Seriously? Around 1983-1985, the market was 50% IBM PC/compatibles and 50% Apple II.
[Citation needed] Given that the C64 was selling like hotcakes (market share that I found reference to on the net was between 35 and 40% over that time period, but I don't necessarily trust those sources) your 50/50 IBM/Apple split sounds suspiciously like it was pulled out of thin air.
I think you should go back and read Tog again...that famous study showed that for some tasks, people believed that the keyboard was faster, even though it wasn't even close.
TG-16 CD for the win...I'm pretty sure it was the first, even if it was ridiculously expensive. I still have one, and it still works. Ys 1 & 2 were/are fantastic games.
In grade 7, my teacher staged a crazy gunman attack in the classroom - mind you this was nearly 20 years ago now...
First thing in the morning, he's starting up a lesson, and some guy barges into the room ranting about how he'd been cut off in traffic, and how angry he was. After a few shouted exchanges, he pulled a cap gun out of hit pocket and "shot" my teacher - though he got excited and "shot" himself in the foot instead. Then he ran out of the room.
I think the point of the lesson was to teach us how to be good eyewitnesses or something. I don't remember if my teacher had a fake blood pack or not - could be that my memory has embellished it.
We weren't cowering under our desks, but the accuracy of our eyewitness accounts was shockingly bad even seconds after the event.
People who want to use MythTV or Windows MCE, for the most part want it run as a dedicated Tivo-like appliance.
Speak for yourself - while that's certainly true of my one dedicated frontend, my backend serves as all sorts of server type things (mail, web, database, storage)
I didn't find it overly onerous installing from the gentoo portage, and the feature list can't be beat. It's also nice that I can (and do) run a frontend on any other machine in my house - laptop, mac mini, xbox. There are some rough edges, to be sure, but overall I think it's a damned fine piece of software, and better than a lot of stuff I've paid money for.
If you know linux at all Myth is the way to go. If you don't know linux, or don't like tinkering, MCE is likely the path of least resistance.
Re:I remember actually wanting ads in a game once.
on
In-Game Ads Necessary?
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· Score: 1
Coke and Pepsi already cut back their advertising dollars significantly from their peak - hasn't seemed to slow the marketing machine from selling those spots to the car people or the beer people.
I think you're right though, we're on the verge of an advertising backlash. Tivo will get the "blame" but ultimately it was coming anyway.
I remember actually wanting ads in a game once.
on
In-Game Ads Necessary?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Back in 1997, I bought NHL '97 to go with my shiny new computer. The boards were plastered with ads for Hagg sticks and other crap non-existent products. Primarily because they didn't have the licenses to put real brands in the game.
There was a modding community out there endeavouring to recreate the TV hockey experience as much as possible. I'll admit, I patched my NHL '97 to have actual ads instead of the standard fake ones. Updated equipment skins, on screen scoreboard graphics etc. It enhanced the gameplay, because it made it more like real life.
Now, if you go back and watch NHL hockey from the 70's, you'll be shocked to see that the boards were ad-free. Today, you can go to any small town rink and there are board ads, and ads painted into the ice, and ads on the scoreboard, and ads in the urinals. There has to be a happy medium out there somewhere.
Re:PC-based DVRs have massive drawbacks...
on
Build Your Own DVR
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· Score: 1
Where on earth did you get a Plextor m402U for $129?
I'm not saying that what they do has no value. I just question a legal system that winds up giving more rights to the people behind the marketing than the people behind the creating.
Copyright was created to encourage creation, not to encourage marketing.
And before you say "nobody forced them to sign away their rights" realize that the **AAs have created an environment that makes it difficult to make it on your own. As an example, payola to radio stations is illegal, and yet it continues unabated.
I personally don't like Scrooge McDuck's golden rule: "He who has the gold, makes the rules."
There's also the fundamental difference of who's being ripped off. Stan created Spider-Man etc. The **AA don't create things, they just hoard the rights to other people's creations.
That's my point though - you're probably one of a handful of people in the whole world that it matters to. If you couldn't buy a digital camera that took JPG or TIFF or some other common format, there would be millions of people clamouring for an "open" camera.
Or, they wouldn't have sold as many of them as they have.
More important than functioning as it was intended is functioning as it's expected.
My digital camera lets me take pictures, and lets me do whatever I want with my pictures. That's why you don't see people getting up in arms about the lack of openness of digital cameras, but you do see active communities built up around "hacking" cell phones to remove artificial restrictions.
Sure it's possible that some hardware hacking could result in some new whiz bang feature in my camera, but honestly, I (and I assume many others) don't use 99% of the whiz bang features that are already enabled on my camera, so why do I need more?
On the other hand, I'd never buy a cameraphone that didn't let me download my pictures to my computer and use them myself without paying a fee to the service provider. That's just insane, and wrong.
Despite the crappy review, you owe it to yourself to check the game out. It's an awesome adrenaline racer.
As to how many courses - I haven't bothered to count, but there are probably a dozen true courses that you play in various configurations, taking different turns, going different directions, etc. Lots of cars, though a lot of them play similarly.
As for replay though - don't worry about being bored with it after 6-7 hours, unless you don't likea arcadey adrenaline racers with spectacular crashes. Even then, it's probably worth a rental.
Does this review belong on the front page? Nope. It barely belongs on the Games page, since the game is so old.
Actually, you're wrong too. I administer a half dozen blogs, and the spammers don't stop just because their posts never see the light of day.
In fact, I have one blog that has a robots.txt file disallowing all (ie, search engines shouldn't/don't crawl it) and the stupid spammers still post there...
There's one guy who's been posting a couple hundred spams a day to my main site, and despite the fact that not a single one of them has ever shown up on the page, he's kept at it for a couple of weeks now. I expect that this joker will stop eventually, but he'll be replaced by a dozen other more obnoxious jokers, so the spam problem doesn't go away.
Remember, the plural of anecdote isn't proof. Just because that's what you've seen doesn't make it the rule.
Further to "how to avoid blogs" when searching - try just adding "-blog" to your search. You'll be amazed at how many blogs just disappear.
Kind of like looking for good reviews of products without wading through the sites trying to sell you the product by adding "-cart" to your search. (It's amazing how many places have "No reviews yet, be the first to review the product" on their pages. Damned internet clutterers.)
On the other hand, it's quite difficult to find reviews of shopping carts, and news stories about blogs that aren't on blogs...Hrmmmm. Maybe my approach needs some work.
Back in the early windows 95 days, when I wasn't that familiar windows, I had a faulty keyboard. Every now and then, it would act as if the windows key was being held down. Whenever I'd type any of the standard windows shortcut keys, the shortcut would fire instead, so I couldn't type certain letters.
Since it was a hardware fault, rebooting didn't solve the problem. I didn't know about windows key shortcuts at the time, so I was quite baffled by the behaviour of my machine. I sent out several emails asking for help, carefully omitting any words that had the letters e, r and s in them (I think that's all there were for default windows shortcuts back in the day.) It was frustrating as hell, until I figured it out, and turfed the keyboard.
No, I know you were refuting the "we stand on God for Thee" bit - I was referring to your rant against the President putting God into his policies - since as a Canadian, we've got God right there in our anthem...
As to my nationality quiz - that's probably the only reason I'll respond, cause I really like your choice of questions.
-What is your favorite Timbit? My favourite chocolate, though I was raised on Robins Eggs - we didn't get a Timmy Ho's here until I was 18 or something...
-Who is Paul Henderson, what did he do, and when? Paul scored a goal against the Russians three years before I was born (I was born in 1975.) It was a very big goal. "There's a shot. Out front to Henderson, he scores!" I think I've heard that aboot a million and a half times.
-38 and no date describes what NHL team. That's no team, that's the maple leafs. -Name two dog breeds named for a Canadian province. I'll admit you've got me stumped there - Labrador Retriever? and ? I'm not a big dog guy. -Who is Grapes? Blue? Rose? Ron? Don Cherry, his dog (a bull terrier, who passed away some time ago) his wife (who passed away two years ago, which resulted in him growing that godawful goatee) and his straightman on HNIC - the current host of Movie Night in Canada -Toronto is the capital of what (and no, "smelling like my ass" is not a correct response, even if it is true)? Hmmm isn't Tdot the capital of the world? No, wait, the Universe...Ah, hell. Ontario. Close enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously? Around 1983-1985, the market was 50% IBM PC/compatibles and 50% Apple II.
[Citation needed] Given that the C64 was selling like hotcakes (market share that I found reference to on the net was between 35 and 40% over that time period, but I don't necessarily trust those sources) your 50/50 IBM/Apple split sounds suspiciously like it was pulled out of thin air.
Pretty sure I jailbroke my ipod on iOS 4 with a jailbreakme website...
I think you should go back and read Tog again...that famous study showed that for some tasks, people believed that the keyboard was faster, even though it wasn't even close.
TG-16 CD for the win...I'm pretty sure it was the first, even if it was ridiculously expensive. I still have one, and it still works. Ys 1 & 2 were/are fantastic games.
In grade 7, my teacher staged a crazy gunman attack in the classroom - mind you this was nearly 20 years ago now...
First thing in the morning, he's starting up a lesson, and some guy barges into the room ranting about how he'd been cut off in traffic, and how angry he was. After a few shouted exchanges, he pulled a cap gun out of hit pocket and "shot" my teacher - though he got excited and "shot" himself in the foot instead. Then he ran out of the room.
I think the point of the lesson was to teach us how to be good eyewitnesses or something. I don't remember if my teacher had a fake blood pack or not - could be that my memory has embellished it.
We weren't cowering under our desks, but the accuracy of our eyewitness accounts was shockingly bad even seconds after the event.
Mr. Selvig was a great teacher.
Back when Quake was the hot game, I took scans of my wedding photos (I'd gotten married recently) and created textures for myself and my best man.
It was both cool and extremely creepy to see myself running around the quake levels in a tux and a rocket launcher.
Speak for yourself - while that's certainly true of my one dedicated frontend, my backend serves as all sorts of server type things (mail, web, database, storage)
I didn't find it overly onerous installing from the gentoo portage, and the feature list can't be beat. It's also nice that I can (and do) run a frontend on any other machine in my house - laptop, mac mini, xbox. There are some rough edges, to be sure, but overall I think it's a damned fine piece of software, and better than a lot of stuff I've paid money for.
If you know linux at all Myth is the way to go. If you don't know linux, or don't like tinkering, MCE is likely the path of least resistance.
Coke and Pepsi already cut back their advertising dollars significantly from their peak - hasn't seemed to slow the marketing machine from selling those spots to the car people or the beer people. I think you're right though, we're on the verge of an advertising backlash. Tivo will get the "blame" but ultimately it was coming anyway.
Back in 1997, I bought NHL '97 to go with my shiny new computer. The boards were plastered with ads for Hagg sticks and other crap non-existent products. Primarily because they didn't have the licenses to put real brands in the game.
There was a modding community out there endeavouring to recreate the TV hockey experience as much as possible. I'll admit, I patched my NHL '97 to have actual ads instead of the standard fake ones. Updated equipment skins, on screen scoreboard graphics etc. It enhanced the gameplay, because it made it more like real life.
Now, if you go back and watch NHL hockey from the 70's, you'll be shocked to see that the boards were ad-free. Today, you can go to any small town rink and there are board ads, and ads painted into the ice, and ads on the scoreboard, and ads in the urinals. There has to be a happy medium out there somewhere.
Where on earth did you get a Plextor m402U for $129?
They don't both have to have that kind of money - just one of them does...
I'm not saying that what they do has no value. I just question a legal system that winds up giving more rights to the people behind the marketing than the people behind the creating.
Copyright was created to encourage creation, not to encourage marketing.
And before you say "nobody forced them to sign away their rights" realize that the **AAs have created an environment that makes it difficult to make it on your own. As an example, payola to radio stations is illegal, and yet it continues unabated.
I personally don't like Scrooge McDuck's golden rule: "He who has the gold, makes the rules."
There's also the fundamental difference of who's being ripped off. Stan created Spider-Man etc. The **AA don't create things, they just hoard the rights to other people's creations.
That's my point though - you're probably one of a handful of people in the whole world that it matters to. If you couldn't buy a digital camera that took JPG or TIFF or some other common format, there would be millions of people clamouring for an "open" camera.
Or, they wouldn't have sold as many of them as they have.
More important than functioning as it was intended is functioning as it's expected.
My digital camera lets me take pictures, and lets me do whatever I want with my pictures. That's why you don't see people getting up in arms about the lack of openness of digital cameras, but you do see active communities built up around "hacking" cell phones to remove artificial restrictions.
Sure it's possible that some hardware hacking could result in some new whiz bang feature in my camera, but honestly, I (and I assume many others) don't use 99% of the whiz bang features that are already enabled on my camera, so why do I need more?
On the other hand, I'd never buy a cameraphone that didn't let me download my pictures to my computer and use them myself without paying a fee to the service provider. That's just insane, and wrong.
Despite the crappy review, you owe it to yourself to check the game out. It's an awesome adrenaline racer.
As to how many courses - I haven't bothered to count, but there are probably a dozen true courses that you play in various configurations, taking different turns, going different directions, etc. Lots of cars, though a lot of them play similarly.
As for replay though - don't worry about being bored with it after 6-7 hours, unless you don't likea arcadey adrenaline racers with spectacular crashes. Even then, it's probably worth a rental.
Does this review belong on the front page? Nope. It barely belongs on the Games page, since the game is so old.
Actually, you're wrong too. I administer a half dozen blogs, and the spammers don't stop just because their posts never see the light of day.
In fact, I have one blog that has a robots.txt file disallowing all (ie, search engines shouldn't/don't crawl it) and the stupid spammers still post there...
There's one guy who's been posting a couple hundred spams a day to my main site, and despite the fact that not a single one of them has ever shown up on the page, he's kept at it for a couple of weeks now. I expect that this joker will stop eventually, but he'll be replaced by a dozen other more obnoxious jokers, so the spam problem doesn't go away.
Remember, the plural of anecdote isn't proof. Just because that's what you've seen doesn't make it the rule.
Further to "how to avoid blogs" when searching - try just adding "-blog" to your search. You'll be amazed at how many blogs just disappear.
Kind of like looking for good reviews of products without wading through the sites trying to sell you the product by adding "-cart" to your search. (It's amazing how many places have "No reviews yet, be the first to review the product" on their pages. Damned internet clutterers.)
On the other hand, it's quite difficult to find reviews of shopping carts, and news stories about blogs that aren't on blogs...Hrmmmm. Maybe my approach needs some work.
I think you mean StumbleUpon
Man oh man. This comment needs to be moderated up in the worst way. That's one of the best posts I've read on Slashdot in several months.
What a day to be out of mod points.
You must have sigs turned off - his sig is:
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
Back in the early windows 95 days, when I wasn't that familiar windows, I had a faulty keyboard. Every now and then, it would act as if the windows key was being held down. Whenever I'd type any of the standard windows shortcut keys, the shortcut would fire instead, so I couldn't type certain letters.
Since it was a hardware fault, rebooting didn't solve the problem. I didn't know about windows key shortcuts at the time, so I was quite baffled by the behaviour of my machine. I sent out several emails asking for help, carefully omitting any words that had the letters e, r and s in them (I think that's all there were for default windows shortcuts back in the day.) It was frustrating as hell, until I figured it out, and turfed the keyboard.
If you have designer access to your mail database, you can add an action that lets you "Reply Quoted" - The Notes FAQ has details.
Once you get past the poorly designed default template, you can do some really cool stuff with Notes/Domino, and almost make it behave properly.
No, I know you were refuting the "we stand on God for Thee" bit - I was referring to your rant against the President putting God into his policies - since as a Canadian, we've got God right there in our anthem...
As to my nationality quiz - that's probably the only reason I'll respond, cause I really like your choice of questions.
-What is your favorite Timbit?
My favourite chocolate, though I was raised on Robins Eggs - we didn't get a Timmy Ho's here until I was 18 or something...
-Who is Paul Henderson, what did he do, and when?
Paul scored a goal against the Russians three years before I was born (I was born in 1975.) It was a very big goal. "There's a shot. Out front to Henderson, he scores!" I think I've heard that aboot a million and a half times.
-38 and no date describes what NHL team.
That's no team, that's the maple leafs.
-Name two dog breeds named for a Canadian province.
I'll admit you've got me stumped there - Labrador Retriever? and ? I'm not a big dog guy.
-Who is Grapes? Blue? Rose? Ron?
Don Cherry, his dog (a bull terrier, who passed away some time ago) his wife (who passed away two years ago, which resulted in him growing that godawful goatee) and his straightman on HNIC - the current host of Movie Night in Canada
-Toronto is the capital of what (and no, "smelling like my ass" is not a correct response, even if it is true)?
Hmmm isn't Tdot the capital of the world? No, wait, the Universe...Ah, hell. Ontario. Close enough.
Don't forget the following line - "God keep our land, glorious and free..."
Oh wait, that takes some of the piss out of your rant...
I'm not religious by any stretch, but I like the fact that God is mentioned in our national anthem, and almost nobody gets upset about it.