Perhaps there are no shortages in your area, but if $600 ebay auctions is any indication, there are tons of people who want them and can't find them in their local stores. Saying "There is no shortage" in this case isn't very accurate, because there is.
Also, people working at EB have been known to lie or make numbers up on the spot to get you off their backs, because, you know, they bave better things to do than answer questions that aren't from customers who are actually interested in purchasing one....and from the looks of your sig, you're not very interested in the 360, are you:).
Unless they buy the entire company and essentially transplant all of the management and programmers, Microsoft can pry Opera from my cold, dead hands.
It's multiplatform, it's got tons of useful features that are built-in and don't rely on flakey plugins and it's fast as hell. If IE is any indication, any progress on new, useful features would stagnate as soon as it was integrated into the operating system.
Honestly, was the PS2 any different. I don't recall ANY system in recent memory that had a lineup that made the system worth purchasing right off the bat. Do what I do, just wait until they come down in price, and buy them when they're cheap. Then you get the system and a decent selection good games for a fraction of the price.
A portion of the creationists (I use this henceforth to refer to everyone who beleives in some sort of ID nonsense) came up with "Micro" and "Macro" evolution to compensate for this. According to those who beleive it (It's hard to tie it into Creationism itself, because I dont think even two different Creationists agree on what happened), evolution DOES happen on a very small scale, like changing charactoristics in fruit flies, or a mutating virus, but that it's impossible for evolution to change things to the point of there being two totally different species. Of course, such a thing would take a long time to happen in real evolution, which is why their faulty logic is firmly cemented, they can't be proven wrong with a simple explination of "We've seen it happen".
I was listening to the radio recently, due to my roomate liking "popular" music, and one song I heard over and over was some awful rap song where the chorus went 'SHAKE THAT LAFFY TAFFY! SHAKE THAT LAFFY TAFFY!".
I didn't want to like WoW. I waited until September to play it (even though I had it in March). I played for 2 hours and bam, I was a goner. I don't play every moment of every day, but it is my favorite MMORPG by far (and the most popular one in my internet cafe - CoV/CoH is a reasonably close second)
It hooked me for a month or two, mainly due to the worlds being so well made. Honestly, I had an awesome time just wandering around, seeing all there was to see and enjoying the environments.
The reason I quit was that most of the content to be played was given by NPC's. NPC's would ask me to collect 100 bear asses, and I'd farm 100 bear asses...then turn them in...yay 10 silver. Or, I would go into a X place and kill Y evil gay. Those were more fun, but they got repetative after a while. Or, I could go into one of the many lower level instance dungeons. Unfortuniatly the lower level dungeons very rarely had decent groups going through them, getting into a group was hard enough, and the people who played in them were usually pretty terrible because of the negligable penalty for death. Also, because they were instanced, you couldn't wander into a dungeon and randomly meet another group going through the same one. PvP was battlegrounds and random ganking only, and the way it was divided meant that you could almost predict who won every battle based on what level and what gear they had. Were you level 24? Good luck doing anything but sucking in a battleground.
However, WoW did entice me enough to want to try other MMO's. I tried a few Everquest knockoffs, but I quickly found that level treadmilling was not what I was looking for. So I went in the other direction. Currently, my favorites are Eve Online and Ultima Online Pre-Rennisance freeshards...their lack of reliance on questing was a refreshing change of pace. Unfortuniatly, EVE Online has the personality of a spreadsheet, and UO's interface is very archaic, plus UO's skill grind, while managable due to macros, is still what I feel is an unnecissary pain in the butt.
What would be my ideal MMO? World of Warcraft with Ultima Online's gameplay and EVE's economy and skill gain.
If you like iTunes, you'll love Foobar2k. I use it to rip all of my CD's to Musepack -standard, get tags, apply ReplayGain, and sort it how I like it. It also has the advantage of not being nearly as resource/memory intensive as itunes or WMP 10.
Re:360 - A Complete And Total Disaster
on
The Shadow of Kong
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· Score: 1
We've had power supply problems, subpar games, and graphics that have yet to exceed the worst of the last generation of game systems. How is the XBox 360 *not* a disaster?
Let me put something in perspective for you. I was playing a Half Life mod called The Specialists a few days ago. My roomate looked up at what I was playing and asked me if I was playing Halo. How is that for brand recognition...and in only a few years no less. The only complete and total disaster here is your mind when you finally realize that Micorosft is making waves in their gaming division, and they're not going away anytime soon.
So read from other news sites that are paid to write glowing, positive reviews of the piece of turd that is the 360?
How is this better than the page after page of Linux-is-awesome, Micorosft-sodomized-my-firstborn-son morons who couldn't string together a constructive argument to save their life getting modded +5 insightful's left and right with rhetoric and terrible arguments. That's just as deceptive, if not moreso because their opinions are being "validated" by invisible moderators who are all drawn from the same crowd. Just because the mainstream press's bias towards Micorosft is bad doesn't mean that Slashdot's anti-Microsoft bias is any better.
No. It's this simple. If Microsoft puts on the box "backwards compatible", it god damn well better be backwards compatible. Not 40% backwards compatible, not 80%, defintely not 80% this week, 73% the next, and a month later 82% backwards compatible.
Read that again. He compared a percentage of games being backwards compatable to plain 'backwards compatable'
No. It's this simple. If Microsoft puts on the box "backwards compatible", it god damn well better be backwards compatible. Not 40% backwards compatible, not 80%, defintely not 80% this week, 73% the next, and a month later 82% backwards compatible.
The first run of PS2's had numerous issues with various PS1 games. Nintendo's Gameboy Advance SP broke Kirby's Tilt and Tumble, so not even the Game Boy Advance has a spotless track record.
Spoken like someone who has never tried their hand at emulation. Creating emulators with 100% compatability isn't easy, even when you have the schematics yourself. They had to have been able to update the software somehow, or else they would have had to scrap backwards compatability...unless they figured out a (probably very costly) way of putting the old architecture in the new system somehow.
There was no easy solution for backwards compatability with an architecture as complex as the Xbox's. Good thing it's Microsoft, because then you can bitch about them no matter what avenue they take.
When I teach a section in my ethics classes about Free Software, my students (virtually all of whom use windows) are astonished when I tell them that my computers (1 GNU/Linux laptop, 1 FreeBSD desktop) only get rebooted when I update the kernel. They are convinced that rebooting every few days is necessary for, e.g., memory management.
What you meant to say.
When I teach a section in my ethics classes about Free Software, my students (virtually all of whom use windows 98) are astonished when I tell them that my computers (1 GNU/Linux laptop, 1 FreeBSD desktop) only get rebooted when I update the kernel. They are convinced that rebooting every few days is necessary for, e.g., memory management.
Honestly, I've had a number of computers, and I've never had a BSOD that I couldn't trace back to a faulty piece of hardware/driver and that's hardly Microsoft's fault.
I'm unclear about VAC and Punkbuster, but doesn't World of Warcraft one way hash everything it scans on your computer, and compares the one way hashes to a central database of one-way hashes of known cheating software?
If that is the case, then it's almost impossible to gather anything from your computer that they're not specificly looking for.
I think the problem with VAC isn't that it's invasive, it's that it's not effective enough to keep up with month's-old exploits, and the problem I hear with Punkbuster is not that it's invasive, but that it registeres too many false posatives and there is no appeal process, since Even Balance proclaims that their system is infailable. Anti-cheat devices have problems, but I don't think invasion of privacy is one of them.
Getting a rocket launcher in stage 1-3 I think was due compensation. It's a demo, so of course there are things taken out. Plays pretty much exactly like I remember the Quake 2 demo playing a long time ago.
If you're making games, it's usually a good solution to make the game engine open source, and charge for the data. The game engine can get ported to dog knows what platforms without any effort from you, and you can still get compensated by charging for the data files. The real value of a game tends to be in the data files, as they control the story line, the graphics, the sound effects, basically everything. The game engine is just like a library used to play the datafiles. Of course, not all games work like this.
"Usually?" How many games have you made, sir? Where is your data?
Meanwhile, here is a list of paid-for engines which you might have heard of, that get lots of money thrown at them from software developers:
Doom 3 Engine
Unreal Engine 2.0
Source Engine
Renderware
Gamebryo
This doesn't even take into account the specific engines, such as Havok, or engines of past that have made their parent companies TONS of money, such as the myrid of engines created by id and Epic. They DO have value. Maybe not to the end user, but they DO have value to the developers who otherwise creating these games would be a bigger chore than need be. These engines prevents developers from having to re-invent the wheel, for sound code, graphics code, physics, etc., every time they create a game.
He even said specificly "Is it even possible, short of distributing source code?". He clearly does not want to distribute his source, for one reason or another.
As yet another person who used FC in production, I had a less than satisfactoy experience with it, most notably YUM breaking completely after upgrading from an already unstable FC2 to FC3. I beleive the company I am working for is still using the computer even after I left, but they put more stock in it for being from Red Hat than it's individual merits...they mainly use it as a testing machine in my absense.
Friends of mine had similar experiences with Fedora, and in that time they converted to Slackware and stuck with it. Me? After the headache that was Fedora Core 2, I've been progressing to more and more stable distros on my own personal computer....first Slackware, now Debian, and at the moment I've even been messing around with FreeBSD on a seporate partition in my free time.
I understand you had good experiences with Fedora Core, but understand that not everyone's experiences with all distros have been roses and blue jays.
1. There was no Microsoft-incuded lack of supply, it was a REAL lack of supply.
2. How the hell did you end up with posative moderation? Funny, I could understand, but insightful?
I was going to refute point 4 until I saw So... I blame the developers for wasting all of that space. I do.. In that case, I agree with you. You COULD still fit a quality game on a GD-ROM, even today, but the major development studios are the ones who needed tons and tons of space. It was the reason that developers passed over the N64...why be limited to expensive cartidges that held a paltry couple megs worth of space when you had CD's that could hold a million times that much.
Tell that to the thousands of people who had defective PS2's throughout the lifetime of the console.
Or the people who got dead pixels on their PSP. Or their new Dell LCD flat screen.
I could go on and on, but the point still stands, this isn't the 80's, where companies actually gave two shits about build quality. If you get a piece of consumer electronics that lasts any reasonable amount of time these days, you're very very lucky.
Do I like it? No. But don't blame Microsoft, blame the electronics industry for their shitty shitty QC.
1. The fact that a few major studios refused to support the Dreamcast. I seem to remember there being more, but it was mainly Electronic Arts. Yeah....you don't want the 1,000 ton gorilla shirking your system.
2. The PS2 was announced the same day, or shortly before, the release of the Dreamcast. Some people decided to just wait for the PS2 instead. That can't be good.
3. SEGA was EXTREMELY strapped for cash. When they realized that for the next year they had to manufacture X number of systems....and they didn't have enough money in their treasurey. Yeah...running out of money will do that oo.
4. CD-ROM Format. The CD-ROM was tired at this point,and developers were rapidly running out of space. 1.whatever GB that the GD-ROM format supported was simply not enough to hold any huge games. The Playstation had the DVD tech, which allowed a much greater amount of space.*
So yeah...those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
* "But Alex" you say, "What does this mean for the Xbox 360 and it's lack of space?" I can't really say anything as a fact, but in my opnion I don't think that the developers are quite as strapped for space as they were when the Dremcast was out. Back then, PC games were starting to come out on mutliple CD's. I have yet to see a multi-DVD game...doesn't mean they don't exist, but I haven't seen one.
My last VIA motherboard, which housed a Athlon XP 2800+ ran fantasticly and without a hitch.. If you want to stay away from both companies, you have a third option as well, a SiS chipset which my current motherboard runs with, and I have been having no problems with it either.
Not necissarily propel them to the top. However you can't deny the fact that having a lot of cash in reserve will prevent any sort of 'oh shit we don't have the cash avalable to make another run of consoles', screwups that sealed the Dreamcast's doom.
The point is that coming first does not mean it's has a better or worse chance at market. There were a LOT of strikes against the Dreamcast.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, people working at EB have been known to lie or make numbers up on the spot to get you off their backs, because, you know, they bave better things to do than answer questions that aren't from customers who are actually interested in purchasing one....and from the looks of your sig, you're not very interested in the 360, are you :).
Unless they buy the entire company and essentially transplant all of the management and programmers, Microsoft can pry Opera from my cold, dead hands.
It's multiplatform, it's got tons of useful features that are built-in and don't rely on flakey plugins and it's fast as hell. If IE is any indication, any progress on new, useful features would stagnate as soon as it was integrated into the operating system.
Honestly, was the PS2 any different. I don't recall ANY system in recent memory that had a lineup that made the system worth purchasing right off the bat. Do what I do, just wait until they come down in price, and buy them when they're cheap. Then you get the system and a decent selection good games for a fraction of the price.
Here is a source, for anyone looking for one.
A portion of the creationists (I use this henceforth to refer to everyone who beleives in some sort of ID nonsense) came up with "Micro" and "Macro" evolution to compensate for this. According to those who beleive it (It's hard to tie it into Creationism itself, because I dont think even two different Creationists agree on what happened), evolution DOES happen on a very small scale, like changing charactoristics in fruit flies, or a mutating virus, but that it's impossible for evolution to change things to the point of there being two totally different species. Of course, such a thing would take a long time to happen in real evolution, which is why their faulty logic is firmly cemented, they can't be proven wrong with a simple explination of "We've seen it happen".
I was listening to the radio recently, due to my roomate liking "popular" music, and one song I heard over and over was some awful rap song where the chorus went 'SHAKE THAT LAFFY TAFFY! SHAKE THAT LAFFY TAFFY!".
Has this what Top 40 has come to?
Why are you posting on slashdot? Go outside.
It hooked me for a month or two, mainly due to the worlds being so well made. Honestly, I had an awesome time just wandering around, seeing all there was to see and enjoying the environments.
The reason I quit was that most of the content to be played was given by NPC's. NPC's would ask me to collect 100 bear asses, and I'd farm 100 bear asses...then turn them in...yay 10 silver. Or, I would go into a X place and kill Y evil gay. Those were more fun, but they got repetative after a while. Or, I could go into one of the many lower level instance dungeons. Unfortuniatly the lower level dungeons very rarely had decent groups going through them, getting into a group was hard enough, and the people who played in them were usually pretty terrible because of the negligable penalty for death. Also, because they were instanced, you couldn't wander into a dungeon and randomly meet another group going through the same one. PvP was battlegrounds and random ganking only, and the way it was divided meant that you could almost predict who won every battle based on what level and what gear they had. Were you level 24? Good luck doing anything but sucking in a battleground.
However, WoW did entice me enough to want to try other MMO's. I tried a few Everquest knockoffs, but I quickly found that level treadmilling was not what I was looking for. So I went in the other direction. Currently, my favorites are Eve Online and Ultima Online Pre-Rennisance freeshards...their lack of reliance on questing was a refreshing change of pace. Unfortuniatly, EVE Online has the personality of a spreadsheet, and UO's interface is very archaic, plus UO's skill grind, while managable due to macros, is still what I feel is an unnecissary pain in the butt.
What would be my ideal MMO? World of Warcraft with Ultima Online's gameplay and EVE's economy and skill gain.
If you like iTunes, you'll love Foobar2k. I use it to rip all of my CD's to Musepack -standard, get tags, apply ReplayGain, and sort it how I like it. It also has the advantage of not being nearly as resource/memory intensive as itunes or WMP 10.
Yeah, it's really a disaster when it's impossible to find a new Xbox 360 except on ebay. I think you need to be reminded about what a "complete and total disaster" actually is.
Let me put something in perspective for you. I was playing a Half Life mod called The Specialists a few days ago. My roomate looked up at what I was playing and asked me if I was playing Halo. How is that for brand recognition...and in only a few years no less. The only complete and total disaster here is your mind when you finally realize that Micorosft is making waves in their gaming division, and they're not going away anytime soon.
So read from other news sites that are paid to write glowing, positive reviews of the piece of turd that is the 360?
How is this better than the page after page of Linux-is-awesome, Micorosft-sodomized-my-firstborn-son morons who couldn't string together a constructive argument to save their life getting modded +5 insightful's left and right with rhetoric and terrible arguments. That's just as deceptive, if not moreso because their opinions are being "validated" by invisible moderators who are all drawn from the same crowd. Just because the mainstream press's bias towards Micorosft is bad doesn't mean that Slashdot's anti-Microsoft bias is any better.
No. It's this simple. If Microsoft puts on the box "backwards compatible", it god damn well better be backwards compatible. Not 40% backwards compatible, not 80%, defintely not 80% this week, 73% the next, and a month later 82% backwards compatible.
Read that again. He compared a percentage of games being backwards compatable to plain 'backwards compatable'
The first run of PS2's had numerous issues with various PS1 games. Nintendo's Gameboy Advance SP broke Kirby's Tilt and Tumble, so not even the Game Boy Advance has a spotless track record.
But hey, double standards rock.
There was no easy solution for backwards compatability with an architecture as complex as the Xbox's. Good thing it's Microsoft, because then you can bitch about them no matter what avenue they take.
When I teach a section in my ethics classes about Free Software, my students (virtually all of whom use windows) are astonished when I tell them that my computers (1 GNU/Linux laptop, 1 FreeBSD desktop) only get rebooted when I update the kernel. They are convinced that rebooting every few days is necessary for, e.g., memory management.
What you meant to say.
When I teach a section in my ethics classes about Free Software, my students (virtually all of whom use windows 98) are astonished when I tell them that my computers (1 GNU/Linux laptop, 1 FreeBSD desktop) only get rebooted when I update the kernel. They are convinced that rebooting every few days is necessary for, e.g., memory management.
Honestly, I've had a number of computers, and I've never had a BSOD that I couldn't trace back to a faulty piece of hardware/driver and that's hardly Microsoft's fault.
If that is the case, then it's almost impossible to gather anything from your computer that they're not specificly looking for.
I think the problem with VAC isn't that it's invasive, it's that it's not effective enough to keep up with month's-old exploits, and the problem I hear with Punkbuster is not that it's invasive, but that it registeres too many false posatives and there is no appeal process, since Even Balance proclaims that their system is infailable. Anti-cheat devices have problems, but I don't think invasion of privacy is one of them.
Getting a rocket launcher in stage 1-3 I think was due compensation. It's a demo, so of course there are things taken out. Plays pretty much exactly like I remember the Quake 2 demo playing a long time ago.
"Usually?" How many games have you made, sir? Where is your data?
Meanwhile, here is a list of paid-for engines which you might have heard of, that get lots of money thrown at them from software developers:
This doesn't even take into account the specific engines, such as Havok, or engines of past that have made their parent companies TONS of money, such as the myrid of engines created by id and Epic. They DO have value. Maybe not to the end user, but they DO have value to the developers who otherwise creating these games would be a bigger chore than need be. These engines prevents developers from having to re-invent the wheel, for sound code, graphics code, physics, etc., every time they create a game.
He even said specificly "Is it even possible, short of distributing source code?". He clearly does not want to distribute his source, for one reason or another.
Friends of mine had similar experiences with Fedora, and in that time they converted to Slackware and stuck with it. Me? After the headache that was Fedora Core 2, I've been progressing to more and more stable distros on my own personal computer....first Slackware, now Debian, and at the moment I've even been messing around with FreeBSD on a seporate partition in my free time.
I understand you had good experiences with Fedora Core, but understand that not everyone's experiences with all distros have been roses and blue jays.
1. There was no Microsoft-incuded lack of supply, it was a REAL lack of supply. 2. How the hell did you end up with posative moderation? Funny, I could understand, but insightful?
I was going to refute point 4 until I saw So... I blame the developers for wasting all of that space. I do.. In that case, I agree with you. You COULD still fit a quality game on a GD-ROM, even today, but the major development studios are the ones who needed tons and tons of space. It was the reason that developers passed over the N64...why be limited to expensive cartidges that held a paltry couple megs worth of space when you had CD's that could hold a million times that much.
Or the people who got dead pixels on their PSP. Or their new Dell LCD flat screen.
I could go on and on, but the point still stands, this isn't the 80's, where companies actually gave two shits about build quality. If you get a piece of consumer electronics that lasts any reasonable amount of time these days, you're very very lucky.
Do I like it? No. But don't blame Microsoft, blame the electronics industry for their shitty shitty QC.
So yeah...those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
* "But Alex" you say, "What does this mean for the Xbox 360 and it's lack of space?" I can't really say anything as a fact, but in my opnion I don't think that the developers are quite as strapped for space as they were when the Dremcast was out. Back then, PC games were starting to come out on mutliple CD's. I have yet to see a multi-DVD game...doesn't mean they don't exist, but I haven't seen one.
My last VIA motherboard, which housed a Athlon XP 2800+ ran fantasticly and without a hitch.. If you want to stay away from both companies, you have a third option as well, a SiS chipset which my current motherboard runs with, and I have been having no problems with it either.
The point is that coming first does not mean it's has a better or worse chance at market. There were a LOT of strikes against the Dreamcast.