The case of the two kids who murdered a todller is prove of a crime that would have not be solved with out cctv. Was this case unique as many people claimed or extremely common? Perhaps all unsolved crimes of these nature were committed by people we would normally never suspect. You and I don't know. The camera in this case did.
It is like saying because crimes were solved before DNA it is now not an essential tool for the justice system.
In fact these new technologies are becoming more essential as we are less willing to convict people because they are the wrong color. Sure we could just fry the closest black to a rape or murder again but I prefer that we use DNA profiling and CCTV to catch the real criminals.
Two "adult" games and the author declares a rise of adult games. Whee. How many cutsey cartoon gameboy games been released? This week?
The Sims has long been perverted/liberated for those who think there is nothing wrong with a bit of nudity. Morrowind has nude skins and missions wich add a bit of spice. Nevewinternights has some sex laden extensions.
So there is enough out there however the main market for games is japan and america. Most of us can not use games made for japan were adult themed games are an established market and so we mostly see games made in america or at least expecting to make most of their sales in the america.
This means games must be censored to be sold on the shelf. Don't like it? Though. Game developers want to make money and not being able to sell it in walmart or whatever hurts their bottomline.
You will note that many developers even go to the trouble of releasing two versions. One for the free world and one for american:P Vietcong comes in clean cut american pie mode and swear mode.
So I doubt we will be seeing more "adult" games. Although I did read that The Sims 2 will again have the potential for gay relationships. Since this was an accident in the originals sims they now seem to have made a conscious decision to leave it in. If the idea survives in the american release then perhaps their is hope after all.
Minimum requirements are really the bare absolute minimum to play a game. Or rather they would be if any pc could be counted on performing the same as another pc with similar hardware. There are just to many variables. Your P3 may out perform a P4. The amount of crap running at the same time. The amount of memory and the quality of the memory. The OS. The patch level of the OS. The settings of the game. Number of speakers.
Basically the minimum specs should be read as this. If you absolutly have to play the game and can not afford to upgrade then yes you can at least with luck play it at more then 1 frame per second when the moon is full.
The recommended spec mean that if you pc meets it then you can turn some of the options on and it won't be a slideshow. When the moon is full.
Only if you exceed the recommended spec by a mile do you have any chance of playing the game anywhere near the quality shown in the screen shots and the gameplay videos.
As for bitching about it. Well buy a console. They are supposed to all have the same spec so the game will either run or not run. You know the reviewer is playing it on the same machine as you.
PC means constantly having to upgrade to the latest hardware to play the latest games. Or does it? If you still can stand counter stike then your P3 should be perfect. Or do you really need a higher framerate then refreshrate?
So the answer the question, minimum specs are like the fuel milage in car ads, the prices in holiday ads, playboy women. A work of fiction.
His complaint is that he forgot about the renewal and because of the way they billed him (a month after the renewal) that he had no time to cancel the payment.
Well he can forget complaining about the renewal. The drivel about the x-box not working is meaningless. They are not charging him for a game console. They are charging him for a subscription to network services. Wether or not he uses them is irrelavant.
So the only question remains is if it is okay for MS to bill him so late that he has no time to complain. Then again considering the date, feb. And when it took place. Dec. I think he is out of luck. Had he responded immidiatly to his credit card company he would have had a case since he could have contested the charge under the CC rules. Now no luck. Though. Move faster next time. And never ever do an automatic renewal for stuff that you know is not going to be used for years and years.
One is that on every emerge portage a number of configurations changes are made that are pointless. Like a change of the number of spaces in/etc/fstab. 1. who cares if there are two or three tabs between options? 2./etc/fstab will always be different for the user anyway since the default one has nonsense values.
Anyway on to the init. I do sorta like the init system except the use of the stop-start-daemon. Works fine if everything has well but is as a dumb piece of shit when it doesn't. Will happily insist that something is running when it isn't or that it isn't when it is. Have for some services now changed the scripts to stop using that crap anyway.
Have asked this on the gentoo forum but noone so far has given me a reason let alone a good reason why the stop-start-daemon is used at all. Especially for stuff like apache where the gentoo initscript has less options then apachectl has.
Anyway rebooting just to see the init scripts seems a bit, odd. Kinda like saying you like windows crashes because of the cool splash screen. Get a girl:)
But if you ever do an emerge -u portage and then etc-update make sure you know what you are doing. A lot of the updates you can simply do EXCEPT for the files wich you may have changed. Problem is you may have forgotten and then you could really break something. I had it happen once when I accidently overwrote the net configuration. No a smart move on a remote machine. Noticed it only after hosting provided added hardware and then rebooted it as a very secure server (no netaccess).
Guy at party: Oh you are a doctor? I have this pain in my leg, what do you suggest I would do about it?
Doctor at party: I would see a doctor about it.
Search for doctor jokes and you will find many others and better ones too.
If you have a truck license then expect to be called upon whenever someone around you needs to move house because you want to drive a truck on your off days too. If you are handy then expect to be asked to do DIY stuff so basic you expect a demented 2yr old could do it. Simiarly I ask a girl I know with beautilfull handwriting to write my business christmas cards. Friends know I got lousy handwriting but business relations must be able to read the card to know who it is from.
So I help with computer problems. Only if people are being annoying I stop after a while. Just as the truckdriver doesn't need a rear seat driver or the DIY expert needs your advice, if I fix your computer I am the teacher you are the student and no the student will not surpass the master in this movie thank you very much.
I don't mind technophobes. They let me get on with my work. I mind the idiots who think they know computers because they know the windows desktop a bit. I wouldn't hate MS nearly as much if it wasn't for the kind of people who use it.
You say video game system. I never seen any warning come with my pc. Granted the last time I bought a complete pc we considered diseases like this a curse of god and burned witches but still. Some PC games I think I remember the warning from although the only game manual I got to hand for vietcong makes no warning.
I know epilepsy can be triggered by the flashing effect that results from driving along a row of trees with the sunlight behind them. SO if it is the same in video games then not all games have to come with a warning. A chess game wouldn't flash.
I find this a difficult story. On the one hand I am all darwin. You know you have a disease. Don't play games. Read a book. On the other hand game companies know about the problem. Just print a warning. I am sure any lawyer will insist on it being in the manual.
One thing MS has done right is that you can drag the toolbars. Sure they can occupy half your screen but I have put them all behind each other and removed the useless crap so that is only uses a minimal of vertical, therefore display, space.
That is the one thing I miss on opera. Very nice browser and the tabbing is fastly superior to Firebird (firebird does still open some links in a new window for some reason) but the wasted space is insane. Then again I got this problem with a lot of window layouts. Menu bars are always two third blank space. Put the status bar up there or something.
Of course Opera wins because it doesn't clutter the taskbar. Why do two clicks when you can switch pages with one eh?
There is however one area where Opera is the supreme king of all browsers. RESUME. It is a god send when for whatever reason the browser is closed. Just start later and continue where you left off with all your pages. No more searching for eons for that one site, crash and all your search results lost. Opera you are the best.
You could launch a distro but as has been shown only a few even manage to survive let alone turn a profit. How much change does a supplier of a single program have? A program wich you say is only of use to home users?
If you look at commercial closed source products for the home then you got the same problem however. Doesn't really matter if it is source or binary if people want to steal it. Look at ACDsee, winrar, winzip, winamp 5 (well serves them right for going commercial) and so on.
Only if for some reason your users are going to be moral people or they have an other reason to actually buy your software then I think making a living out of home users is extremly difficult.
Given that if your binary program is popular people are going to crack any protection in a matter of days you might argue that simply not including the protection is actually saving you money and not pissing off paying customers. Then you have to figure out if you are prepared to put in the work and things like bandwidth for the % of thieves vs paying customers.
I wouldn't at this time. But hey maybe IBM's patent for paying opensource developers is going to help out here. Or maybe you can get money from a distro if your app really fills a gap.
But the graphics need to be able to do it. I don't know if you played and were capable of doing it at max level but the lighting was dynamic as well. Meaning that if you blew a hole in a wall the light from the next room would shine through and cast shadows.
This is more then you say had in quake were if you opened a door to a lighted room then the light would NOT spill into the room you were in.
Graphics is not just extra polys to make round pillars. It is also bullet holes in the pillar. Smoke from burning wood. Holes in the wood. And so on.
As for the gameplay. Yeah Silent Storm plays way more like the originals UFO's then Aftermath does. Oh and one tip. Look out if there is a gas cylinder in your line of fire. At least if you got your own men close to the building:P
I have just one problem with the MS will win theor
on
Google v. Microsoft
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I have just one problem with the MS will win theory. It seems to rely on the idea that MS can sell anything it wants even if it is an inferior product. Well lets take a look at that shall we?
Game consoles? Nope. Microsoft Phone? Nope. Interactive TV? Nope. MSN? Nope.
MS is not exactly scoring a 100% with the products it releases. The OS and office suit do well. So do their PDA's although this is because everyone else is really screwing up.
Lets not forget that netscape lost because it couldn't keep up. Linux users will remember being lumbered with Netscape 4.2. Windows users just switched to IE.
So does google loose? Maybe if they screw up but I don't think the bundling thing is going to help MS all that much. MSN is bundled and has so far totally failed to take over the market or turn a profit.
Of course one tiny little detail is that MS doesn't need to make a profit. I cleans out its consumers so much on the OS and office suit it can afford to have several money drains going on at once. MS can afford to screw up countless times. I doubt google has that luxury.
But that is what slashdot is for eh? So multi-processor finally happening? Nice. I still like my dual P3 desktops over single P4's. If finally games are going to take real advantage of it then maybe the time of just upping the frequency is over. Well I can dream can't I?
As for removing the HD? Well assuming of course it is true then the PC will once again be the ultimate platform. A large storage medium allows you to store stuff for later. Things like save games vs save points, patches, upgrades, extra content, user made content etc etc to your hearts content. It is why the pc with all its troubles is still so popular.
Remember Kotor? On the x-box a simple game. The moment it came out on the PC people were hacking it.
Of course only MS knows what is really going to be in the x-box2. If they are really removing the HD I hope for their suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^users they got something to replace its function. Or it is back to "save points".
Oh and those thinking that this is to prevent linux from being run on it. Doesn't really matter that much. It would just have to be a thin client. IE boot over the network.
Two recent games. UFO aftermath and Silent Storm. As I played aftermath I thought looks nice. Great game. A silly person like the article poster would have said that the graphics were great and nothing could have improved on it. Cue Silent storm released shortly after. Where UFO had mostly static scenery in Silent Storm it could be destroyed by your fire. UFO had only outside citylevels and indoor bases. Silent Storm had outside levels with houses you could go in. The graphics were just so much better it is hard to describe. Both are fun and intresting games to play but when compared Silent Storm is just the better game despite its weaker story. (Why am I a WW2 soldier fighting some alien invasion? Isn't WW2 on its own intresting enough anymore?)
And Silent Storm wins because of its graphics. It really makes a difference when you are fighting a heated battle and the enviroment does get damaged. I had a small squad pinned down by a sniper on the third floor who constantly ducked out of the way after taking very accurate shots. My own sniper was busy being patched up. So I had a soldier run up to the side of the house and start throwing grenades at the house. He couldn't reach the floor of the sniper let alone lob one in through the window. He did however manage to hit the outside of the second floor. This blew away the wall allowing the second grenade to sail in easily. Blowing away both floors killing the sniper as he fell two floors.
So yes I think graphics will be continue to be an important improvement. No maybe not in "dumb" shooters like quake where quite honestly the increased power has only been used to create nice decoration. In games like Vietnam, Silent Storm, Operation Flashpoint, the increase in graphics power is however used to create more then just pretty pictures. It is used to create a more realistic enviroment in wich to play. People complain about snipers? Play OFP and see how easy it is to snipe at a player 1 mile away.
Really why do people keep posting these stupid stories? They happen every year and every year they are proven wrong.
Oh and I don't think games like Half-life aged terribly but I do enjoy in more recent games that peoples lips move and there heads in general are more then cubes. No it doesn't matter to much in a frag fest. But when like me you enjoy single player games it does matter.
He is talking about the original System Shock. In case you hadn't noticed by either the titel or the story it was a sequel.
The original System Shock was a ground breaking titel at the time of doom but using a fastly superior engine for the enviroment and a fastly infirior one for the characters. It was I think one of the first true 3d shooters as opposed to dooms and duke nukems 2.5d. It also had a great story and if you had the cd version excellent voice acting.
Sadly it also was about a gazillion times more complex to play then doom. It was however a single player game so really they can't be compared.
As for outdated graphics. If you read the text files on the cd you will read that it has support for 3d headsets. So whenever these things actually appear in shops, System Shock will be THE game again:)
Disclaimer it is of course entirely possible that the poster had intended it as a joke. On slashdot you just never know for certain and System Shock is to nice a game to go unmentioned.
Howabout a story about the cheerleader who was date raped by the jock of the school all because the really nice guy she liked didn't ask her out even though she had been hinting and peer presure meant she had to go to the prom?
Basic principle is that everyone is entitled to appeal their judgement. Courts have been known to be wrong and so their should be nothing put in the way of taking it to the highest court.
EU especially had some pretty stupid rulings overturned by the highest EU court.
Then again a criminal who pleads guilty generally is sentenced less then one who claims innocence and is found guilty. But this has proven very dangerous in american with innocent people pleabargening since they can't afford to prove their innocence.
Of course MS is not innocent but you can't unfortuanlly create a seperate legal system for the evil.
You keep your neck undented. Things in my pocket have to survive me bending over and such. The connectors on portable players always get damaged because of that. Same with the antenna's on old phones. Add to it your keys, loose change and handkerchief and you got a hostile enviroment.
Belt? Even worse in many ways. In a working enviroment things tend to snag. And if you are crawling around after wires this is not nice.
So yeah the collar would be an intresting spot. A safe place on the body. How often do you bump your hips into something and how often your throath?
Of course the original reference was humorous intended but I just dislike it when people automatically snub an idea just because they refuse to think for a second about a new possibilty.
Think about it. Whenever on consumer programs they compare say soup they make the test blind. Meaning that the testers don't know wich brand is in wich bowl so they can't have any prejudices. Kassa is a dutch program that does this and it has some amazing results. The cheapest brand from the cheapest store outranking the most expensive. Happened with Chocolate letters, a gift at sinterklaas.
In medical studies they go even further. They use double blind meaning that no-one except an outsider to the test has knowledge of what is what. So a doctor will give medicine to a patient and neither he nor the patient knowns wether is the tested drug or a placebo.
This however is impossible with stuff you can regonize. There is no double blind surgery tests same as their are no blind car tests. Most software can't be tested this way either. At best you could do something like giving one set version A of drivers and the others version B and then see wich they liked best if you stop them from seeing the version number.
But testing an OS like this? Never. Never mind looks. Unix and windows and tron and qnx are just to0 different. Would be like a comparitive review of apples and onions. Yes you can both fry them in a batter but noone will take such a review serious.
Steel is already dirt cheap with american steel plants unable to compete. Granted this partly because americans make lousy workers and the plants are hopelessly outdated but any savings would be needed to just survive.
Oh and with lousy workers I mean that americans will keep on insisting on being paid more then a starving wage and refuse to do double shifts. The rotters.
What is this constant fad with/.ing? Sure sometimes a site is overloaded but lately I seen constant claims that a site is down while the site loads perfectly fine. Are these people on some kind of hair trigger? If it doesn't load in a pico second it must be down?
A lot has already been said on the stamp part but allow me to point out a few tiny little potential problems.
Non MS software
How to pay? Don't forget that noone has a worldwide network available for payments. And if someone mentions paypal or credit cards I am going to shout American.
How to enforce. Right of appeal? How to prove I didn't sign up for a mailing list? Or that I signed off?
Email is free. Look at how successful moves have been to get people to pay for it.
Nice idea but considering he gives the example that you can filter on the word enlargement shows he doesn't have a clue. Yes Bill thanks for showing us the way. Why haven't we thought of this before.
Laugh at computing as it is now. Oh boy. Since you are the person behind personal computing you are saying that we will laugh at you? Anyway it is old news. Plenty of people already laught. They are the apple or linux or bsd or "anything as long as it not bloody ms" users. Oh well at least he admits that XP is laughable.
The X-box2 is going to be great and take over the market. What like the x-box did? If you are in a three horse race and you finish last (nintendo tied in sales? Check nintendo's real console the GBA in sales. Games for it are full price so they make the same kinda profit on it. More considering the development costs are a whole lot less) then of course you are going to say that the next one is going to be better. It is a famous MS tactic. Don't switch now. Our next one will be really great in fact it will have all the stuff we promised for this one.
Google vs MS. Don't even get me started. Not that I don't think MS can't beat google. Netscape was once the browser. Were are they now? Still it will be a sad day when google goes down the drain. This is the only area that has me worried. All the other is the usual Gates non-sense that makes for a good laugh but google has got an enemy and so far even giants like IBM have been able to win a round against MS.
You don't mention being blacklisted. Were you or were you not? From your story you responded to the spam incident. Wich is something bad ISP's, the once who get listed don't.
If you didn't get blacklisted then your story is misplaced. It is a good story for telling the hidden cost of spam but not to attack blacklists.
Note that I do not equit size with quality. Just that you get what you pay for no matter what the size of the company may be. Sure size matters when it comes to available man power. A 1-man operation can't waste two days just fighting such an incident but a large company may have only 1 man with different duties as well to fight spam.
Donky kong has some. They where LCD games in the 80's or so that folded open and you had two games. I still have one of them somewhere I think that had you playing mario in a bottle factory. Grates would appear at the bottom right and had to be put on a belt wich moved them to the other screen where you had to put them on a higher belt. The trick was controlling both your guys on either screen to move the crates up as they were filled with bottles until finally they went into a truck.
Slashdot Mirror
It is like saying because crimes were solved before DNA it is now not an essential tool for the justice system.
In fact these new technologies are becoming more essential as we are less willing to convict people because they are the wrong color. Sure we could just fry the closest black to a rape or murder again but I prefer that we use DNA profiling and CCTV to catch the real criminals.
The Sims has long been perverted/liberated for those who think there is nothing wrong with a bit of nudity. Morrowind has nude skins and missions wich add a bit of spice. Nevewinternights has some sex laden extensions.
So there is enough out there however the main market for games is japan and america. Most of us can not use games made for japan were adult themed games are an established market and so we mostly see games made in america or at least expecting to make most of their sales in the america.
This means games must be censored to be sold on the shelf. Don't like it? Though. Game developers want to make money and not being able to sell it in walmart or whatever hurts their bottomline.
You will note that many developers even go to the trouble of releasing two versions. One for the free world and one for american :P Vietcong comes in clean cut american pie mode and swear mode.
So I doubt we will be seeing more "adult" games. Although I did read that The Sims 2 will again have the potential for gay relationships. Since this was an accident in the originals sims they now seem to have made a conscious decision to leave it in. If the idea survives in the american release then perhaps their is hope after all.
Basically the minimum specs should be read as this. If you absolutly have to play the game and can not afford to upgrade then yes you can at least with luck play it at more then 1 frame per second when the moon is full.
The recommended spec mean that if you pc meets it then you can turn some of the options on and it won't be a slideshow. When the moon is full.
Only if you exceed the recommended spec by a mile do you have any chance of playing the game anywhere near the quality shown in the screen shots and the gameplay videos.
As for bitching about it. Well buy a console. They are supposed to all have the same spec so the game will either run or not run. You know the reviewer is playing it on the same machine as you.
PC means constantly having to upgrade to the latest hardware to play the latest games. Or does it? If you still can stand counter stike then your P3 should be perfect. Or do you really need a higher framerate then refreshrate?
So the answer the question, minimum specs are like the fuel milage in car ads, the prices in holiday ads, playboy women. A work of fiction.
His complaint is that he forgot about the renewal and because of the way they billed him (a month after the renewal) that he had no time to cancel the payment.
Well he can forget complaining about the renewal. The drivel about the x-box not working is meaningless. They are not charging him for a game console. They are charging him for a subscription to network services. Wether or not he uses them is irrelavant.
So the only question remains is if it is okay for MS to bill him so late that he has no time to complain. Then again considering the date, feb. And when it took place. Dec. I think he is out of luck. Had he responded immidiatly to his credit card company he would have had a case since he could have contested the charge under the CC rules. Now no luck. Though. Move faster next time. And never ever do an automatic renewal for stuff that you know is not going to be used for years and years.
Anyway on to the init. I do sorta like the init system except the use of the stop-start-daemon. Works fine if everything has well but is as a dumb piece of shit when it doesn't. Will happily insist that something is running when it isn't or that it isn't when it is. Have for some services now changed the scripts to stop using that crap anyway.
Have asked this on the gentoo forum but noone so far has given me a reason let alone a good reason why the stop-start-daemon is used at all. Especially for stuff like apache where the gentoo initscript has less options then apachectl has.
Anyway rebooting just to see the init scripts seems a bit, odd. Kinda like saying you like windows crashes because of the cool splash screen. Get a girl :)
But if you ever do an emerge -u portage and then etc-update make sure you know what you are doing. A lot of the updates you can simply do EXCEPT for the files wich you may have changed. Problem is you may have forgotten and then you could really break something. I had it happen once when I accidently overwrote the net configuration. No a smart move on a remote machine. Noticed it only after hosting provided added hardware and then rebooted it as a very secure server (no netaccess).
Guy at party: Oh you are a doctor? I have this pain in my leg, what do you suggest I would do about it?
Doctor at party: I would see a doctor about it.
Search for doctor jokes and you will find many others and better ones too.
If you have a truck license then expect to be called upon whenever someone around you needs to move house because you want to drive a truck on your off days too. If you are handy then expect to be asked to do DIY stuff so basic you expect a demented 2yr old could do it. Simiarly I ask a girl I know with beautilfull handwriting to write my business christmas cards. Friends know I got lousy handwriting but business relations must be able to read the card to know who it is from.
So I help with computer problems. Only if people are being annoying I stop after a while. Just as the truckdriver doesn't need a rear seat driver or the DIY expert needs your advice, if I fix your computer I am the teacher you are the student and no the student will not surpass the master in this movie thank you very much.
I don't mind technophobes. They let me get on with my work. I mind the idiots who think they know computers because they know the windows desktop a bit. I wouldn't hate MS nearly as much if it wasn't for the kind of people who use it.
I know epilepsy can be triggered by the flashing effect that results from driving along a row of trees with the sunlight behind them. SO if it is the same in video games then not all games have to come with a warning. A chess game wouldn't flash.
I find this a difficult story. On the one hand I am all darwin. You know you have a disease. Don't play games. Read a book. On the other hand game companies know about the problem. Just print a warning. I am sure any lawyer will insist on it being in the manual.
That is the one thing I miss on opera. Very nice browser and the tabbing is fastly superior to Firebird (firebird does still open some links in a new window for some reason) but the wasted space is insane. Then again I got this problem with a lot of window layouts. Menu bars are always two third blank space. Put the status bar up there or something.
Of course Opera wins because it doesn't clutter the taskbar. Why do two clicks when you can switch pages with one eh?
There is however one area where Opera is the supreme king of all browsers. RESUME. It is a god send when for whatever reason the browser is closed. Just start later and continue where you left off with all your pages. No more searching for eons for that one site, crash and all your search results lost. Opera you are the best.
End rant
If you look at commercial closed source products for the home then you got the same problem however. Doesn't really matter if it is source or binary if people want to steal it. Look at ACDsee, winrar, winzip, winamp 5 (well serves them right for going commercial) and so on.
Only if for some reason your users are going to be moral people or they have an other reason to actually buy your software then I think making a living out of home users is extremly difficult.
Given that if your binary program is popular people are going to crack any protection in a matter of days you might argue that simply not including the protection is actually saving you money and not pissing off paying customers. Then you have to figure out if you are prepared to put in the work and things like bandwidth for the % of thieves vs paying customers.
I wouldn't at this time. But hey maybe IBM's patent for paying opensource developers is going to help out here. Or maybe you can get money from a distro if your app really fills a gap.
They are the ones who own the Unix trademark, bought up Suse and are kicking SCO in the rear.
So ask the Novell fans for their latest OS. Suse :)
This is more then you say had in quake were if you opened a door to a lighted room then the light would NOT spill into the room you were in.
Graphics is not just extra polys to make round pillars. It is also bullet holes in the pillar. Smoke from burning wood. Holes in the wood. And so on.
As for the gameplay. Yeah Silent Storm plays way more like the originals UFO's then Aftermath does. Oh and one tip. Look out if there is a gas cylinder in your line of fire. At least if you got your own men close to the building :P
Game consoles? Nope. Microsoft Phone? Nope. Interactive TV? Nope. MSN? Nope.
MS is not exactly scoring a 100% with the products it releases. The OS and office suit do well. So do their PDA's although this is because everyone else is really screwing up.
Lets not forget that netscape lost because it couldn't keep up. Linux users will remember being lumbered with Netscape 4.2. Windows users just switched to IE.
So does google loose? Maybe if they screw up but I don't think the bundling thing is going to help MS all that much. MSN is bundled and has so far totally failed to take over the market or turn a profit.
Of course one tiny little detail is that MS doesn't need to make a profit. I cleans out its consumers so much on the OS and office suit it can afford to have several money drains going on at once. MS can afford to screw up countless times. I doubt google has that luxury.
As for removing the HD? Well assuming of course it is true then the PC will once again be the ultimate platform. A large storage medium allows you to store stuff for later. Things like save games vs save points, patches, upgrades, extra content, user made content etc etc to your hearts content. It is why the pc with all its troubles is still so popular.
Remember Kotor? On the x-box a simple game. The moment it came out on the PC people were hacking it.
Of course only MS knows what is really going to be in the x-box2. If they are really removing the HD I hope for their suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^users they got something to replace its function. Or it is back to "save points".
Oh and those thinking that this is to prevent linux from being run on it. Doesn't really matter that much. It would just have to be a thin client. IE boot over the network.
And Silent Storm wins because of its graphics. It really makes a difference when you are fighting a heated battle and the enviroment does get damaged. I had a small squad pinned down by a sniper on the third floor who constantly ducked out of the way after taking very accurate shots. My own sniper was busy being patched up. So I had a soldier run up to the side of the house and start throwing grenades at the house. He couldn't reach the floor of the sniper let alone lob one in through the window. He did however manage to hit the outside of the second floor. This blew away the wall allowing the second grenade to sail in easily. Blowing away both floors killing the sniper as he fell two floors.
So yes I think graphics will be continue to be an important improvement. No maybe not in "dumb" shooters like quake where quite honestly the increased power has only been used to create nice decoration. In games like Vietnam, Silent Storm, Operation Flashpoint, the increase in graphics power is however used to create more then just pretty pictures. It is used to create a more realistic enviroment in wich to play. People complain about snipers? Play OFP and see how easy it is to snipe at a player 1 mile away.
Really why do people keep posting these stupid stories? They happen every year and every year they are proven wrong.
Oh and I don't think games like Half-life aged terribly but I do enjoy in more recent games that peoples lips move and there heads in general are more then cubes. No it doesn't matter to much in a frag fest. But when like me you enjoy single player games it does matter.
The original System Shock was a ground breaking titel at the time of doom but using a fastly superior engine for the enviroment and a fastly infirior one for the characters. It was I think one of the first true 3d shooters as opposed to dooms and duke nukems 2.5d. It also had a great story and if you had the cd version excellent voice acting.
Sadly it also was about a gazillion times more complex to play then doom. It was however a single player game so really they can't be compared.
As for outdated graphics. If you read the text files on the cd you will read that it has support for 3d headsets. So whenever these things actually appear in shops, System Shock will be THE game again :)
Disclaimer it is of course entirely possible that the poster had intended it as a joke. On slashdot you just never know for certain and System Shock is to nice a game to go unmentioned.
Come on. Tell the complete story.
Does he think the other side has robots as well? Or does he not think of them as people?
EU especially had some pretty stupid rulings overturned by the highest EU court.
Then again a criminal who pleads guilty generally is sentenced less then one who claims innocence and is found guilty. But this has proven very dangerous in american with innocent people pleabargening since they can't afford to prove their innocence.
Of course MS is not innocent but you can't unfortuanlly create a seperate legal system for the evil.
Belt? Even worse in many ways. In a working enviroment things tend to snag. And if you are crawling around after wires this is not nice.
So yeah the collar would be an intresting spot. A safe place on the body. How often do you bump your hips into something and how often your throath?
Of course the original reference was humorous intended but I just dislike it when people automatically snub an idea just because they refuse to think for a second about a new possibilty.
In medical studies they go even further. They use double blind meaning that no-one except an outsider to the test has knowledge of what is what. So a doctor will give medicine to a patient and neither he nor the patient knowns wether is the tested drug or a placebo.
This however is impossible with stuff you can regonize. There is no double blind surgery tests same as their are no blind car tests. Most software can't be tested this way either. At best you could do something like giving one set version A of drivers and the others version B and then see wich they liked best if you stop them from seeing the version number.
But testing an OS like this? Never. Never mind looks. Unix and windows and tron and qnx are just to0 different. Would be like a comparitive review of apples and onions. Yes you can both fry them in a batter but noone will take such a review serious.
Oh and with lousy workers I mean that americans will keep on insisting on being paid more then a starving wage and refuse to do double shifts. The rotters.
What is this constant fad with /.ing? Sure sometimes a site is overloaded but lately I seen constant claims that a site is down while the site loads perfectly fine. Are these people on some kind of hair trigger? If it doesn't load in a pico second it must be down?
Nice idea but considering he gives the example that you can filter on the word enlargement shows he doesn't have a clue. Yes Bill thanks for showing us the way. Why haven't we thought of this before.
Laugh at computing as it is now. Oh boy. Since you are the person behind personal computing you are saying that we will laugh at you? Anyway it is old news. Plenty of people already laught. They are the apple or linux or bsd or "anything as long as it not bloody ms" users. Oh well at least he admits that XP is laughable.
The X-box2 is going to be great and take over the market. What like the x-box did? If you are in a three horse race and you finish last (nintendo tied in sales? Check nintendo's real console the GBA in sales. Games for it are full price so they make the same kinda profit on it. More considering the development costs are a whole lot less) then of course you are going to say that the next one is going to be better. It is a famous MS tactic. Don't switch now. Our next one will be really great in fact it will have all the stuff we promised for this one.
Google vs MS. Don't even get me started. Not that I don't think MS can't beat google. Netscape was once the browser. Were are they now? Still it will be a sad day when google goes down the drain. This is the only area that has me worried. All the other is the usual Gates non-sense that makes for a good laugh but google has got an enemy and so far even giants like IBM have been able to win a round against MS.
If you didn't get blacklisted then your story is misplaced. It is a good story for telling the hidden cost of spam but not to attack blacklists.
Note that I do not equit size with quality. Just that you get what you pay for no matter what the size of the company may be. Sure size matters when it comes to available man power. A 1-man operation can't waste two days just fighting such an incident but a large company may have only 1 man with different duties as well to fight spam.
Worked excellent.