(For instance, there is a term for the Buddhist death-rebirth cycle the author mentions in the article... it's "metempsychosis". However, it's very rarely used, because how often does your average American discuss cycular reincarnation?)
I think the funny part there is that I might have implicitly glossed over use of the word metempsychosis (as I've heard it a few times through high school and college), but wasn't quite sure exactly where he was going with the description in the article (maybe I was asleep).
The primary one is one of the Final Fantasy ports (FF Anthology).
A quick search brought up a few pages saying that the following games have been confirmed by Sony not to work on the PS2, but then the above is the only one I have on this list:
Arcade Party Pak, Atari Arcade Greatest Hits, Fighter Maker, Final Fantasy Anthology, International Track and Field, Judge Dredd, Monkey Hero, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, Tomba.
I'll just do the same thing I did with this generation of consoles:
1) Buy games for previous generation console dirt cheap when new console is released.
2) Wait for new console to have 3 or more games that I must have.
3) Buy the new console and the 3 or more games.
4) Repeat.
Gee, I wonder why I have 4 consoles and am considering buying a PSOne for the PS1 games I own that won't play on the PS2. This is what taught me:
5) Don't sell the old system until I've tested every single game I already have on the new system (if the new system makes any claims of backwards compatability).
I can buy switches to handle as many consoles as I could possibly collect. I can buy ports (or sequels that manage to replace the games they follow) to reduce my need for older consoles. When I don't play a console very much I can even box it up and store it in a closet until I just need to play that game. I can't get my old games and systems back if I sell them, though, and I see no reason not to preserve these old games for my daughter should she ever show any interest in retro gaming later in her life (though by then she may just be able to zap them all into some VR rig for pennies a ROM).
SFU has been around for a while, also under the name Interix. The primary difference is that it is now free, and they appear to be planning to ship it with the next version of Windows. Either way, they've been selling this to people switching over Unix servers for quite some time. Dropping the price and eventually shipping it with Windows was simply a matter of time.
Some markets dominated by Unix may look at this option, though I doubt they will in fairly new installations where the option was already there for consideration, but, on the other hand, things like renderfarms, where the overhead of the OS is part of the reason they use *nix in the first place, it's unlikely they'll ever consider any version of Windows other than the embedded products.
GNU software has been shipped with commertal software for a very long time and is still done today. What you can't do is use open source code in a product that will be shipped binary only.
So far so good... excepting spelling, of course
If the commertal parts of SFU contain open source code then Microsoft can't ship.
I think you're confused. SFU, until the most recent version, was a commercial product that MS sold for many years, with GPL code included. They have always given access to the GPL code, and included it in a commercial product. Remember, binary-only and commercial are not the same thing.
However this begs the question why did Microsoft use GCC and not Microsoft C++? Hmmm?
Because Microsoft C++ doesn't have any need for the GCC extensions and other factors that would complicate MS C++ while only adding minor benefits. Additionally, SFU was not originally developed by Microsoft. Using GCC makes porting Unix applications easier, since most of the applications being ported were originally developed under GCC. The idea is that you could do very little work to get an application running under Interix (now SFU), and then eventually spend the extra time writing the application as a native Windows app. The article also points out that they may be working on a way to allow Windows and Unix code to work together (which they can't do currently outside of some external communication system), which would most likely be done under MS C++, especially given the increased standards-compliance of MS C++ over the last couple of releases (though, again, they may have to add some GNU extensions).
Maybe it has something to do with the commertal product being absolut garbage.
it's the fault of all the Wal-Marts and Best Buys in the world that employ people that don't ask for id when someone young-looking tries to buy a M rated game,
Best Buy specifically has a trigger in their system for M-rated games that tells the employee to check ID, regardless of how young or old you look. I know this because I asked what tripped it when they asked me, when I was buying 2 games (M and T) and 2 movies (NR and R). Wal-Mart has the same thing for movies, but I'm not sure if they do for games as well.
On the other hand, the specialty stores seem to have much more variance on how they treat the issue, by which I mean that the individual behind the counter really seems to determine whether or not IDs are checked.
Then again, having the system automatically prompt for an ID check doesn't always work too well, as seen by the many times I've noticed checkers hitting 5555 to bypass the birth-date check when I buy cigarettes, despite the fact that both states I've lived in require checking IDs for anyone under 30 buying tobacco.
As someone mentioned above, though, who's homeowners association fees are 10-20% of the purchase price of their house?
In any case, I refuse to buy a home wherever there is a homeowners association as well, simply because I won't pay someone to tell me what to do with my own home, not to mention the little clause in most homeowners associations that allow them to kick you out.
I think he might have meant that Tengen games in general were found to be fine (the Tetris issue is a whole 'nother ballgame). But in general, I believe Game Over shows that Tengen games were legit and Nintendo wasn't able to stop them.
After looking around a bit longer, and some refreshment of my memory, this link: http://www.nesplayer.com/features/lawsuits/ tengen. htm
pointed out that Tengen was a spin-off of Atari, and directly related to the Atari lawsuit I mentioned previously. Additionally, many articles referencing Tengen titles other than Tetris refer to their rarity, due to the titles being removed after losing the lawsuit (Atari vs. Nintendo).
Tengen had a handful of officially licensed games, but their unlicensed titles were pulled and destroyed. All simply because a group at Tengen had reverse-engineered the chip normally used to authenticate the cartridges (supposedly they had a functional cartridge at the same time, but were 'tainted' by the work to reverse engineer the chip). In the end Tengen folded primarily due to legal costs and the unwillingness of their parents companies to continue funding them.
Remember back in the NES days when (I think it was) Tengen came out with several games that Nintendo didn't like, and so did not receive the Nintendo Seal of Approval? Games like Gauntlet, Tetris (a Tetris that more closely resembled the arcade version than Nintendo's own) and others were available on the shelves. Nintendo tried to get them removed through the court system, and lost.
I think you need to look that case history up. Tengen lost, for not having a valid license to release Tetris in the US (the license being from the Russian creator of Tetris), and all copies of Tengen Tetris were removed from the shelves and destroyed. Tengen didn't suffer monetary damages simply because they had licensed Tetris from Mirrorsoft. Therefore Mirrorsoft, who did not have the license to sell to Tengen in the first place, had to pay the fines.
Furthermore, to get to a case more along the lines of what could happen when trying to ship an "un-approved" disc, you could look up Atari vs. Nintendo. In that case, Atari lost the right to distribute Nintendo-compatible cartridges because they had reverse-engineered a system used on Nintendo cartridges to authenticate the games before the console would launch the program. Another case, against a company called Color Dreams, went against Nintendo because the company did not use Nintendo's copyrighted material to get their unlicensed games to run on the system.
Therefore, if SNK were to release an "un-approved" disc, it would pretty much have to have been developed without a Sony dev kit, which means none of their Japanese-released PS1 or PS2 titles would be applicable.
The difference, though, is that SNK is dealing with fairly new games, whereas Nintendo is porting 20-year-old games to a handheld.
So, when you want the latest King of Fighters, you either import it and mod your console, or you have to wait for SCEA to approve it, and you end up with a 2-in-1 pack that's been censored.
hmm I have 2 gamecubes, a GB Player, 2 GBA SPs, a GBA, 4 Wavebirds, and 3 TVs in my apartment. Unfortunately, none of the TVs is very portable (and one of them has a colour shift that needs to be fixed).
That being said, I know people with 5 TVs in their homes, and I know people with Gamecubes. I just don't think I know anyone that cares enough about FF:CC to put all of it together to get the 5 TVs, 5 GCs, 4 GB Players, and 4 Wavebirds all in the same room when we could just use 2 TVs, 2 GCs, 1 GBP, 2 GBA SPs, 1 GBA, and a Wavebird.
In reality, the most expensive things are the Cubes and the largest TV. Most of the stuff is assumed to be things you and your friends already have (ie the Cubes, TVs, and controllers).
Despite this being off-topic, don't forget that every time you buy a new game for the PS2, you're sending cash to one of the RIAA's and MPAA's biggest members.
After all, Sony isn't actually making as much money from either music or movies as they are from video games, despite the number of movie and music studios they own.
The US has the highest taxation percentage in the world when you factor in the many hidden taxes.
Do you have a source for this statement, or is it simply conjecture?
I'm personally taxed around 30%, with an additional 5-10% taken out for medicare/social security.
I'm taxed around 25% by the federal government, plus the additions for medicare and social security, which come out to ~7% of my gross income when combined, most of which is social security (medicare is ~1%). The parts that irritate me there are that I will likely never see the SS money, and the medicare comes out to more than the cost of my own health and dental benefits.
Then with the income I have left, I pay 8.5% on every purchase I make, 3.5% on my mortgage for property taxes, 65 dollars a year for vehicle registration, tolls on the roads I drive on, exhorbitant tax on gasoline, alcholol, and tobacco.
Most of these are state taxes, though a few are mixed taxes (alcohol, tobacco, gasoline, iirc). I pay a state income tax between 4 and 5 % in addition to these (which could explain your 30% previously), but when I lived in California the state income tax was more like 10%, and tobacco was significantly higher (tobacco taxes vary from city to city here in Virginia, but I can buy a pack for $2 in Richmond, whereas in San Diego, CA, I was paying easily $4/pack 2 years ago). In some states there is no sales tax, and in most states they vary by city (because sales tax is solid income for the state, county, and city). Here, for instance, there's an 11% tax on prepared food, but no tax on most grocery items. Anything else tends to run in the 4% range. I also pay property taxes on my car which run in the 10% of the car's value (based on whatever they decide the car is worth, usually without looking at it), though there are some tax rebates that reduce that cost, as well as state and city stickers with additional costs, and the registration cost. They're all fairly small (except the property tax, but again most of that has been rebated, for now), but they add up.
We even get double taxed on a portion of our income, as social security is based on your before tax income, even though a large portion of that you will never see. Then when you get older, all of the social security taxes you paid may give you back some social security payments, which you will have to pay taxes on.
Not to mention that you're getting taxed when you get the money as well as when you spend it.
Let's also not forget that most of the products we buy are imported, and they are taxed at importation and that cost is passed along to us.
Solution: don't buy so many imported products... Never mind that in many areas we have lower import taxes than other countries, and that you can import goods from some countries (and/or in some categories of goods) with no taxes on the importation.
Their are infrastructure taxes on every form of communication, usage taxes, 911 taxes, about 50% tax of various kinds on airline tickets.
Don't forget that many airline taxes are local as well, though since 9/11 many new federal taxes have been added.
So tell me please, how the US has lower taxation and all of those stupid socialist countries pay way higher taxes for things like universal health care, etc.
It's really quite simple: everything you're complaining about exists to some extent in those other countries, but that first tax (the 30% income tax) is higher, as well.
I sat down one day and did the math, and by the time I was done, I realized that about 68% of my income goes to paying one form of tax or another. Think about that before you go spouting off your inaccurate tax comparisons between the US and the "socialist" countries.
Think about a few of the taxes you're complaining about and why they've been implemented. Start working at the local, state, and federal level to repeal some of those taxes, and to change the way tax
This is probably the easiest place to get information on the matter, though it's not exactly unbiased (being a lobby group for foreign companies operating in the US). You can do more searching for yourself, but of course google searches take a while to cut through the current campaign fluff on the issues.
I went to High School in the seventies, the class valedictorian was by far the most respected student there. He was not in any sports but was the nicest guy in the entire school. He is now our family doctor. Things are different today, it's not that we didn't have some of the same things going on.
I graduated from High School 8 years ago (class of '96). Our class valedictorian was a very respected student, one of the nicest girls I knew in the place. I'm not sure what she's doing today, I didn't keep in touch with most of the people in school and moved across the country 2 years ago. Still, I was always impressed by how hard she worked to maintain her GPA, and that she still had time to work part-time and volunteer in the community.
But today it's just more extreme. People got beat up in school or about something that happened at school that never got settled, not often but it happened. Today people get killed in school,not often but it happens.
When I was in school, people got beat up, generally at the beginning and end of the school year, when it was 100 degrees outside and everyone tended to be a little short on temper. My first year of high school, someone brought a gun to school with the intent of shooting one of the Vice Principles (who was generally hated by many students, not that it justifies anything). Someone saw the gun in his bag and reported it before he did anything.
3 years after I graduated, someone brought a gun to the other high school in the same city, and shot a few students. Within hours people from all over the country were discussing why the school should have metal detectors and security officers and this and that. Anyone that ever attended high school in San Diego County (outside of the city schools) could have told them that metal detectors wouldn't work, because every class room's door opens to the outside (as do the bathrooms, where the shots were fired). Security officers were on campus at every school in the district when I was attending, as well as when the shootings took place (but they increased the numbers almost immediately afterwards). A couple of weeks later someone shot at the administrative building at another school in the same district.
In many ways, students have been treated like prisoners from the time I started attending school. In high school I was required to take 5 courses every semester, regardless of what I needed to graduate, simply because a student has to attend for a certain number of hours to be counted for the cash the state hands out to public schools. Students couldn't leave campus for lunch, and were confined to a particular area of the campus to make sure they could be watched. The zero tolerance policies for violence mean that students looking to commit violence know that there's a good chance that the student they want to attack will not fight back, as both students will be punished if that happens. No lockers were supplied to students because they would be expensive and were found to lead to increased drug use and violence (as students kept drugs and weapons in their lockers). But without lockers, students were often required to leave their posessions in classrooms during assemblies, so that searches could be made of their bags without large protests, often with drug dogs brought in to speed things up. One student's parents sued the school because they had signed a waiver allowing the school to force their daughter to take a drug test; they were under the impression (somehow) that they had to sign and submit the permission slip to prevent the school from performing the drug tests.
There is a big difference. The popular songs talked about alot of things. Sex, drugs, love etc. Now I hear songs that talk about popping a cap in someones ass. Or a dead girl friend in the trunk. Things are different, while alot of themes are similiar, it's just alot more extreme.
Most popular songs are still about sex, drugs, love, etc. The extreme ends, or the things that people get up in arm
The decline in the education system over the years certainly has a tremendous impact in this area but I feel it also has a lot to do with the trend to ship the jobs overseas. It started with manual labor jobs and has slowly worked it's way to the tech jobs.
The US has approximately a 5:1 ratio of jobs shipped into the US by foreign companies vs. jobs shipped out of the US by US companies. In other words, we gain far more jobs from foreign companies shipping jobs overseas than we lose by shipping jobs overseas.
Of course, there is a slight lag in the types of jobs being equatable. When people started complaining that jobs in the automobile industry were being shipped overseas, there was a period during which there weren't many foreign auto makers opening new plants in the US. Now, though, if you buy a Japanese or German car in the US, it's almost (or possibly more) as likely to have been built in the US as an American car.
As was the case in the past, the jobs being shipped overseas are most often jobs that require fairly limited skills that are easy for people to pick up. Additionally, people were getting used to getting paid fairly well for those jobs (in the past due to labour unions negotiating wages too high to be sustainable for the corporation--the same thing happened in some companies in the Asian auto industry in the last decade; in the case of tech jobs due to the.com bubble), and many of the companies folded or downsized. When people went looking for jobs elsewhere after losing their jobs, they found that the jobs they were looking for were paying too little, no longer available, or being shipped overseas.
The simple reality is that there are fewer openings available for people in those positions, even when you include all of the openings that are now appearing overseas. Furthermore, because we've managed to reduce the expectations of customers to the point where even the higher levels of tech support are handled with fairly simple scripts, the lowest levels of support, where you'd normally hire the most people with the least amount of education, can, in many cases, be completely replaced with a computer and a handful of more highly educated individuals to support and maintain that computer (maybe even the upper-level support staff can handle some of this burden, such as adding new questions/answers to it's database).
Declines in the education system can probably be addressed with a completely new post. It's really almost irrelevant because many of the people these jobs are being shipped to are being educated specifically to perform these jobs (improving their English and studying linguistics to remove accents as best as possible in a short time), and because the level of education comes down to less than that expected (but not always shown) from a high school graduate.
I wouldn't expect a new card NOT to beat out the current cards.
It's fairly common, although the previous generation of nVidia cards didn't seem to manage too well. On the other hand, beating them by 100% (2x performance in some of the tests), is quite an achievment, and is quite uncommon.
ATI and Nvidia have played this catchup game with each other for years.
and before that it was nVidia and 3dfx, and before that it wasn't even a competition as 3dfx had it in hand (and before that it wasn't about 3d graphics for consumer PCs). The 3d game is still fairly young, and the only comparable experience to ATI's takeover of the market was nVidia's own takeover vs. 3dfx. To see that history may not repeat itself is comforting, but nVidia has to remember that at one time they were unheard of, and it's just as likely that the next big competitor will be someone no one ever thought would be in this market (remember ATI's graphics cards when nVidia was still releasing TNT cards?).
Frankly, the competition is good, and has improved both company's offerings. I can only hope that it continues, and maintains my 2-year tradition of buying high-performance cards at low prices thanks to the new high-performance cards knocking the prices down every 6 months. I have to make up for all of those $350-425 graphics cards I bought in the mid-to-late 90s.
How is this any different from other special interest groups? We see laws shot down by the movie industry, by the NRA, by Grandmothers Against Rubber Sheets, and no one says anything at all.
It's not, really, and a quick check on Google will find that Leeland Yee is backed by a couple of special interests himself, in areas where much of the "what about the children?" and "violent media is corrupting our youth" comes from in the first place.
If lobbying groups working on behalf of the video game industry were responsible for this bill's failure, then it's probably more a story of one lobby against another than they'd like it to appear. On the other hand, if the failure was not the result of some lobby, it makes the whole comment that much more of a joke.
I have the Microsoft trackball that you linked to. It's well-designed, but poorly built. The ball, buttons and wheel are well-positioned, but there are lots of details that were done wrong. The sensor is in a little nook that is left open, making it a very effective dirt trap. At least once a day the thing stops working and I have to pop the ball out and clean that little nook. Usually it's just one barely-visible little fiber from clothing or carpet or something. The last trackball I had (logitech two-button) had a little cover over the nook where the sensor is, to avoid that.
I usually have to clean mine about every 3 weeks, and my home one less often. Usually it's just gunk packed in next to one of the three guides, but occasionally I have to clean out the area over the sensor as well. I agree that it could've been better designed, but considering the fact that each of these has lasted as long as any 3 trackballs I had before switching to optical, I'm fine with the cleaning.
Also, the buttons have a lot of play to them (by design as far as I can tell; cheap construction), and one of the extra LEDs in the unit (which is not actually needed, it's just there for show) sometimes shines through the space between the buttons and the wheel, right into my eye. These are both minor annoyances, but very regular ones, and could've been avoided if they had built the thing properly.
The LED seems more a manner of how you place the trackball, but then how you place it is very important to your comfort, so if this is a problem you probably have little choice. I tended to find the buttons a little too sensitive when I first bought one, but have since gotten used to them (my previous trackballs had a much more firm click to them, and better construction of the buttons). As cheap as the buttons feel to me, they haven't given me any trouble, and in the long run a button failing is a better sign of cheap construction than them just feeling cheap.
If Logitech would build a trackball with a similar design I would buy it in a second.
I actually agree on this. I'll probably be buying a logitech keyboard in the near future as well, since MS seems to have cleaned out most of their "Natural" line of keyboards, or bundles mice with everything.
BTW, why do you want wireless? I can understand a wireless mouse, because you move the unit around in normal operation, but a trackball sits stationary so the cord isn't really an issue...?
I'm planning on building a computer for the living room to act as a file server, mp3 player, and DVR. I'm slowly moving all of my game consoles to wireless controllers for much the same reason: wanting to control everything from across the room without people tripping over cords all the time, or dealing with long extension cords. If I find that I like the wireless enough, I may also use one for work, where the cables make a bit of a mess and I tend to shift between 2 or 3 positions throughout the day. At home on the primary computer it's not really a problem because all of the cables drop off the back of the desk (into the mess back there, but then I keep the desk about a foot away from the wall so I can get back there when I need to).
Or if you're like me and your thumb is completely inaccurate as a pointing device (but have no problems moving your index finger side-to-side), there's this or this. The latter is the one I currently use, and the former is the one I'm currently looking at, since MS hasn't released a wireless version of their trackball yet.
My recommendation is to go down to BestBuy or some other large store and check out a couple of them to see how they feel. I have pretty bad problems with carpal tunnel when I use a standard keyboard and any mouse, but with a good trackball that's the right size for my hand and the right posture I can usually use a computer as long as I need to without a problem.
I'd also add that optical trackballs do need occasional cleaning (pull the ball out and make sure there's nothing in the sensors), but that the cleaning is significantly easier to do without damagining the trackball than the pre-optical trackballs and mice.
Also, as in my first paragraph, we won't reduce the size of the military, we'll just increase its power dramatically. Reducing the size would be great while maintaining its power, but not under this president, and I don't really know if we should at this time
The size of the military was already reduced, under Clinton, through reduction of budgets and the military itself increasing the entrance requirements (turning more people away), as well as removing more people from the military by being more strict with the requirements to stay in. Of course, most of the causes of the size reduction really haven't been reversed by Bush.
He implies (no, states outright) that Sega didn't put the league ability in because they didn't feel they had enough time to react to the api. Hrm, maybe my memory is toast, but if I recall correctly, NFL Fever 2004 was released on August 26, 2003 (according to XBox's retailer website). ESPN NFL Football shipped out to stores on September 3, 2003 (according to Sega's website).
If XSN was ready to roll for NFL Fever 2004 (it was the launch of XSN), and that game came out a week ahead of ESPN, that whole reason is hogwash, by my book. Clearly Microsoft held back on the information on how to implement access to the backbone so they could use it exclusively that year - or at the least, made sure they delivered the specs so late in the development stage that ESPN was already in the beta testing stage and past the point of installing "feature code".
It doesn't occur to you in the least that since NFL Fever was the first game to use XSN that it would have to be in some sort of beta state for them to even test XSN in the first place before releasing the API to other companies?
If they had shipped a broken, untested API that was changing rapidly to meet the needs of their own titles, this might be a whole different debate, but the end result would be the same, and the tone of the arguments would be similar enough.
I'll let the article speak for itself, from page 2:
IGN Sports: Last year, the ESPN games weren't allowed to have Xbox leagues because of XSN. Now that the Microsoft lineup is not coming out, will the ESPN games be allowed to have leagues this year?
Kevin Browne: This past year, it wasn't a matter of them not being allowed, it was more that the technology came in at a latter date than what they felt comfortable reacting to. The ability exists for them to have the same sort of league functionality that exists for XSN Sports, and with the Tsunami release of Xbox Live that comes out this spring, they'll have an even better ability. My hope is that they take advantage of it, and if EA decides that they want to be on Xbox Live this year, that they'll take advantage of those capabilities and provide great sports games for Xbox customers.
The thing they're cutting out isn't Xbox Live, but XSN. I can (and, when I want to be embarassed, do) play ESPN NFL on Xbox Live - I just can't set up a tournament or track stats like I might with NFL Fever (XSN).
They're not cutting out XSN, they're just cutting out the games that they were going to release for it this year. They even stated in the article not only that they haven't planned to drop XSN support from current games, but that it's completely possible for others (Sega, EA, etc) to make use of XSN if they have the time and desire to implement it. XSN is simply a subset of Live that's specific to sports titles, and (presumably) reusable across numerous titles (being basically a web service tied to the XBox Live network). They're cutting titles, not the network, not the services on that network. Additionally, they'll be resuming the titles eventually, when they've managed to get them to the level they feel they need to be at to compete with Sega and EA.
IMNSHO, XSN wasn't that robust to compel me to even TRY NFL Fever when I knew I'd be getting a good product from Sega's offering. Besides, I'm no damn good at football and I really have no compelling need to go up against kids who don't have f/t jobs or other people who're much better at it than I. I'm happier playing against a (dumbed down) AI or one of my buddies from work, and I can do that without XSN.
I haven't played any of the XSN titles, so I can't comment on them specifically. On the other hand, I must say that if PGR2 is any indicator, the level to which they can integrate online functions into a single player game is quite amazing, to the point where you can compete with players around the world without having to actually go online and compete in real time (and listen to them whine and curse into their microphones, or throw a tantrum when their parents tell them to get off the XBox to have dinner or do their homework). Even if you don't want to compete with people, it's nice to be able to know where your abilities stack up, and the functionality can always be disabled (as it is if you don't have a Live account).
Of course, once you know where you stand after playing against the AI, the option is always available to play against other players, whether over the network or in the same room.
Slashdot Mirror
(For instance, there is a term for the Buddhist death-rebirth cycle the author mentions in the article... it's "metempsychosis". However, it's very rarely used, because how often does your average American discuss cycular reincarnation?)
I think the funny part there is that I might have implicitly glossed over use of the word metempsychosis (as I've heard it a few times through high school and college), but wasn't quite sure exactly where he was going with the description in the article (maybe I was asleep).
The primary one is one of the Final Fantasy ports (FF Anthology).
A quick search brought up a few pages saying that the following games have been confirmed by Sony not to work on the PS2, but then the above is the only one I have on this list:
Arcade Party Pak,
Atari Arcade Greatest Hits,
Fighter Maker,
Final Fantasy Anthology,
International Track and Field,
Judge Dredd,
Monkey Hero,
Mortal Kombat Trilogy,
Tomba.
I'll just do the same thing I did with this generation of consoles:
1) Buy games for previous generation console dirt cheap when new console is released.
2) Wait for new console to have 3 or more games that I must have.
3) Buy the new console and the 3 or more games.
4) Repeat.
Gee, I wonder why I have 4 consoles and am considering buying a PSOne for the PS1 games I own that won't play on the PS2. This is what taught me:
5) Don't sell the old system until I've tested every single game I already have on the new system (if the new system makes any claims of backwards compatability).
I can buy switches to handle as many consoles as I could possibly collect. I can buy ports (or sequels that manage to replace the games they follow) to reduce my need for older consoles. When I don't play a console very much I can even box it up and store it in a closet until I just need to play that game. I can't get my old games and systems back if I sell them, though, and I see no reason not to preserve these old games for my daughter should she ever show any interest in retro gaming later in her life (though by then she may just be able to zap them all into some VR rig for pennies a ROM).
SFU has been around for a while, also under the name Interix. The primary difference is that it is now free, and they appear to be planning to ship it with the next version of Windows. Either way, they've been selling this to people switching over Unix servers for quite some time. Dropping the price and eventually shipping it with Windows was simply a matter of time.
Some markets dominated by Unix may look at this option, though I doubt they will in fairly new installations where the option was already there for consideration, but, on the other hand, things like renderfarms, where the overhead of the OS is part of the reason they use *nix in the first place, it's unlikely they'll ever consider any version of Windows other than the embedded products.
GNU software has been shipped with commertal software for a very long time and is still done today.
What you can't do is use open source code in a product that will be shipped binary only.
So far so good... excepting spelling, of course
If the commertal parts of SFU contain open source code then Microsoft can't ship.
I think you're confused. SFU, until the most recent version, was a commercial product that MS sold for many years, with GPL code included. They have always given access to the GPL code, and included it in a commercial product. Remember, binary-only and commercial are not the same thing.
However this begs the question why did Microsoft use GCC and not Microsoft C++?
Hmmm?
Because Microsoft C++ doesn't have any need for the GCC extensions and other factors that would complicate MS C++ while only adding minor benefits. Additionally, SFU was not originally developed by Microsoft. Using GCC makes porting Unix applications easier, since most of the applications being ported were originally developed under GCC. The idea is that you could do very little work to get an application running under Interix (now SFU), and then eventually spend the extra time writing the application as a native Windows app. The article also points out that they may be working on a way to allow Windows and Unix code to work together (which they can't do currently outside of some external communication system), which would most likely be done under MS C++, especially given the increased standards-compliance of MS C++ over the last couple of releases (though, again, they may have to add some GNU extensions).
Maybe it has something to do with the commertal product being absolut garbage.
That's just the vodka you've been drinking.
it's the fault of all the Wal-Marts and Best Buys in the world that employ people that don't ask for id when someone young-looking tries to buy a M rated game,
Best Buy specifically has a trigger in their system for M-rated games that tells the employee to check ID, regardless of how young or old you look. I know this because I asked what tripped it when they asked me, when I was buying 2 games (M and T) and 2 movies (NR and R). Wal-Mart has the same thing for movies, but I'm not sure if they do for games as well.
On the other hand, the specialty stores seem to have much more variance on how they treat the issue, by which I mean that the individual behind the counter really seems to determine whether or not IDs are checked.
Then again, having the system automatically prompt for an ID check doesn't always work too well, as seen by the many times I've noticed checkers hitting 5555 to bypass the birth-date check when I buy cigarettes, despite the fact that both states I've lived in require checking IDs for anyone under 30 buying tobacco.
As someone mentioned above, though, who's homeowners association fees are 10-20% of the purchase price of their house?
In any case, I refuse to buy a home wherever there is a homeowners association as well, simply because I won't pay someone to tell me what to do with my own home, not to mention the little clause in most homeowners associations that allow them to kick you out.
I think he might have meant that Tengen games in general were found to be fine (the Tetris issue is a whole 'nother ballgame). But in general, I believe Game Over shows that Tengen games were legit and Nintendo wasn't able to stop them.
/ tengen. htm
After looking around a bit longer, and some refreshment of my memory, this link:
http://www.nesplayer.com/features/lawsuits
pointed out that Tengen was a spin-off of Atari, and directly related to the Atari lawsuit I mentioned previously. Additionally, many articles referencing Tengen titles other than Tetris refer to their rarity, due to the titles being removed after losing the lawsuit (Atari vs. Nintendo).
Tengen had a handful of officially licensed games, but their unlicensed titles were pulled and destroyed. All simply because a group at Tengen had reverse-engineered the chip normally used to authenticate the cartridges (supposedly they had a functional cartridge at the same time, but were 'tainted' by the work to reverse engineer the chip). In the end Tengen folded primarily due to legal costs and the unwillingness of their parents companies to continue funding them.
Remember back in the NES days when (I think it was) Tengen came out with several games that Nintendo didn't like, and so did not receive the Nintendo Seal of Approval? Games like Gauntlet, Tetris (a Tetris that more closely resembled the arcade version than Nintendo's own) and others were available on the shelves. Nintendo tried to get them removed through the court system, and lost.
I think you need to look that case history up. Tengen lost, for not having a valid license to release Tetris in the US (the license being from the Russian creator of Tetris), and all copies of Tengen Tetris were removed from the shelves and destroyed. Tengen didn't suffer monetary damages simply because they had licensed Tetris from Mirrorsoft. Therefore Mirrorsoft, who did not have the license to sell to Tengen in the first place, had to pay the fines.
Furthermore, to get to a case more along the lines of what could happen when trying to ship an "un-approved" disc, you could look up Atari vs. Nintendo. In that case, Atari lost the right to distribute Nintendo-compatible cartridges because they had reverse-engineered a system used on Nintendo cartridges to authenticate the games before the console would launch the program. Another case, against a company called Color Dreams, went against Nintendo because the company did not use Nintendo's copyrighted material to get their unlicensed games to run on the system.
Therefore, if SNK were to release an "un-approved" disc, it would pretty much have to have been developed without a Sony dev kit, which means none of their Japanese-released PS1 or PS2 titles would be applicable.
The difference, though, is that SNK is dealing with fairly new games, whereas Nintendo is porting 20-year-old games to a handheld.
So, when you want the latest King of Fighters, you either import it and mod your console, or you have to wait for SCEA to approve it, and you end up with a 2-in-1 pack that's been censored.
hmm I have 2 gamecubes, a GB Player, 2 GBA SPs, a GBA, 4 Wavebirds, and 3 TVs in my apartment. Unfortunately, none of the TVs is very portable (and one of them has a colour shift that needs to be fixed).
That being said, I know people with 5 TVs in their homes, and I know people with Gamecubes. I just don't think I know anyone that cares enough about FF:CC to put all of it together to get the 5 TVs, 5 GCs, 4 GB Players, and 4 Wavebirds all in the same room when we could just use 2 TVs, 2 GCs, 1 GBP, 2 GBA SPs, 1 GBA, and a Wavebird.
In reality, the most expensive things are the Cubes and the largest TV. Most of the stuff is assumed to be things you and your friends already have (ie the Cubes, TVs, and controllers).
Despite this being off-topic, don't forget that every time you buy a new game for the PS2, you're sending cash to one of the RIAA's and MPAA's biggest members.
After all, Sony isn't actually making as much money from either music or movies as they are from video games, despite the number of movie and music studios they own.
The US has the highest taxation percentage in the world when you factor in the many hidden taxes.
Do you have a source for this statement, or is it simply conjecture?
I'm personally taxed around 30%, with an additional 5-10% taken out for medicare/social security.
I'm taxed around 25% by the federal government, plus the additions for medicare and social security, which come out to ~7% of my gross income when combined, most of which is social security (medicare is ~1%). The parts that irritate me there are that I will likely never see the SS money, and the medicare comes out to more than the cost of my own health and dental benefits.
Then with the income I have left, I pay 8.5% on every purchase I make, 3.5% on my mortgage for property taxes, 65 dollars a year for vehicle registration, tolls on the roads I drive on, exhorbitant tax on gasoline, alcholol, and tobacco.
Most of these are state taxes, though a few are mixed taxes (alcohol, tobacco, gasoline, iirc). I pay a state income tax between 4 and 5 % in addition to these (which could explain your 30% previously), but when I lived in California the state income tax was more like 10%, and tobacco was significantly higher (tobacco taxes vary from city to city here in Virginia, but I can buy a pack for $2 in Richmond, whereas in San Diego, CA, I was paying easily $4/pack 2 years ago). In some states there is no sales tax, and in most states they vary by city (because sales tax is solid income for the state, county, and city). Here, for instance, there's an 11% tax on prepared food, but no tax on most grocery items. Anything else tends to run in the 4% range. I also pay property taxes on my car which run in the 10% of the car's value (based on whatever they decide the car is worth, usually without looking at it), though there are some tax rebates that reduce that cost, as well as state and city stickers with additional costs, and the registration cost. They're all fairly small (except the property tax, but again most of that has been rebated, for now), but they add up.
We even get double taxed on a portion of our income, as social security is based on your before tax income, even though a large portion of that you will never see. Then when you get older, all of the social security taxes you paid may give you back some social security payments, which you will have to pay taxes on.
Not to mention that you're getting taxed when you get the money as well as when you spend it.
Let's also not forget that most of the products we buy are imported, and they are taxed at importation and that cost is passed along to us.
Solution: don't buy so many imported products... Never mind that in many areas we have lower import taxes than other countries, and that you can import goods from some countries (and/or in some categories of goods) with no taxes on the importation.
Their are infrastructure taxes on every form of communication, usage taxes, 911 taxes, about 50% tax of various kinds on airline tickets.
Don't forget that many airline taxes are local as well, though since 9/11 many new federal taxes have been added.
So tell me please, how the US has lower taxation and all of those stupid socialist countries pay way higher taxes for things like universal health care, etc.
It's really quite simple: everything you're complaining about exists to some extent in those other countries, but that first tax (the 30% income tax) is higher, as well.
I sat down one day and did the math, and by the time I was done, I realized that about 68% of my income goes to paying one form of tax or another. Think about that before you go spouting off your inaccurate tax comparisons between the US and the "socialist" countries.
Think about a few of the taxes you're complaining about and why they've been implemented. Start working at the local, state, and federal level to repeal some of those taxes, and to change the way tax
This is probably the easiest place to get information on the matter, though it's not exactly unbiased (being a lobby group for foreign companies operating in the US). You can do more searching for yourself, but of course google searches take a while to cut through the current campaign fluff on the issues.
I went to High School in the seventies, the class valedictorian was by far the most respected student there. He was not in any sports but was the nicest guy in the entire school. He is now our family doctor. Things are different today, it's not that we didn't have some of the same things going on.
I graduated from High School 8 years ago (class of '96). Our class valedictorian was a very respected student, one of the nicest girls I knew in the place. I'm not sure what she's doing today, I didn't keep in touch with most of the people in school and moved across the country 2 years ago. Still, I was always impressed by how hard she worked to maintain her GPA, and that she still had time to work part-time and volunteer in the community.
But today it's just more extreme. People got beat up in school or about something that happened at school that never got settled, not often but it happened. Today people get killed in school,not often but it happens.
When I was in school, people got beat up, generally at the beginning and end of the school year, when it was 100 degrees outside and everyone tended to be a little short on temper. My first year of high school, someone brought a gun to school with the intent of shooting one of the Vice Principles (who was generally hated by many students, not that it justifies anything). Someone saw the gun in his bag and reported it before he did anything.
3 years after I graduated, someone brought a gun to the other high school in the same city, and shot a few students. Within hours people from all over the country were discussing why the school should have metal detectors and security officers and this and that. Anyone that ever attended high school in San Diego County (outside of the city schools) could have told them that metal detectors wouldn't work, because every class room's door opens to the outside (as do the bathrooms, where the shots were fired). Security officers were on campus at every school in the district when I was attending, as well as when the shootings took place (but they increased the numbers almost immediately afterwards). A couple of weeks later someone shot at the administrative building at another school in the same district.
In many ways, students have been treated like prisoners from the time I started attending school. In high school I was required to take 5 courses every semester, regardless of what I needed to graduate, simply because a student has to attend for a certain number of hours to be counted for the cash the state hands out to public schools. Students couldn't leave campus for lunch, and were confined to a particular area of the campus to make sure they could be watched. The zero tolerance policies for violence mean that students looking to commit violence know that there's a good chance that the student they want to attack will not fight back, as both students will be punished if that happens. No lockers were supplied to students because they would be expensive and were found to lead to increased drug use and violence (as students kept drugs and weapons in their lockers). But without lockers, students were often required to leave their posessions in classrooms during assemblies, so that searches could be made of their bags without large protests, often with drug dogs brought in to speed things up. One student's parents sued the school because they had signed a waiver allowing the school to force their daughter to take a drug test; they were under the impression (somehow) that they had to sign and submit the permission slip to prevent the school from performing the drug tests.
There is a big difference. The popular songs talked about alot of things. Sex, drugs, love etc. Now I hear songs that talk about popping a cap in someones ass. Or a dead girl friend in the trunk. Things are different, while alot of themes are similiar, it's just alot more extreme.
Most popular songs are still about sex, drugs, love, etc. The extreme ends, or the things that people get up in arm
The decline in the education system over the years certainly has a tremendous impact in this area but I feel it also has a lot to do with the trend to ship the jobs overseas. It started with manual labor jobs and has slowly worked it's way to the tech jobs.
.com bubble), and many of the companies folded or downsized. When people went looking for jobs elsewhere after losing their jobs, they found that the jobs they were looking for were paying too little, no longer available, or being shipped overseas.
The US has approximately a 5:1 ratio of jobs shipped into the US by foreign companies vs. jobs shipped out of the US by US companies. In other words, we gain far more jobs from foreign companies shipping jobs overseas than we lose by shipping jobs overseas.
Of course, there is a slight lag in the types of jobs being equatable. When people started complaining that jobs in the automobile industry were being shipped overseas, there was a period during which there weren't many foreign auto makers opening new plants in the US. Now, though, if you buy a Japanese or German car in the US, it's almost (or possibly more) as likely to have been built in the US as an American car.
As was the case in the past, the jobs being shipped overseas are most often jobs that require fairly limited skills that are easy for people to pick up. Additionally, people were getting used to getting paid fairly well for those jobs (in the past due to labour unions negotiating wages too high to be sustainable for the corporation--the same thing happened in some companies in the Asian auto industry in the last decade; in the case of tech jobs due to the
The simple reality is that there are fewer openings available for people in those positions, even when you include all of the openings that are now appearing overseas. Furthermore, because we've managed to reduce the expectations of customers to the point where even the higher levels of tech support are handled with fairly simple scripts, the lowest levels of support, where you'd normally hire the most people with the least amount of education, can, in many cases, be completely replaced with a computer and a handful of more highly educated individuals to support and maintain that computer (maybe even the upper-level support staff can handle some of this burden, such as adding new questions/answers to it's database).
Declines in the education system can probably be addressed with a completely new post. It's really almost irrelevant because many of the people these jobs are being shipped to are being educated specifically to perform these jobs (improving their English and studying linguistics to remove accents as best as possible in a short time), and because the level of education comes down to less than that expected (but not always shown) from a high school graduate.
This is true; ever since I picked up a GF-FX Ultra, I haven't heard anything else in my PC (well, except the CDs spinning up).
I wouldn't expect a new card NOT to beat out the current cards.
It's fairly common, although the previous generation of nVidia cards didn't seem to manage too well. On the other hand, beating them by 100% (2x performance in some of the tests), is quite an achievment, and is quite uncommon.
ATI and Nvidia have played this catchup game with each other for years.
and before that it was nVidia and 3dfx, and before that it wasn't even a competition as 3dfx had it in hand (and before that it wasn't about 3d graphics for consumer PCs). The 3d game is still fairly young, and the only comparable experience to ATI's takeover of the market was nVidia's own takeover vs. 3dfx. To see that history may not repeat itself is comforting, but nVidia has to remember that at one time they were unheard of, and it's just as likely that the next big competitor will be someone no one ever thought would be in this market (remember ATI's graphics cards when nVidia was still releasing TNT cards?).
Frankly, the competition is good, and has improved both company's offerings. I can only hope that it continues, and maintains my 2-year tradition of buying high-performance cards at low prices thanks to the new high-performance cards knocking the prices down every 6 months. I have to make up for all of those $350-425 graphics cards I bought in the mid-to-late 90s.
How is this any different from other special interest groups? We see laws shot down by the movie industry, by the NRA, by Grandmothers Against Rubber Sheets, and no one says anything at all.
It's not, really, and a quick check on Google will find that Leeland Yee is backed by a couple of special interests himself, in areas where much of the "what about the children?" and "violent media is corrupting our youth" comes from in the first place.
If lobbying groups working on behalf of the video game industry were responsible for this bill's failure, then it's probably more a story of one lobby against another than they'd like it to appear. On the other hand, if the failure was not the result of some lobby, it makes the whole comment that much more of a joke.
I have the Microsoft trackball that you linked to. It's well-designed, but poorly built. The ball, buttons and wheel are well-positioned, but there are lots of details that were done wrong. The sensor is in a little nook that is left open, making it a very effective dirt trap. At least once a day the thing stops working and I have to pop the ball out and clean that little nook. Usually it's just one barely-visible little fiber from clothing or carpet or something. The last trackball I had (logitech two-button) had a little cover over the nook where the sensor is, to avoid that.
I usually have to clean mine about every 3 weeks, and my home one less often. Usually it's just gunk packed in next to one of the three guides, but occasionally I have to clean out the area over the sensor as well. I agree that it could've been better designed, but considering the fact that each of these has lasted as long as any 3 trackballs I had before switching to optical, I'm fine with the cleaning.
Also, the buttons have a lot of play to them (by design as far as I can tell; cheap construction), and one of the extra LEDs in the unit (which is not actually needed, it's just there for show) sometimes shines through the space between the buttons and the wheel, right into my eye. These are both minor annoyances, but very regular ones, and could've been avoided if they had built the thing properly.
The LED seems more a manner of how you place the trackball, but then how you place it is very important to your comfort, so if this is a problem you probably have little choice. I tended to find the buttons a little too sensitive when I first bought one, but have since gotten used to them (my previous trackballs had a much more firm click to them, and better construction of the buttons). As cheap as the buttons feel to me, they haven't given me any trouble, and in the long run a button failing is a better sign of cheap construction than them just feeling cheap.
If Logitech would build a trackball with a similar design I would buy it in a second.
I actually agree on this. I'll probably be buying a logitech keyboard in the near future as well, since MS seems to have cleaned out most of their "Natural" line of keyboards, or bundles mice with everything.
BTW, why do you want wireless? I can understand a wireless mouse, because you move the unit around in normal operation, but a trackball sits stationary so the cord isn't really an issue...?
I'm planning on building a computer for the living room to act as a file server, mp3 player, and DVR. I'm slowly moving all of my game consoles to wireless controllers for much the same reason: wanting to control everything from across the room without people tripping over cords all the time, or dealing with long extension cords. If I find that I like the wireless enough, I may also use one for work, where the cables make a bit of a mess and I tend to shift between 2 or 3 positions throughout the day. At home on the primary computer it's not really a problem because all of the cables drop off the back of the desk (into the mess back there, but then I keep the desk about a foot away from the wall so I can get back there when I need to).
Or if you're like me and your thumb is completely inaccurate as a pointing device (but have no problems moving your index finger side-to-side), there's this or this. The latter is the one I currently use, and the former is the one I'm currently looking at, since MS hasn't released a wireless version of their trackball yet.
My recommendation is to go down to BestBuy or some other large store and check out a couple of them to see how they feel. I have pretty bad problems with carpal tunnel when I use a standard keyboard and any mouse, but with a good trackball that's the right size for my hand and the right posture I can usually use a computer as long as I need to without a problem.
I'd also add that optical trackballs do need occasional cleaning (pull the ball out and make sure there's nothing in the sensors), but that the cleaning is significantly easier to do without damagining the trackball than the pre-optical trackballs and mice.
Also, as in my first paragraph, we won't reduce the size of the military, we'll just increase its power dramatically. Reducing the size would be great while maintaining its power, but not under this president, and I don't really know if we should at this time
The size of the military was already reduced, under Clinton, through reduction of budgets and the military itself increasing the entrance requirements (turning more people away), as well as removing more people from the military by being more strict with the requirements to stay in. Of course, most of the causes of the size reduction really haven't been reversed by Bush.
He implies (no, states outright) that Sega didn't put the league ability in because they didn't feel they had enough time to react to the api. Hrm, maybe my memory is toast, but if I recall correctly, NFL Fever 2004 was released on August 26, 2003 (according to XBox's retailer website). ESPN NFL Football shipped out to stores on September 3, 2003 (according to Sega's website).
If XSN was ready to roll for NFL Fever 2004 (it was the launch of XSN), and that game came out a week ahead of ESPN, that whole reason is hogwash, by my book. Clearly Microsoft held back on the information on how to implement access to the backbone so they could use it exclusively that year - or at the least, made sure they delivered the specs so late in the development stage that ESPN was already in the beta testing stage and past the point of installing "feature code".
It doesn't occur to you in the least that since NFL Fever was the first game to use XSN that it would have to be in some sort of beta state for them to even test XSN in the first place before releasing the API to other companies?
If they had shipped a broken, untested API that was changing rapidly to meet the needs of their own titles, this might be a whole different debate, but the end result would be the same, and the tone of the arguments would be similar enough.
I'll let the article speak for itself, from page 2:
IGN Sports: Last year, the ESPN games weren't allowed to have Xbox leagues because of XSN. Now that the Microsoft lineup is not coming out, will the ESPN games be allowed to have leagues this year?
Kevin Browne: This past year, it wasn't a matter of them not being allowed, it was more that the technology came in at a latter date than what they felt comfortable reacting to. The ability exists for them to have the same sort of league functionality that exists for XSN Sports, and with the Tsunami release of Xbox Live that comes out this spring, they'll have an even better ability. My hope is that they take advantage of it, and if EA decides that they want to be on Xbox Live this year, that they'll take advantage of those capabilities and provide great sports games for Xbox customers.
The thing they're cutting out isn't Xbox Live, but XSN. I can (and, when I want to be embarassed, do) play ESPN NFL on Xbox Live - I just can't set up a tournament or track stats like I might with NFL Fever (XSN).
They're not cutting out XSN, they're just cutting out the games that they were going to release for it this year. They even stated in the article not only that they haven't planned to drop XSN support from current games, but that it's completely possible for others (Sega, EA, etc) to make use of XSN if they have the time and desire to implement it. XSN is simply a subset of Live that's specific to sports titles, and (presumably) reusable across numerous titles (being basically a web service tied to the XBox Live network). They're cutting titles, not the network, not the services on that network. Additionally, they'll be resuming the titles eventually, when they've managed to get them to the level they feel they need to be at to compete with Sega and EA.
IMNSHO, XSN wasn't that robust to compel me to even TRY NFL Fever when I knew I'd be getting a good product from Sega's offering. Besides, I'm no damn good at football and I really have no compelling need to go up against kids who don't have f/t jobs or other people who're much better at it than I. I'm happier playing against a (dumbed down) AI or one of my buddies from work, and I can do that without XSN.
I haven't played any of the XSN titles, so I can't comment on them specifically. On the other hand, I must say that if PGR2 is any indicator, the level to which they can integrate online functions into a single player game is quite amazing, to the point where you can compete with players around the world without having to actually go online and compete in real time (and listen to them whine and curse into their microphones, or throw a tantrum when their parents tell them to get off the XBox to have dinner or do their homework). Even if you don't want to compete with people, it's nice to be able to know where your abilities stack up, and the functionality can always be disabled (as it is if you don't have a Live account).
Of course, once you know where you stand after playing against the AI, the option is always available to play against other players, whether over the network or in the same room.