In Holland at least credit cards are not nearly as widespread as they seem to be in the US. We have an excellent free debit card system in place. Of course this cannot be used with any of the online style systems (games or consoles). They all require a credit card. I suppose a simple bank tranfer (cheap safe and secure) is to difficult by them.
Why pay for a credit card then pay intrest when you can get better service (protection against theft) for free?
Option 1 would be extremly stupid, everyone and his dog has gotten this one and after reasoned scandals no sane person would try to pull this one. Jail is a very real option for anyone knowingly and willingly defrauding at this time.
Option 2 is also unlikely neither sun or microsoft could be stupid enough to pull something like this. Throwing fud is quite something different from starting lawsuits.
Option 3 could that SCO simply miscalculated. They hoped IBM would simply relicense they would gain a shit load of cash and go away.
As for linus shutting up, what he said is extremely common practice that will be company policy everywhere where research is being done.
That is like saying that since SCO is a tiny little company bravely standing up the giant overpowerfull IBM we should support them.
Companies and people should be judged on the total of their deeds. Youre argument seems to be that a tiny little good deed, most likely motivated by extreme selfintrest (considering they are also fighting antispam laws) should suddenly make us forget all the bad deeds.
I for one am not impressed.
This falls in the same categories as AOL sueing spammers or the money back for the CD price fixing. If you think they did this because they cared about you then life must be a very nice and fluffy place for you.
I could be wrong but isn't the gameboy the best selling computer/console ever? The portable entertainment market is gigantic.
Maybe it is different when you drive a car but when using public transport, portable entertainment becomes extremely attrictive. I think a good 50% is reading a book, listening to music or playing with their phone. Train/bus/tram travel is boring. A good piece of entertainment means youre time spent waiting is spend well. Perhaps even better then those who get there quicker in a car.
As for the playing movies bit, didn't that a HD mp3 player maker come out with one that could play movies? (not apple or creative). This one could obviously record movies (HD) but then again sony is a content owner. They might not be ready to let people do their own drm.
Of course there will be. Evil gamers who buy imported games must be stopped because ehm because because..... else the terrorist will have WON!
Seriously what is it with region encoding. Aren't we supposed to have a global economy? Or does this just mean that manufacturers are free to produce where they want at the cheapest prices regardless of local condiditions but customers are not free to buy?
Nah surely that cannot be it. It would be like suggesting that all those open trade deals the EU and the US have with third world nations benefit the EU and US only.
Does anyone have a clue why some companies still insist on region encoding? Some anime companies seem to make it a point to make their dvd's region free. Doesn't this make it a lot easier to sell? One pressing, ship anywhere?
What is the problem for sony if I buy an imported japanese game. Hell if it uses dvd style region encoding for some weird reason japan and eu are the same anyway. I guess evil americans must be stopped.
Depends, with SCO now clamoring for a hault to all things AIX I think IBM no longer has the luxury to wait it out. You can just imagine sun sales reps going to clients now. "Solaris is in the clear, how are youre aix installs?"
At least they gotta get this threat of every AIX having to be removed out of the way as soon as possible. This kinda stuff does not go overwell with customers planning the purchase of a million dollar setup.
The thing is that SCO is not a single person. While ridicolous defences may be a tactic if you got nothing left to lose, they are on the attack. Surely some of the lawyers must think they got a real case.
At least I seem to remember that a lawyer maybe held accountable if he does not properly inform his clients on a case.
Well, about the question if IBM might have signed a stupid contract like this. Can anyone remember wich bunch of idiots failed to see the coming of the PC and through that effectivly gave MS a free run?
There might be an even simpler explenation at least in europe/japan. Mobile phones and computer games.
These two items, espiaccly the first have become a significant part of young peoples spending. A lot are even getting themselves in debt because of the phone costs.
Since you can spend money only once you got to spend less on something else. If you like at the rise in phones, and to a lesser extent games it shows that young people still spend the same just on more different industries.
American gasoline is extremely cheap compared to europe because of the lack of taxes on fuel. So americans drive far more causing an awful lot of polution.
Slap on a huge tax increase and you will kill two birds with one stone. More americans who will walk (okay waddle) and it will reduce polution.
The more realistic a game is the more data has to be transmitted to reflect the users actions.
The simplist of these is stance. In quake there really is only 1 hitmodel no matter wich physical model you play with. In war games you can usually crouch/layflat/lean/stand.
Damage in quake is a simple number. In war games it usually is area specific.
Of course a lot of this is also down to the network code being used. But since aa is based on ut (if I remember correctly) it shouldn't be to bad.
For you fears of youre machine not being able to run it. If it can run it reasonbly in single play (I doubt it) the addition of the network handling shouldn't be to much of a problem. lets face it we played lag free games on P1's with the original quake.
I had to use one as a server for a while (development) and we also had to lock them away as anything left on the desk would evaporate. The heat generated melted my chocolate biscuites two drawers up. Mmmm, melted chocolate.
Laptops are very very bad with heat. They are not really designed to run 24/7.
So as others suggested the Mini-ITX is cheaper, more efficient and a lot more likely to stand up to working 24/7. You can also add decent harddrives and memory.
The interviewer asks why sierra is no longer the company it once was. Read to the very bottom of the article and you will see the answer.
After talking to Bill Gates (Just the person to ask about making profit on games:) he decided to switch the company around. No longer make HIT games but focus on edutainment (yah kid love that) and renewable games.
So who killed Sierra, the founder after talking to gates.
Now valve has added a new monster. Some horrible creature that attachs itself to its victim chest in pairs. Just look at what it did to that young boy.
a girl you say? In half-life? Yeah, like I will fall for that one.
Geez, they cloned him of course so they could make a sequel even after killing of the main character. Didn't you watch alien?
Talking of that what was the ending again of soldier boy? If I remember correctly he wasn't given the choice. And I never played blue shift. Anyone care to fill me in?
mmm, the problem is actually very simple with rumbling mouse. If the mouse shakes so does the input. Do you really want extra shaking introduced in youre controlls? Game pads don't have this problem as the ones I ever used had only off-on controlls anyway.
Note however that there is a difference between rumble packs and force feedback. The first just introduce a bit of shaking to simulate the FEELING of driving over gravel, force feedback tries to simulate the EFFECT of driving over gravel.
So a rumble-pack shakes the wheel as you drive. A force feedback wheel will turn the wheel forcing you to fight against the controls, just like a real car. I think a very real difference.
The X-box controller has a rumble-pack. There is no force feedback affecting the controls.
Try putting force-feedback into a mouse has been tried, and the results so far are disappointing.
Of course with Doom3, half-life 2 and deus-ex 2 I already have more then enough games lined up but does anyone know if they are still going to do Halo for the pc?
If SCO has the case thrown out doesn't that open the door for every linux distro out there to sue there pants off for damages due to any lost sales?
Them sending a warning notice seems odd since it seems always to be up to a judge to decide if a company has to cease trading or can continue while the courtcase is being heard.
What does so far seem to be IBM's reaction to this? We got a lot of people talking but anyone have info if IBM is looking to either blow SCO out of the water, settle or simply buy them?
What is the key selling point of lindows in youre eyes? For most of the existing linux fans Lindows seems a bit light weight compared to other distros so I presume you are not really aiming it at us.
How then do you see lindows competing with windows. Is it purely going to be on price or do you feel other things might be used to win the non-linux fans over to youre distro?
Are there any results available on customer satisfaction? MS has reasoned that computers sold without one their OSes preinstalled would instead be loaded with pirated versions. Have you got any figures available that could help to dispute this?
Good luck in court, hope you succeed where most others have failed.
If you never heard of syberia and liked "The longest Journey" then you are missing something. It is a great adventure and a sequel is in the making.
The lead character is a young woman lawyer send to finalize a deal. She is then slowly drawn into a mysterie surrounding the factory she was supposed to deal with.
http://www.syberia.info/
It may even be out on budget by now.
Oh and for those who question why the original article didn't mention either title. Game girl is a console site. These games are PC only.
Actuallly I could swear there was a PC game with rpg element that used this. I think it was old 286 era but at a point you started to lose constitution for youre main character.
First of ident is not insecure by itself. Some implementations had buffer overflow problems, but then wich server software hasn't. It can also provide login information like the username but this depends on the setup. For correct working, IRC related, it just needs to return a string on query.
So why? IRC is well known for countless attacks against the servers and the users of it. It really seems to bring out the worst in a large group of people who, perhaps encouraged by anonymity(?), feel they can do anything to make other peoples use of the service a hassle.
So how to defend against it? Knowing who a user is is the easiest defence. You can then ban that person from entering youre chatroom/network. There are a couple of pieces of information that are known when you use IRC.
Youre nick. Obviously needs to be there but can be easily randomly changed or be changed to the nicks of other people. Useless for identification therefore. Ban on nick is useless except to stop unwanted nicknames.
Youre IP/hostname. Not really unique, think proxy situations and for some people extremely easy to change. Modem users and users of shell accounts. Ban on IP doesn't work since it could also affect a large group of innocent users who use the same network.
Ident. This is an extra service run on port 113 it reports on query a string containing data corresponding to user information. In fact all you can be really certain of is that if it runs it will return something when you connect to it. Mine for instance always responds the same info. It can also be setup to return a random string each time. Pretty useless therefore as well.
So why require ident to be running? Can't it be as easily changed as the nick? Yes it can, on certain setups. However if you are using/abusing a shell account then the Ident service should be fixed by the admin. It makes therefore the misuse of a certain kinda setup harder (University accounts). Shell accounts are popular for abuse since you are using someone elses IP for youre abuse.
Other posts have indicated that there are plenty of Ident servers for windows around. Saying just because windows does not support something it is obsolete is stupid. There are plenty of things on windows you need third party apps for.
Perhaps the real problem with this question is that to many people feel they have a right to use/abuse a service run by someone else. IRC is a free service run by people who out of their kindness of their hearts run one of the most attacked services on the net. If they then require you to run a tiny little program to make their live easier then so be it. Don't like the rules? Don't use the service. Think you can do better? Run youre own.
Think about. That politicians can be corrupt is nothing new. Kinda amazing is how cheap they go nowadays. Billion dollar merges passed on 100.000 dollars? Tax deductable! Neat. Anyone happen to know how much Al Capone paid vs Bill Gates?
Ah but thank god for democracy. Once the voter learns about this they will surely elect better leaders next time.:P
Oh and for the american bashers/defenders if you want a real laugh follow the dutch political circus for the last year. Makes america look like kindergarden. At least americans betray the voter for good old cash. Over here they are just plain incompetent.
I grant you that perhaps it depends on what you mean by "prettier". If you mean flashy, lots of lens flares and light effect, well you might be right, not my type of game. OFP goes for long range detail. Being able to switch the distance to 4km and see a tank platoon come all the way into range during dusk is great but it lacks the visual drama that most consoles go for. Different styles/tastes I suppose.
So is my vid card worth it? Well when I try the same on a lower specced machine it will not draw to the same distance or with the same texture size. Since I like the huge distances and the sense of immersion it brings it is worth it for me. As for having to rationlize my spending, I am sorry to dissappoint you but pc hardware falls into the hobby department for me and I am old enough to be able to afford it easily.
Don't try to impose youre tastes onto mine. I never claimed that Consoles are better or worse then a pc. Just different. But when you try to claim that consoles can outperform a top of the range PC you need to take a reality check. If you don't trust me, I wouldn't, go ask the developers of games that come out both for PC and platform. You will almost always find that the PC version has better graphics.
But it will be very easy for you to convince me. Show me the OFP version for the X-box that they are producing and show me the same draw distances that I can do on my pc. Until you can I will claim that my pc, and those of most dedicated gamers, wich costs more then all consoles put together, will outperform any off them. I am ready to be proven wrong. Are you?
I am not at all an expert on those bikes or even a fan. I was trying to make a point that fans can forgive a lot. My nephew certainly seemed not to mind to have to rebuild a bike from scratch not because it was old but because it had never been properly build in the first place. He owns several machines from different times and I was amazed he wanted this one that he knew would be trouble. It reminded me of the mac user whose machine crashed severeral times per day and still loved it. As for era a previous poster pointed that one out.
Not for one thing or an other but couldn't this more reflect on the women you date then on the Mac users? Just because it rained when I was in belgium does not mean it always rains in belgium.
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Why pay for a credit card then pay intrest when you can get better service (protection against theft) for free?
As for linus shutting up, what he said is extremely common practice that will be company policy everywhere where research is being done.
Companies and people should be judged on the total of their deeds. Youre argument seems to be that a tiny little good deed, most likely motivated by extreme selfintrest (considering they are also fighting antispam laws) should suddenly make us forget all the bad deeds.
I for one am not impressed.
This falls in the same categories as AOL sueing spammers or the money back for the CD price fixing. If you think they did this because they cared about you then life must be a very nice and fluffy place for you.
I could be wrong but isn't the gameboy the best selling computer/console ever? The portable entertainment market is gigantic.
Maybe it is different when you drive a car but when using public transport, portable entertainment becomes extremely attrictive. I think a good 50% is reading a book, listening to music or playing with their phone. Train/bus/tram travel is boring. A good piece of entertainment means youre time spent waiting is spend well. Perhaps even better then those who get there quicker in a car.
As for the playing movies bit, didn't that a HD mp3 player maker come out with one that could play movies? (not apple or creative). This one could obviously record movies (HD) but then again sony is a content owner. They might not be ready to let people do their own drm.
Seriously what is it with region encoding. Aren't we supposed to have a global economy? Or does this just mean that manufacturers are free to produce where they want at the cheapest prices regardless of local condiditions but customers are not free to buy?
Nah surely that cannot be it. It would be like suggesting that all those open trade deals the EU and the US have with third world nations benefit the EU and US only.
Does anyone have a clue why some companies still insist on region encoding? Some anime companies seem to make it a point to make their dvd's region free. Doesn't this make it a lot easier to sell? One pressing, ship anywhere?
What is the problem for sony if I buy an imported japanese game. Hell if it uses dvd style region encoding for some weird reason japan and eu are the same anyway. I guess evil americans must be stopped.
At least they gotta get this threat of every AIX having to be removed out of the way as soon as possible. This kinda stuff does not go overwell with customers planning the purchase of a million dollar setup.
The thing is that SCO is not a single person. While ridicolous defences may be a tactic if you got nothing left to lose, they are on the attack. Surely some of the lawyers must think they got a real case.
At least I seem to remember that a lawyer maybe held accountable if he does not properly inform his clients on a case.
Well, about the question if IBM might have signed a stupid contract like this. Can anyone remember wich bunch of idiots failed to see the coming of the PC and through that effectivly gave MS a free run?
These two items, espiaccly the first have become a significant part of young peoples spending. A lot are even getting themselves in debt because of the phone costs.
Since you can spend money only once you got to spend less on something else. If you like at the rise in phones, and to a lesser extent games it shows that young people still spend the same just on more different industries.
Slap on a huge tax increase and you will kill two birds with one stone. More americans who will walk (okay waddle) and it will reduce polution.
The more realistic a game is the more data has to be transmitted to reflect the users actions.
The simplist of these is stance. In quake there really is only 1 hitmodel no matter wich physical model you play with. In war games you can usually crouch/layflat/lean/stand.
Damage in quake is a simple number. In war games it usually is area specific.
Of course a lot of this is also down to the network code being used. But since aa is based on ut (if I remember correctly) it shouldn't be to bad.
For you fears of youre machine not being able to run it. If it can run it reasonbly in single play (I doubt it) the addition of the network handling shouldn't be to much of a problem. lets face it we played lag free games on P1's with the original quake.
Laptops are very very bad with heat. They are not really designed to run 24/7.
So as others suggested the Mini-ITX is cheaper, more efficient and a lot more likely to stand up to working 24/7. You can also add decent harddrives and memory.
After talking to Bill Gates (Just the person to ask about making profit on games :) he decided to switch the company around. No longer make HIT games but focus on edutainment (yah kid love that) and renewable games.
So who killed Sierra, the founder after talking to gates.
a girl you say? In half-life? Yeah, like I will fall for that one.
Talking of that what was the ending again of soldier boy? If I remember correctly he wasn't given the choice. And I never played blue shift. Anyone care to fill me in?
Note however that there is a difference between rumble packs and force feedback. The first just introduce a bit of shaking to simulate the FEELING of driving over gravel, force feedback tries to simulate the EFFECT of driving over gravel.
So a rumble-pack shakes the wheel as you drive. A force feedback wheel will turn the wheel forcing you to fight against the controls, just like a real car. I think a very real difference.
The X-box controller has a rumble-pack. There is no force feedback affecting the controls.
Try putting force-feedback into a mouse has been tried, and the results so far are disappointing.
Of course with Doom3, half-life 2 and deus-ex 2 I already have more then enough games lined up but does anyone know if they are still going to do Halo for the pc?
Them sending a warning notice seems odd since it seems always to be up to a judge to decide if a company has to cease trading or can continue while the courtcase is being heard.
What does so far seem to be IBM's reaction to this? We got a lot of people talking but anyone have info if IBM is looking to either blow SCO out of the water, settle or simply buy them?
How then do you see lindows competing with windows. Is it purely going to be on price or do you feel other things might be used to win the non-linux fans over to youre distro?
Are there any results available on customer satisfaction? MS has reasoned that computers sold without one their OSes preinstalled would instead be loaded with pirated versions. Have you got any figures available that could help to dispute this?
Good luck in court, hope you succeed where most others have failed.
If you never heard of syberia and liked "The longest Journey" then you are missing something. It is a great adventure and a sequel is in the making. The lead character is a young woman lawyer send to finalize a deal. She is then slowly drawn into a mysterie surrounding the factory she was supposed to deal with. http://www.syberia.info/ It may even be out on budget by now. Oh and for those who question why the original article didn't mention either title. Game girl is a console site. These games are PC only.
Actuallly I could swear there was a PC game with rpg element that used this. I think it was old 286 era but at a point you started to lose constitution for youre main character.
First of ident is not insecure by itself. Some implementations had buffer overflow problems, but then wich server software hasn't. It can also provide login information like the username but this depends on the setup. For correct working, IRC related, it just needs to return a string on query.
So why? IRC is well known for countless attacks against the servers and the users of it. It really seems to bring out the worst in a large group of people who, perhaps encouraged by anonymity(?), feel they can do anything to make other peoples use of the service a hassle.
So how to defend against it? Knowing who a user is is the easiest defence. You can then ban that person from entering youre chatroom/network. There are a couple of pieces of information that are known when you use IRC.
So why require ident to be running? Can't it be as easily changed as the nick? Yes it can, on certain setups. However if you are using/abusing a shell account then the Ident service should be fixed by the admin. It makes therefore the misuse of a certain kinda setup harder (University accounts). Shell accounts are popular for abuse since you are using someone elses IP for youre abuse.
Other posts have indicated that there are plenty of Ident servers for windows around. Saying just because windows does not support something it is obsolete is stupid. There are plenty of things on windows you need third party apps for.
Perhaps the real problem with this question is that to many people feel they have a right to use/abuse a service run by someone else. IRC is a free service run by people who out of their kindness of their hearts run one of the most attacked services on the net. If they then require you to run a tiny little program to make their live easier then so be it. Don't like the rules? Don't use the service. Think you can do better? Run youre own.
Ah but thank god for democracy. Once the voter learns about this they will surely elect better leaders next time. :P
Oh and for the american bashers/defenders if you want a real laugh follow the dutch political circus for the last year. Makes america look like kindergarden. At least americans betray the voter for good old cash. Over here they are just plain incompetent.
I grant you that perhaps it depends on what you mean by "prettier". If you mean flashy, lots of lens flares and light effect, well you might be right, not my type of game. OFP goes for long range detail. Being able to switch the distance to 4km and see a tank platoon come all the way into range during dusk is great but it lacks the visual drama that most consoles go for. Different styles/tastes I suppose.
So is my vid card worth it? Well when I try the same on a lower specced machine it will not draw to the same distance or with the same texture size. Since I like the huge distances and the sense of immersion it brings it is worth it for me. As for having to rationlize my spending, I am sorry to dissappoint you but pc hardware falls into the hobby department for me and I am old enough to be able to afford it easily.
Don't try to impose youre tastes onto mine. I never claimed that Consoles are better or worse then a pc. Just different. But when you try to claim that consoles can outperform a top of the range PC you need to take a reality check. If you don't trust me, I wouldn't, go ask the developers of games that come out both for PC and platform. You will almost always find that the PC version has better graphics.
But it will be very easy for you to convince me. Show me the OFP version for the X-box that they are producing and show me the same draw distances that I can do on my pc. Until you can I will claim that my pc, and those of most dedicated gamers, wich costs more then all consoles put together, will outperform any off them. I am ready to be proven wrong. Are you?
I am not at all an expert on those bikes or even a fan. I was trying to make a point that fans can forgive a lot. My nephew certainly seemed not to mind to have to rebuild a bike from scratch not because it was old but because it had never been properly build in the first place. He owns several machines from different times and I was amazed he wanted this one that he knew would be trouble. It reminded me of the mac user whose machine crashed severeral times per day and still loved it. As for era a previous poster pointed that one out.
Not for one thing or an other but couldn't this more reflect on the women you date then on the Mac users? Just because it rained when I was in belgium does not mean it always rains in belgium.