, the added child-protection that the friends code provide is however so tiny that I really hope that Nintendo just gives up on that idea to using them for that purpose. It just doesn't at much child protection at all and ruins online for basically everything else. As much as in-game chat or voice chat might suck at times, not having any way at all to interact with other players is a few orders of magnitude worse then that.
And to add a question: Why Sensible Soccer? Why it and not International Soccer or one of the dozens of other soccer games that came long before it? Of all those games Sensible Soccer makes the least sense to include to me, but maybe I am just missing something, since I haven't played it all that much. With Warcraft one could argue that it was the beginning of what later became World of Warcraft, but for strategy games its really a bad pick.
### A computer that comes with Linux preinstalled would never need xorg.conf twiddlery;
Unless that user wants to use a graphic tablet, a second mouse with some additional buttons, a different refresh rate for his monitor, a multi-monitor setup or a ton of other things. There is a lot of things that one can do with GUI tools in Linux, but I still have to visit xorg.conf *far* more often then I would like. And unless there one day comes a proper GUI configuration tool for said file that won't change, doing configuration changes without restarting Xorg would be a nice thing to have. Beside the lack of a standard cross distribution package format xorg.conf is among the ugliest show stopper issues for Linux on the desktop.
### There are at least one hundred pages on Final Fantasy, a dozen on Sailor Moon, and there seems to be a page for every town, highway, and dirt path in the entire world.
And what is wrong with that? Getting information on little details that nobody else cares to collect is exactly what I love about Wikipedia.
### My only other complain is that the boss battles are too easy, but lets face it, its not that the battles are really any easier than previous Zelda's;
The boss battles are easier *FAR* easier then in other Zeldas. The thing I did after finishing Zelda:TP was to replay "A Link to the Past" and "Links Awakening" to see if nostalgia was blurring my view or if Zelda really used to be better. Surprise, surprise, it really was better. The boss battles in previous Zelda are a lot shorter then in Zelda:TP, they however are also far harder since getting hit actually costs you some hearths an the bosses move in patterns that actually take some challenge to dodge. In Zelda:TP on the other side you can stand around for minutes without ever being remotely in danger. The battles in Zelda:TP are extremely item based, so the only challenge is to find out what to do, not to actually do it. In previous Zelda you had to do both at once while also dodging the boss. Needless to say that I died *a lot* more in ALttP and LA then ever in TP.
### I see your point about it being linear, but that's not really any big surprise; none of the games in the Zelda series could seriously be considered true RPGs (adventure with a few basic RPG elements mixed in).
Zelda games are no RPGs, but they never were as linear as Zelda:TP. In Zelda:TP you could literally just solve dungeon, warp back to Thelma's tavern, get hint for next dungeon, warp to dungeon, solve dungeon, repeat. There was no need to explore at all, since everything you had to do was down right obvious. Also in the dungeon there almost never was a situation where you had one key, but two doors to open, in earlier Zeldas however that was pretty much the norm. Zelda didn't even successful recreate the non-linearity of earlier Zelda let alone expand it.
Slashdot Mirror
### Hardly. 4GB is a lot of RAM, even today,
Its not a lot, its more then average sure, but its affordable for everybody and has been for a while. Its not like its a thing that only super-computers have. It however happens that most people just don't need that much RAM. The RAM limits are however still a huge issue, since there are people that do need more RAM and could easily afford it, but neither the hardware or OS support as much RAM as the consumer is able to throw at it.
The blame however is on the hardware manufacturers, not so much on Microsoft, with 32bit hardware more then 4GB RAM is problematic, motherboards only having a limited amount of RAM slots and RAM modules only available up to a certain size contribute their share to the issue. RAM simply has grown a faster then the amount of RAM that actually is supported by the hardware.
### and you see the desktop, it's ready to use.
Not really, my gnome-panel takes a good 20-30 seconds to even react to the first mouse click, till Firefox and friends then start up can take quite a while longer again. Thats definitvly not what I would call instantly usable after boot.
The fun part is that even a perfect reproduction of what a human can see would still be only a tiny minority of what is actually there. This is most easily demonstrated with a TV remote and a digicam, which registers the IR light, which the human eye doesn't. Other side effects is that the human eye will register certain very different mixtures of wavelength as the exact same color, while a digicam will register them as two different ones.
### As long as the games keep coming for the system, which they appear to be,
The games are already a huge issue on the Wii, just look at what is out now and what will be out till the end of the year, short summary: not much. Half the game are ports from last years 'last-gen' games, Tiger Woods, Prince Of Persia, Zelda (delay doesn't change the fact), etc. This can't go on forever, since last-gen won't be there for much longer. Once the last-gen is dead the Wii will have a real issue, since it just doesn't have the power to make ports from next-gen consoles doable. Scaling down the graphics only works till the developers have figured out how to turn some of that power into AI, physics and stuff that is actually gameplay relevant.
I mean, just look at the release list, what top titles are on them that don't have Mario or Metroid in the name? Even the PS3 with all its problems has a whole bunch of possible AAA titles in the line, so far I haven't spotted any of that on the Wii and I just can't see it coming. Heck, even when you look at the totally different direction, i.e. not the big titles, but the small independent games, the XBox360 and the PS3 have a much more solid offering, while the Wii again has basically none at all.
### If you want to introduce yourself to assembly language programming, start with something sane and simple. To that end, you can't get much simpler than the Motorola 68000 family of processors. ###
This might be right, my question is, how does one get started? My desktop computer isn't a Motorola 68000, so how does one get a Motorola 68000? Shall one use a Amiga emulator? Is there some hardware to buy? Anything that can be done with qemu, Dosbox, Dosemu or similar emulation software? I know that assembler is important for some things and I would like to learn it one day, however every time I tried I ended up in the situation that there simply wasn't much interesting to do with it, since all the interesting things where either impossible (no more 0xA000 for graphic access, etc.) or a lot easier done with other languages. Its also hard to find a good tutorial, since most stuff applies to DOS or other systems.
So how does one learn assembly today? Is going retro with Amiga and C64 emulation the only way or are there any practical applications left to get started? Last not least there is also the question of what to do with assembler skills if acquired? Say I would learn 68000 Assembler, would that knowledge be much useful when switching to x86? Or would I have to restart from scratch since all the Syscalls, Opcodes and Mnemonics are different?
Get a flash card, copy DSlinux to it, telnet or ssh into the next computer and use links, w3m or links, not as pretty as Opera, but you won't have any issues with rendering speed.
Concurrency is a problem, but its one that you *can't* avoid. Everything in todays CPU development points very strongly into a multi-core direction, in a few years you can't buy single cores any more and in a few years down the road again something like eight cores might be the norm. So how exactly do you want to write programs then? Single thread, using only 12.5% of the available computing power? I don't think so. Now it is of course hard to write multi-threading in C++, but other languages such as Erlang or function languages in general have a lot less issues with it, sooner or later we actually might need a big switch in the programming languages, since C++ simply seems to be no longer up for the task.
### That's inherently not scalable.
Not scalable? I beg to differ. Thousands threads for sure scale are a lot better then when you just have two or four or whatever, since with thousands you don't really have an upper limit of how many CPU you want to throw at the problem. The real issue with threads is that OS threads are extremely slow, so you can't have thousands threads or your machine would go to a crawl. Threads also are painful to work with since the languages just aren't up to the task.
However for both these issues there exist solutions, namely Erlang, using user-level threads there is no upper limits and you really can have each chicken have its own thread without a problem and the language is also build from the base up to work nicely with threads.
Now I haven't yet seen the talk, bittorrent still busy downloading it, but I seriously doubt that it will just be yet-another-simple-wrapper class.
The intention of the law doesn't sound all that bad, but why does it have to be a law in the first place? Can't a little line in some ESRB contract accomplish the same? And why make all the fuss about it anyway? HotCoffee was totally harmless and as far as I know the only case where it ever happened, but even then only by accident and not on purpose (unused/disabled data and code in video games is pretty common).
If those politicians actually want to protect the children they should better try to make ESRB ratings mandatory, since that might actually change something, instead of worrying about laws which never ever would have been used anyway.
ACK, back when the SNES was up to date basically all third party titles cost around 65EUR over here, some even up in the 75EUR, only some first party titles where sold at 50EUR and even then those prices aren't adjusted to inflation. If video games actually would adjust to inflation we would probably pay around 100EUR today.
There is really nothing to complain about the current prices, even if one doesn't like the 60EUR price tag, there are a ton of used games out there and all those cheap platinum/classic rereleases, which weren't available back then either.
### On a desktop, Debian "Sid" (the unstable development branch) is quite bleeding edge
That however is only true for most packages, not all. From time to time things get delayed in Debian a lot (thanks to stable release cycles), Xorg for example took a long while to make it into Debian, far longer then everywhere else, that was quite annoying. Debian Sid also lacks a lot of preconfiguration that Ubuntu has. I still use Sid since the last time I tried Ubuntu it indeed had more breakage then Debian, however that was a few years ago. When I ever need to do a clean reinstall I would probably go with Ubuntu due to the preconfiguration and the more focused development (i.e. no delays holding back on important new software due to one reason or the other).
Because its the easiest/only way to substantially pump up the CPU power with todays machines. Its not exactly a PS3 exclusive, Microsoft is doing it with the XBox360, Intel is doing it with their DualCore, AMD is doing it as well. Multiple processors is the way of the future, its still a bumpy road till they are installed everywhere and fully utilized by applications, but it can't be avoided anymore.
Now why Sony used Cell and not a more conventional design is a different question, but probably because they thought that the long-time benefits out weight the short-time problems. Also the Cell is very well suited for multimedia applications, which beside the gaming, is one of the PS3 strongest points.
The price tag for basically all electronics is higher in Europe thanks to the VST which is included in the price and the longer warranty that you get on all products here, its nothing PS3 specific, Apple does the same, Nintendo does the same and Microsoft as well, == $.
### On a standard set Wii titles look better than the last gen,
Since when? I have yet to see a Wii game that looks as good as the good looking Gamecube games (RE4, RebelStrike, etc.), let alone the good looking XBox ones (Riddick, Ninja Gaiden, etc). Sure, the latest Wii incarnation of MonkeyBall might look better then the last on the Gamecube, but that is kind of expected with new version of the same game and it never looked very impressive to begin with.
### Monkey's Audio is free software under at least one definition of the word free.
If you want to refer to the no-money aspect of software you should use the word "Freeware", no need to trying to hijack the term Free Software for something for which the software world already has a perfectly fitting word.
In the last years Debian has become more and more the base for other distros, while Debians very own distro, namely the "Debian stable" branch has faded away into total obscurity. Sure it might still run on a few server here and there and I have it running on my router myself. But its basically a total failure. Why? Simple, sure you might want a distro that doesn't ship the newest stuff of everything and instead focuses on stable software, but that is *not* what Debian stable is doing. Debian stable is simply old software without RC bugs assigned that doesn't get updated any longer. That often means that you won't see the bug fixes that happen in upstream. More then once it has happened to me that upstream already long fixed critical bugs that never made it into stable, would I have run 'unstable' I would have never run into the bugs in the first place. And of course it also happens a lot that I run into software that either isn't available in stable or so outdated that its just of no use any more, so I have to compile it myself, use untrustworthy third party repositories and do all that security update thing completly manually, since Debian stable of course doesn't provide any updates for unofficial packages.
Debian should just give up on the whole stable thing is it is now and instead turn it into a branch that is really worth its name, i.e. only package software there that is really stable and proven to work and not some FooBar 0.0.6 stuff that just happens to be floating around in unstable without RC bugs assigned, since that will be obsolete in a matter of weeks anyway and provides basically zero value at a point where stable is released, let alone years after that.
Debian testing/unstable as become an important core of other distros and they should really focus much more on that instead of trying to pretend that unstable one day will become stable, since that simply isn't what is happening.
I wouldn't call it "desensitize" but instead simply "training". The closer a game gets to the real thing, the more the things that you learned in the game apply to the real world. With driving games we already are extremely close to the real thing, since both a real car and a game car are controlled with an abstract controller and since many driving games try to recreate real world physics. There is of course still a barrier that doesn't let you use your "trained" skills of GTA in the real world, but it shouldn't come to anybodies surprise that you might remember a few of the lessons you learn in GTA while sitting in a real car.
Now to bring the good old first person shooters back into the picture: FPSs are still extremely abstract, playing a person in a FPS feels nothing like walking in the real world, physics basically never try to be realistic and unless with a car you don't exactly use a rocket launcher every day. You still learn stuff in a FPS, but what you learn is playing an abstract video game that has little to do with the real world. Killing a 'person' in a FPS is really no different then killing a ghost in Pacman, the graphic style differs, but aside from that they are almost the same creatures (aka brainless video game characters). The day where FPS really start to get realistic and the NPCs behave realistically, so that they are almost indistinguishable from a real person, that is the day where I would really worry about the influence FPS have, but today we aren't even close to that and once we get there I kind of doubt that the game designers will continue to make mass-killing the core gameplay, there should be more interesting things to do by then.
### If the artist can intentionally provoke a specific emotional reaction in the viewer, it is art. The end.
Which specific emotions should Michelangelo's David provoke? Or Mona Lisa? etc.
Depends, especially with older games it is often hard to find a patch that works with your exact version of the game, so its often easier to just download the right version then to try to find the right patch, if it exists at all.
### Hopefully, since there's an actual UI in place on the Wii, they'll make adding people to your addressbook more streamlined, without requiring you to manually enter in codes.
The whole point of the friend code system is that there is no way to obtain them from withing the Wii system itself, this forces you to contact the other players outside of the Wii system, so that the Wii system itself can stay completly clean of any kind of player to player contact (aka chat, forums, lobbies, etc.). The only thing the system provides is random match making without a way to talk to other players.
Given that the Wii comes with a fully featured webbrowser and build in parental controls, the added child-protection that the friends code provide is however so tiny that I really hope that Nintendo just gives up on that idea to using them for that purpose. It just doesn't at much child protection at all and ruins online for basically everything else. As much as in-game chat or voice chat might suck at times, not having any way at all to interact with other players is a few orders of magnitude worse then that.
And to add a question: Why Sensible Soccer? Why it and not International Soccer or one of the dozens of other soccer games that came long before it? Of all those games Sensible Soccer makes the least sense to include to me, but maybe I am just missing something, since I haven't played it all that much. With Warcraft one could argue that it was the beginning of what later became World of Warcraft, but for strategy games its really a bad pick.
### A computer that comes with Linux preinstalled would never need xorg.conf twiddlery;
Unless that user wants to use a graphic tablet, a second mouse with some additional buttons, a different refresh rate for his monitor, a multi-monitor setup or a ton of other things. There is a lot of things that one can do with GUI tools in Linux, but I still have to visit xorg.conf *far* more often then I would like. And unless there one day comes a proper GUI configuration tool for said file that won't change, doing configuration changes without restarting Xorg would be a nice thing to have. Beside the lack of a standard cross distribution package format xorg.conf is among the ugliest show stopper issues for Linux on the desktop.
### There are at least one hundred pages on Final Fantasy, a dozen on Sailor Moon, and there seems to be a page for every town, highway, and dirt path in the entire world.
And what is wrong with that? Getting information on little details that nobody else cares to collect is exactly what I love about Wikipedia.
### My only other complain is that the boss battles are too easy, but lets face it, its not that the battles are really any easier than previous Zelda's;
The boss battles are easier *FAR* easier then in other Zeldas. The thing I did after finishing Zelda:TP was to replay "A Link to the Past" and "Links Awakening" to see if nostalgia was blurring my view or if Zelda really used to be better. Surprise, surprise, it really was better. The boss battles in previous Zelda are a lot shorter then in Zelda:TP, they however are also far harder since getting hit actually costs you some hearths an the bosses move in patterns that actually take some challenge to dodge. In Zelda:TP on the other side you can stand around for minutes without ever being remotely in danger. The battles in Zelda:TP are extremely item based, so the only challenge is to find out what to do, not to actually do it. In previous Zelda you had to do both at once while also dodging the boss. Needless to say that I died *a lot* more in ALttP and LA then ever in TP.
### I see your point about it being linear, but that's not really any big surprise; none of the games in the Zelda series could seriously be considered true RPGs (adventure with a few basic RPG elements mixed in).
Zelda games are no RPGs, but they never were as linear as Zelda:TP. In Zelda:TP you could literally just solve dungeon, warp back to Thelma's tavern, get hint for next dungeon, warp to dungeon, solve dungeon, repeat. There was no need to explore at all, since everything you had to do was down right obvious. Also in the dungeon there almost never was a situation where you had one key, but two doors to open, in earlier Zeldas however that was pretty much the norm. Zelda didn't even successful recreate the non-linearity of earlier Zelda let alone expand it.