Certain plugins had a hard time working before they made an installer for Firefox. Java, Flash, WMP, Quicktime, etc. might not work correctly unless they made an installer.
I still have Firefox 0.7 (I think that's the version, either 0.7 or 0.8, Windows version) on CD in case I go someplace that doesn't have Firefox installed, so at least I'm not forced into using IE. I can run it off the CD, and I have no problems and nothing to install.
They're there. But far less than IE's. There's 30 for Firefox/Mozilla, and 125 for IE. Plus there's 1996 virus listings that affect IE, 0 for Mozilla/Firefox. Mozilla/Firefox is listed as moderately critical, IE is listed as highly critical.
http://secunia.com/search/?search=Internet+Explore r
It's 80k that, when they use it and see the virtues of Firefox/Opera/etc., will tell their friends and families of the better alternatives to IE. IF all 80k can get just 1 person to switch, that becomes 160k, and if they get just one person to switch, then that's 320k, etc.
Microsoft likes to purport that IE is the most used based on merit alone, which is blatantly false. And, as more people start using alternatives (at this point, Firefox being the best for Windows, with it not only being completely free but also extremely small to download), they'll realize Microsoft is so full of shit it isn't even funny.
And, if IE doesn't get upgraded to match the others, even in Longhorn, people will just stay away and try and get thier friends and family to do the same.
Hell, I just switched my father over to Firefox on his XP machine because he was full of spy and adware that I had to get rid of. Once I showed him tabbed browsing and the built in pop up blocker, he was hooked.
Could you possibly tell me where I could find a single freeware game for the Xbox? Last I heard, none of the publishers of games for the Xbox have been giving away freeware games.
I've even heard (might be wrong) they loose money on the hardware, and turn it into profit through the commissions on games. If that's true I guess that's why they don't want people to install linux on it and use it for non-gaming purposes...
This would, in fact, be how it is supposed to work. However, Microsoft has yet to see one red cent of profit from the Xbox, or sales of its games. In the past 3 years, even with good sales of the Xbox and its games (some of the games, anyway, most don't see good sales), Microsoft has lost over $2 billion on the Xbox project.
Goes to show, though, that if Microsoft wants in on a market, they're willing to lose some money. Any other company would have folded or dropped the product if they were losing over $100 million per quarter on one product, like Microsoft does. I guess having a monopoly position that allows them to sell overpriced unsecure and buggy software allows them to lose so much and barely even bat an eyelash.
I have, however, clicked on Google's text ads several times--they were actually relevant! Anyone who feels their product or service is more important than the reason I visited the site doesn't deserve my attention.
This is why when we were deciding on if we were going to do ads on GamesAreFun.com, we only seriously looked at Google AdSense as the major porvider of ads. Google AdSense ads are text based, non intrusive, and 99% of the time relevant to what is on the page (or at least the site, being as we are a video game site, all the ads have something to do with video games or peripherals).
What if I can't pay attention to the content because the ads are screaming for my attention? I get easily distracted by stuff moving in my peripheral vision, such that I can't concentrate on an article or whatever. It's not like magazines, where the ads just sit there, waiting patiently for your attention.
The only other ads we have are ads that we decided on ourselves, as static banners. One of these links to our merchandise on Jinx.com, and the other links to GameMusic.com; and the banners are small, and you only see one at a time.
We're web surfers. We know how shitty pop ups, pop unders, Flash based ads, animated banner ads done to completely overwhelm your eyes, and other forms of advertising are. We oppose them, and we will not subject our readers to them. The ads we do have are non-intrusive, and esily clicked on or ignored at the reader's discretion.
In fact, most of the staff does not use IE to browse the web, we're either Mozilla 1.x or Firefox users (and since I have a Mac, I'm a Safari user); which helps to show we're aghainst the pop up/under ads.
While I won't go so far as to say that Mac OS (especially OS X) is adware/spyware and virus free, I will say the chances of getting these things on a Mac are exponentionally less than with a Windows box.
Listen to the parent of this post. Get her a iBook (the 14" ones are $1400 with a 1.33 GHz G4 and built in Airport Extreme), she'll be amazed at how little it slows down because there isn;t a bazillion malware programs hitting it at the same time. Just get her to at least 512 MB of RAM (I have 640 MB on my iBook), otherwise it could run a bit slow at times.
Comcast doesn't support the router itself, true. However, even though I've had a router for years now, they haven't refused to help me if my modem goes on the fritz.
Of course, most of the time I know I just need to unplug the modem for about 30 secs to 1 minute to let the memory clear itself, and then it will normally work. If this doesn't work, then I call and ask to see if there is an outage. And, if there isn't an outage, then we walk through the tech support until their systems update and it reports there is an outage, or the modem decides it wants to start sending and receiving again.
Maybe they have a different view of routers for different parts of the country. I don't know.
I, personally, have never played any of the Sly Cooper or Jak and Daxter games... but if this had happened to me, I'd definitely go for Hot Shots Golf: FORE!, since I love the Hot Shots Golf series.
Um, my gamertag has a space in it, and has since day 1 of XBL, and I've never had a problem with the space.
Not that it would matter, being as I already own Links, Top Spin, and Crimson Skies, and don't care about Amped or possibly any of the others.
When has Sony lied about a product's features before?
Sony claimed the PS2 could render Toy Story in real time... never happened, never will happen. Sony also promised and promised 1 million units for the North American launch of the PS2, delivered half of that in a successful attempt to get people wanting it even more-- and didn't say a damn word about the shortage until, what, a week before release? Sony also promised the PS2 hard drive would be used for lots and lots of stuff, like new levels in games, downloadable music files, downloadable movie files, IMs, game saves, and that it would be out very quickly after the release of the PS2.
3 years before the hard drive was released is very quickly, and 3 games that support it is tons of uses? And except for the games that support it (SOCOM II, FFXI, Resident Evil: Outbreak), no games can do anything with it, including saving games. Where's the downloadable music? Where's the downloadable movies? Oh, yeah, they aren't here.
At E3 this year they were talking about a larger memory card instead of what the hard drive could do or be used for.
Sony claimed the PSX (PS2/DVR combo unit) would play MP3 files; claimed it would write DVDs at 24X; claimed the PSX would read CD-R media; claimed the PSX would support the DVD+RW format; claimed the PS2 would read TFF and GIF files; claimed that the PSX would support Sony's Cybershot digital cameras...
Sony claimed this for months, especially while pre-orders for the PSX were rolling in... then 10 days before they released the PSX in Japan, they announced all these features were simply GONE from the PSX, except the burning, but it was reduced from 24X to 12X.
Kurtaragi, himself, at E3 this year told us (yes, I was at the press conference) that the PSP would get 2.5 hours of battery life from playing movies, 6 hours from playing music, and battery life "comparable to other handhelds while playing games" (his own words)--which should be between 8-12 hours (GBA and GBA SP battery lives). Now Sony is saying that the PSP might get 4-6 hours of battery life from playing games. Strange how that's around half of what Sony promised at E3, eh?
You're right. Sony has NEVER lied about a products features in the past, and they shure as hell wouldn't start now.
Oh, wait, that was sarcasm you were typing, wasn't it?;-P
For now. There's probably nothing in the EULA that says Valve can't change that on a moment's notice as well. Remember EULAs often carry that "we reserve the right to change this without warning, and if you don't like it, well, fuck off because you already agreed to it when we had the old one up" clause.
In that regard, I hope your stance on the HL2 and Steam EULAs doesn't change if Valve decides that you need an open Internet connection just to play offline, since you've been very adamant about reading the EULA and living with it.
While I'm sympathetic to this PoV, I have to point out that you're foolish to ignore the fact that you either DO have to read it all or you forfeit your right to complain when it has a surprise you don't like. Don't like that fact? Don't buy the game. Find something else to do with your life, or write your own games.
This is actually a good point, for now. If the UCTIA gets passed in more states, though, this could become moot, since the UCTIA can allow software makers to completely hide the EULA from the end user, while still making it somehow a legally binding contract.
Of course, software makers can still be reasonably assured that most people are just not going to read the EULAs on software, even if the UCTIA (rightfully) gets destroyed in state senates, and so they would only have to worry about the very small percentage (say probably under 1% of all customers) who would read the EULAs, understand them, and decide to not agree to them.
I've got two reasons to not worry about Steam, though. 1) I'm not all about having to register a game online for a single player offline game, even if it is only once; and 2) I'm on a Mac, and Valve's stance towards the Mac demographic of people who might potentially buy their games is a hearty "FUCK YOU!", especially because of how many millions of dollars they want from potential Mac publishers to have them port and publish the game for Valve for the Mac (meaning Valve wouldn't have to do shit, just license the game)-- Money that most Mac publishers know they would most likely never recoup. And that's for Half-Life 1, God only knows they'd be even more greedy and ask for a few billion to port Half-Life 2 to the Mac if it sells as well as Half-Life on the PC.
Right, which is why Valve has helped out in expanding the community by wanting millions upon millions of dollars in licensing fees in order for someone to license Half-Life for Mac, right?
Valve is only 'community friendly' because without those user made mods, no one would still care about Half-Life this long after its release. Half-Life was semi-popular, and a decent game, but it wasn't until a small team of users made a little teensy mod called Counter-Strike that Half-Life really took off. Team Fortress Classic was popular for a while, but when Counter-Strike really hit, it completely took over the Half-Life onlne world.
Seriously, almost no one plays Half-Life itself, but Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat and such are still popular.
Valve pretty much owes its popularity to the community, not from their actual Half-Life game, which is basically a Quake 1 engine game with some Quake 2 features hacked in with a pretty decent story.
Without the community making those mods, no one would have cared about Half-Life enough to have made Half-Life 2 possible this long after the original.
I guess thats why your post hasn't been modded UP for its terribly factual data, correct?
Unlike you, who feels good about being modded up 1 to a 2, I don't feel the need to try and Karma Whore. I've had my fair share of 3s, 4s, and 5s on posts; more than enough to have my posts start at a 2 moderation. Karma Whoring is not necessary for me; if my posts get modded, they get modded, if they don't they don't. Either way I don't take enough time to check/. enough to bother most of the time. Recent health problems have given me a nice 3 week window (minimum), though to check and post on/. more often. Otherwise, half the time I am days late before I see a story I would have otherwise decided to post in, and by then, no one is reading, so there is little need to post for any reason.
The bulk of what I said is true in the first three paragraphs the rest was fluff until the end.
I'm sure that's how Dubbya sees his decision to go to war with Iraq, too. Everything he said was true, except for the parts he lied about or just spoke out of his ass about. Looks like you and the Idiot in Chief have a lot in common.
The reason was the developers jumped ship to PS1 due to superior storage capacity that enabled you to make superior games with more content, better textures, and graphics then you could on a cart, lets face it, Cartridges were measured in mere megabits, a CD is 650Mbytes, there is no way you would want to develop for a cartridge.
CDs are cheaper to manufacture than carts, thus Sony offered better royalty rates. It wasn't that developers suddenly could do amazing shit with their games on the PSOne (check out those early games, most of them look and play like shit, SNES games coming out at the same time looked better, and often played better-- and even later PSOne games aren't that amazing in the graphics department), it was that publishers could charge the same amount for games, and see more money from the sales. Simple economics says we can make the same game for both systems, but we make more money on each CD versions sold over the carts, so we'll support disk based media.
And all the extra space of CDs got wasted with rendered video, which people were assuming was gameplay video... until they got past the opening to the actual game itself.
That is the whole reason Square left nintendo after 3 sequels to its legendary final fantasy series (and its still going strong and sells playstation 2's today), which was the smartest move on Sony's part ever was to get all the best 3rd party devs doing their system totally screwing over Nintendo.
Let's not forget all the rendered video Square could put on those CDs, nor the boatload of money Sony offered Square to make FF VII exclusive. Yet, SONY made more money off of FF VII than Square did, because Sony was the publisher of the game in North America.
Also, one thing people like you fail to remember is that while the PSOne was selling fairly well, it wasn't until FF VII was announced as exclusive to the PSOne that sales went through the roof. Before FF VII was announced exclusive, there wasn't much reason for people to own a PSOne, especially when most of the games were pretty craptacular looking thanks to the PSOne's very limited RAM.
Nintendo lost half their market in one fell swoop because of the mistake that ended up being the N64, all the developers that were formerly developing for the snes TOTALLY abandoned the N64 for the Playstation, Konami with Metal gear (which btw, the original was originally released on Nintendo's NES way back in the day), Street Fighter Series, Tekken, all the best fighting games, and all the Japanese RPG's went to the PSX while the N64 totally got shafted.
Again, not until FF VII was announced as exlusive and the sales shot through the roof did these developers and publishers jump ship to Sony. Or did we forget that Metal Gear Solid came out around a full year plus AFTER FF VII was announced and released? Street Fighter + load times = crap (in fact, the PSOne had a horrid time doing 2D games at all, because it had so little RAM to load all the sprite animations-- and Sony was very against 2D gaming, with the exception of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night), Tekken = meh (and Soul Calibur was much better on the Dreamcast than the PSOne), and the RPGs went so they could do tons of rendered video-- joy.
You have to realize hardware manufacturers like Sony don't sell playstation 2's, the developers sell playstation 2's by developing MUST HAVE games that force you to buy the hardware.
Right, because Sony NEVER overhyped their specs and told people to forget about the Dreamcast because the PS2 was going to be super dooper better than it and be able to render Toy Story in real time, right? The Sony Hype Machine(TM) is well known. The promise of great games down the road for the PS2 didn't sell them at launch, and certainly the launch games didn't (since almost all were pure crap), the Sony Hype Machine(TM) sold them by touting the DVD playback and the 75 million polygons/second theoretical max of the Emotion Engin
Yes, but it is unoptomized, and requires X11 or Darwin to run (these must be downloaded separately after the purchase of a Mac with OS X). Unless they have released a new version of OO.o for Mac OS X, this is the case.
I use OO.o on my Wintel machine, but I can get along fine with AppleWorks on my iBook (which I use more often than my Wintel machine), and AppleWorks can open Office documents and save documents as Office documents as well, or at least the word processor part can and the spreadsheet part can read Excel files.
4)If you need to have all the shiny new software out there, then the mac is not for you. An example is Gmail. It only recently began supporting Safari and there is still no Gmail notifier for OS X (although there are some nifty Gmail widgets out there for Konfabulator).
I've been using GMail with Safari for months, and never had a problem with it. Sure, I get no notification through the OS, but I haven't given out my GMail account address to many people at all. But, Safari 1.2.x has worked fine with GMail since I got the account.
Barring that, he can also hit F10 (standard button) for Exposé to show him all open windows in the current app (and then can then just TAB through the apps) and choose the window he wants immediately.
Except that nVidia doesn't write their drivers for the Mac platform, Apple does. They send the specs and such to Apple, and Apple writes the drivers.
Same for ATi.
Apple pretty much writes all the drivers for all the hardware in Macs, so they know that they'll work. It is extremely rare (but probably not unheard of) to hear of driver conflicts on a Mac, especially since the release of OS X. This is also why driver updates are included in the Sytem Updater, because Apple is releasing the newest drivers, not the company that made the hardware.
Microsoft doesn't write all the drivers for Windows hardware (since they can't control what goes into a Wintel machine as much as Apple can control what goes in a Mac), and that's part of the reason why there are still driver conflicts on Windows. The companies sometimes write half-assed drivers just to barely get the hardware to work, and then have to patch and patch and patch.
With Apple having complete control of the hardware and the drivers for said hardware in each stock machine they sell (there's still upgrade options for Mac users not from Apple), they are assured that the hardware will "Just Work" when it is first booted up, and will continue to "Just Work" until an issue comes up that they need to fix.
Ya, I was sort of wondering about the "Fancy Games" bit. I have yet to see a "Fancy Game" (ie: Half-Life 2, Far Cry, Doom3) that will run on a Mac.
Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004, WarCraft III, World of Warcraft (might not be out yet, I forget, but Blizzard is good about making their games Windows and Mac compatible), Civilization 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Halo, Call of Duty (and expansions), Battlefeild 1942, and more are on the Mac. Doom 3 is coming, but Half-Life 2 is not (especially since Valve wants like a billion dollars to license the original Half-Life in order to make a Mac version-- and because they will not program a Mac version themselves, this is the only reason Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are not coming to the Mac-- because Valve is Valve).
The problems with Fire, GAIM, and Adium-X being the interfaces for the programs, though. They're plain ugly, and unintuitive in some cases*.
It REALLY makes me wish Trillian would come to the Mac, because I LOVED Trillian on my Windows machine... but there are no plans to make a Mac version (which I would love to use for ICQ, Yahoo and MSN, since I hate the Mac versions of those IM programs).
*This coming from someone who uses Colloquy, an IRC client that uses the same basic interface as Adium-X. Still, I know many people who swear by Adium-X, and only turn it off for iChat for audio or video conferences. I just don't like the interfaces, myself (can we tell I've become a Mac user because I want my interfaces to be pleasant to look at or what?).
Then those stores are gouging GC customers, probably because they have less GC customers to sell to. Simple as that.
Check any online retailer, or the prices on EBGames.com, and you'll see that the prices for the exact same games on the systems are normally the exact same prices.
For example, Viewtiful Joe 2 was released with a MSRP of $40, new, on the GC. The PS2 version gets released in a week or so, and so we'll have to see the price difference, if any. But if those stores are charging $45 (or more) for VJ2 new on the GC, then they're simply gouging their customers to make more profit. EB has a history of doing this (on all systems), especially when there is no direct competition in the immediate area-- if there is no direct competition in the area they generally raise the price on their games by $5 to make more profit.
My advice is to simply stop shopping at those stores unless absolutely necessary. I'm sure that there's a WalMart in the area (even if WalMart is an evil, evil company), or Target, or Toys R Us, or Best Buy, or something else that will be selling the games for their actual MSRP.
In fact GC are usually $5 more expensive than their PS2 or XBox counterparts.
New GC games: $40-$50, normally.
New PS2 games: $40-$50, normally
New Xbox games: $40-$50, normally
I'm sorry, which bizarro world do you live in where something that sells for the exact same price is "usually $5 more expensive" than its counterparts?
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I still have Firefox 0.7 (I think that's the version, either 0.7 or 0.8, Windows version) on CD in case I go someplace that doesn't have Firefox installed, so at least I'm not forced into using IE. I can run it off the CD, and I have no problems and nothing to install.
http://secunia.com/search/?search=Internet+Explore r
Microsoft likes to purport that IE is the most used based on merit alone, which is blatantly false. And, as more people start using alternatives (at this point, Firefox being the best for Windows, with it not only being completely free but also extremely small to download), they'll realize Microsoft is so full of shit it isn't even funny.
And, if IE doesn't get upgraded to match the others, even in Longhorn, people will just stay away and try and get thier friends and family to do the same.
Hell, I just switched my father over to Firefox on his XP machine because he was full of spy and adware that I had to get rid of. Once I showed him tabbed browsing and the built in pop up blocker, he was hooked.
Could you possibly tell me where I could find a single freeware game for the Xbox? Last I heard, none of the publishers of games for the Xbox have been giving away freeware games.
This would, in fact, be how it is supposed to work. However, Microsoft has yet to see one red cent of profit from the Xbox, or sales of its games. In the past 3 years, even with good sales of the Xbox and its games (some of the games, anyway, most don't see good sales), Microsoft has lost over $2 billion on the Xbox project.
Goes to show, though, that if Microsoft wants in on a market, they're willing to lose some money. Any other company would have folded or dropped the product if they were losing over $100 million per quarter on one product, like Microsoft does. I guess having a monopoly position that allows them to sell overpriced unsecure and buggy software allows them to lose so much and barely even bat an eyelash.
I have, however, clicked on Google's text ads several times--they were actually relevant! Anyone who feels their product or service is more important than the reason I visited the site doesn't deserve my attention.
This is why when we were deciding on if we were going to do ads on GamesAreFun.com, we only seriously looked at Google AdSense as the major porvider of ads. Google AdSense ads are text based, non intrusive, and 99% of the time relevant to what is on the page (or at least the site, being as we are a video game site, all the ads have something to do with video games or peripherals).
What if I can't pay attention to the content because the ads are screaming for my attention? I get easily distracted by stuff moving in my peripheral vision, such that I can't concentrate on an article or whatever. It's not like magazines, where the ads just sit there, waiting patiently for your attention.
The only other ads we have are ads that we decided on ourselves, as static banners. One of these links to our merchandise on Jinx.com, and the other links to GameMusic.com; and the banners are small, and you only see one at a time.
We're web surfers. We know how shitty pop ups, pop unders, Flash based ads, animated banner ads done to completely overwhelm your eyes, and other forms of advertising are. We oppose them, and we will not subject our readers to them. The ads we do have are non-intrusive, and esily clicked on or ignored at the reader's discretion.
In fact, most of the staff does not use IE to browse the web, we're either Mozilla 1.x or Firefox users (and since I have a Mac, I'm a Safari user); which helps to show we're aghainst the pop up/under ads.
Listen to the parent of this post. Get her a iBook (the 14" ones are $1400 with a 1.33 GHz G4 and built in Airport Extreme), she'll be amazed at how little it slows down because there isn;t a bazillion malware programs hitting it at the same time. Just get her to at least 512 MB of RAM (I have 640 MB on my iBook), otherwise it could run a bit slow at times.
Of course, most of the time I know I just need to unplug the modem for about 30 secs to 1 minute to let the memory clear itself, and then it will normally work. If this doesn't work, then I call and ask to see if there is an outage. And, if there isn't an outage, then we walk through the tech support until their systems update and it reports there is an outage, or the modem decides it wants to start sending and receiving again.
Maybe they have a different view of routers for different parts of the country. I don't know.
I, personally, have never played any of the Sly Cooper or Jak and Daxter games... but if this had happened to me, I'd definitely go for Hot Shots Golf: FORE!, since I love the Hot Shots Golf series.
It's not that common of a nickname, after all.
Um, my gamertag has a space in it, and has since day 1 of XBL, and I've never had a problem with the space. Not that it would matter, being as I already own Links, Top Spin, and Crimson Skies, and don't care about Amped or possibly any of the others.
Sony claimed the PS2 could render Toy Story in real time... never happened, never will happen. Sony also promised and promised 1 million units for the North American launch of the PS2, delivered half of that in a successful attempt to get people wanting it even more-- and didn't say a damn word about the shortage until, what, a week before release? Sony also promised the PS2 hard drive would be used for lots and lots of stuff, like new levels in games, downloadable music files, downloadable movie files, IMs, game saves, and that it would be out very quickly after the release of the PS2.
3 years before the hard drive was released is very quickly, and 3 games that support it is tons of uses? And except for the games that support it (SOCOM II, FFXI, Resident Evil: Outbreak), no games can do anything with it, including saving games. Where's the downloadable music? Where's the downloadable movies? Oh, yeah, they aren't here.
At E3 this year they were talking about a larger memory card instead of what the hard drive could do or be used for.
Sony claimed the PSX (PS2/DVR combo unit) would play MP3 files; claimed it would write DVDs at 24X; claimed the PSX would read CD-R media; claimed the PSX would support the DVD+RW format; claimed the PS2 would read TFF and GIF files; claimed that the PSX would support Sony's Cybershot digital cameras...
Sony claimed this for months, especially while pre-orders for the PSX were rolling in... then 10 days before they released the PSX in Japan, they announced all these features were simply GONE from the PSX, except the burning, but it was reduced from 24X to 12X.
Kurtaragi, himself, at E3 this year told us (yes, I was at the press conference) that the PSP would get 2.5 hours of battery life from playing movies, 6 hours from playing music, and battery life "comparable to other handhelds while playing games" (his own words)--which should be between 8-12 hours (GBA and GBA SP battery lives). Now Sony is saying that the PSP might get 4-6 hours of battery life from playing games. Strange how that's around half of what Sony promised at E3, eh?
You're right. Sony has NEVER lied about a products features in the past, and they shure as hell wouldn't start now.
Oh, wait, that was sarcasm you were typing, wasn't it? ;-P
For now. There's probably nothing in the EULA that says Valve can't change that on a moment's notice as well. Remember EULAs often carry that "we reserve the right to change this without warning, and if you don't like it, well, fuck off because you already agreed to it when we had the old one up" clause.
In that regard, I hope your stance on the HL2 and Steam EULAs doesn't change if Valve decides that you need an open Internet connection just to play offline, since you've been very adamant about reading the EULA and living with it.
This is actually a good point, for now. If the UCTIA gets passed in more states, though, this could become moot, since the UCTIA can allow software makers to completely hide the EULA from the end user, while still making it somehow a legally binding contract.
Of course, software makers can still be reasonably assured that most people are just not going to read the EULAs on software, even if the UCTIA (rightfully) gets destroyed in state senates, and so they would only have to worry about the very small percentage (say probably under 1% of all customers) who would read the EULAs, understand them, and decide to not agree to them.
I've got two reasons to not worry about Steam, though. 1) I'm not all about having to register a game online for a single player offline game, even if it is only once; and 2) I'm on a Mac, and Valve's stance towards the Mac demographic of people who might potentially buy their games is a hearty "FUCK YOU!", especially because of how many millions of dollars they want from potential Mac publishers to have them port and publish the game for Valve for the Mac (meaning Valve wouldn't have to do shit, just license the game)-- Money that most Mac publishers know they would most likely never recoup. And that's for Half-Life 1, God only knows they'd be even more greedy and ask for a few billion to port Half-Life 2 to the Mac if it sells as well as Half-Life on the PC.
Right, which is why Valve has helped out in expanding the community by wanting millions upon millions of dollars in licensing fees in order for someone to license Half-Life for Mac, right?
Valve is only 'community friendly' because without those user made mods, no one would still care about Half-Life this long after its release. Half-Life was semi-popular, and a decent game, but it wasn't until a small team of users made a little teensy mod called Counter-Strike that Half-Life really took off. Team Fortress Classic was popular for a while, but when Counter-Strike really hit, it completely took over the Half-Life onlne world.
Seriously, almost no one plays Half-Life itself, but Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat and such are still popular.
Valve pretty much owes its popularity to the community, not from their actual Half-Life game, which is basically a Quake 1 engine game with some Quake 2 features hacked in with a pretty decent story.
Without the community making those mods, no one would have cared about Half-Life enough to have made Half-Life 2 possible this long after the original.
Unlike you, who feels good about being modded up 1 to a 2, I don't feel the need to try and Karma Whore. I've had my fair share of 3s, 4s, and 5s on posts; more than enough to have my posts start at a 2 moderation. Karma Whoring is not necessary for me; if my posts get modded, they get modded, if they don't they don't. Either way I don't take enough time to check /. enough to bother most of the time. Recent health problems have given me a nice 3 week window (minimum), though to check and post on /. more often. Otherwise, half the time I am days late before I see a story I would have otherwise decided to post in, and by then, no one is reading, so there is little need to post for any reason.
The bulk of what I said is true in the first three paragraphs the rest was fluff until the end.
I'm sure that's how Dubbya sees his decision to go to war with Iraq, too. Everything he said was true, except for the parts he lied about or just spoke out of his ass about. Looks like you and the Idiot in Chief have a lot in common.
Good job.
The reason was the developers jumped ship to PS1 due to superior storage capacity that enabled you to make superior games with more content, better textures, and graphics then you could on a cart, lets face it, Cartridges were measured in mere megabits, a CD is 650Mbytes, there is no way you would want to develop for a cartridge.
CDs are cheaper to manufacture than carts, thus Sony offered better royalty rates. It wasn't that developers suddenly could do amazing shit with their games on the PSOne (check out those early games, most of them look and play like shit, SNES games coming out at the same time looked better, and often played better-- and even later PSOne games aren't that amazing in the graphics department), it was that publishers could charge the same amount for games, and see more money from the sales. Simple economics says we can make the same game for both systems, but we make more money on each CD versions sold over the carts, so we'll support disk based media.
And all the extra space of CDs got wasted with rendered video, which people were assuming was gameplay video... until they got past the opening to the actual game itself.
That is the whole reason Square left nintendo after 3 sequels to its legendary final fantasy series (and its still going strong and sells playstation 2's today), which was the smartest move on Sony's part ever was to get all the best 3rd party devs doing their system totally screwing over Nintendo.
Let's not forget all the rendered video Square could put on those CDs, nor the boatload of money Sony offered Square to make FF VII exclusive. Yet, SONY made more money off of FF VII than Square did, because Sony was the publisher of the game in North America.
Also, one thing people like you fail to remember is that while the PSOne was selling fairly well, it wasn't until FF VII was announced as exclusive to the PSOne that sales went through the roof. Before FF VII was announced exclusive, there wasn't much reason for people to own a PSOne, especially when most of the games were pretty craptacular looking thanks to the PSOne's very limited RAM.
Nintendo lost half their market in one fell swoop because of the mistake that ended up being the N64, all the developers that were formerly developing for the snes TOTALLY abandoned the N64 for the Playstation, Konami with Metal gear (which btw, the original was originally released on Nintendo's NES way back in the day), Street Fighter Series, Tekken, all the best fighting games, and all the Japanese RPG's went to the PSX while the N64 totally got shafted.
Again, not until FF VII was announced as exlusive and the sales shot through the roof did these developers and publishers jump ship to Sony. Or did we forget that Metal Gear Solid came out around a full year plus AFTER FF VII was announced and released? Street Fighter + load times = crap (in fact, the PSOne had a horrid time doing 2D games at all, because it had so little RAM to load all the sprite animations-- and Sony was very against 2D gaming, with the exception of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night), Tekken = meh (and Soul Calibur was much better on the Dreamcast than the PSOne), and the RPGs went so they could do tons of rendered video-- joy.
You have to realize hardware manufacturers like Sony don't sell playstation 2's, the developers sell playstation 2's by developing MUST HAVE games that force you to buy the hardware.
Right, because Sony NEVER overhyped their specs and told people to forget about the Dreamcast because the PS2 was going to be super dooper better than it and be able to render Toy Story in real time, right? The Sony Hype Machine(TM) is well known. The promise of great games down the road for the PS2 didn't sell them at launch, and certainly the launch games didn't (since almost all were pure crap), the Sony Hype Machine(TM) sold them by touting the DVD playback and the 75 million polygons/second theoretical max of the Emotion Engin
I use OO.o on my Wintel machine, but I can get along fine with AppleWorks on my iBook (which I use more often than my Wintel machine), and AppleWorks can open Office documents and save documents as Office documents as well, or at least the word processor part can and the spreadsheet part can read Excel files.
I've been using GMail with Safari for months, and never had a problem with it. Sure, I get no notification through the OS, but I haven't given out my GMail account address to many people at all. But, Safari 1.2.x has worked fine with GMail since I got the account.
Barring that, he can also hit F10 (standard button) for Exposé to show him all open windows in the current app (and then can then just TAB through the apps) and choose the window he wants immediately.
Except that nVidia doesn't write their drivers for the Mac platform, Apple does. They send the specs and such to Apple, and Apple writes the drivers.
Same for ATi.
Apple pretty much writes all the drivers for all the hardware in Macs, so they know that they'll work. It is extremely rare (but probably not unheard of) to hear of driver conflicts on a Mac, especially since the release of OS X. This is also why driver updates are included in the Sytem Updater, because Apple is releasing the newest drivers, not the company that made the hardware.
Microsoft doesn't write all the drivers for Windows hardware (since they can't control what goes into a Wintel machine as much as Apple can control what goes in a Mac), and that's part of the reason why there are still driver conflicts on Windows. The companies sometimes write half-assed drivers just to barely get the hardware to work, and then have to patch and patch and patch.
With Apple having complete control of the hardware and the drivers for said hardware in each stock machine they sell (there's still upgrade options for Mac users not from Apple), they are assured that the hardware will "Just Work" when it is first booted up, and will continue to "Just Work" until an issue comes up that they need to fix.
Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004, WarCraft III, World of Warcraft (might not be out yet, I forget, but Blizzard is good about making their games Windows and Mac compatible), Civilization 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Halo, Call of Duty (and expansions), Battlefeild 1942, and more are on the Mac. Doom 3 is coming, but Half-Life 2 is not (especially since Valve wants like a billion dollars to license the original Half-Life in order to make a Mac version-- and because they will not program a Mac version themselves, this is the only reason Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are not coming to the Mac-- because Valve is Valve).
It REALLY makes me wish Trillian would come to the Mac, because I LOVED Trillian on my Windows machine... but there are no plans to make a Mac version (which I would love to use for ICQ, Yahoo and MSN, since I hate the Mac versions of those IM programs).
*This coming from someone who uses Colloquy, an IRC client that uses the same basic interface as Adium-X. Still, I know many people who swear by Adium-X, and only turn it off for iChat for audio or video conferences. I just don't like the interfaces, myself (can we tell I've become a Mac user because I want my interfaces to be pleasant to look at or what?).
Check any online retailer, or the prices on EBGames.com, and you'll see that the prices for the exact same games on the systems are normally the exact same prices.
For example, Viewtiful Joe 2 was released with a MSRP of $40, new, on the GC. The PS2 version gets released in a week or so, and so we'll have to see the price difference, if any. But if those stores are charging $45 (or more) for VJ2 new on the GC, then they're simply gouging their customers to make more profit. EB has a history of doing this (on all systems), especially when there is no direct competition in the immediate area-- if there is no direct competition in the area they generally raise the price on their games by $5 to make more profit.
Amazon.com lists VJ2 as $40 for both the GC and PS2. It also lists LotR: The Third Age as a mere 11 cent difference between the GC and other consoles (why, I don't know). EB Games lists the LotR: Third Age game as the exact same price on all consoles, and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is also the exact same price on the PC and all consoles on EBGames.com.
My advice is to simply stop shopping at those stores unless absolutely necessary. I'm sure that there's a WalMart in the area (even if WalMart is an evil, evil company), or Target, or Toys R Us, or Best Buy, or something else that will be selling the games for their actual MSRP.
New GC games: $40-$50, normally.
New PS2 games: $40-$50, normally
New Xbox games: $40-$50, normally
I'm sorry, which bizarro world do you live in where something that sells for the exact same price is "usually $5 more expensive" than its counterparts?
Insightful my ass....