I Bought my Ps3 just recently. I'd originally intended to hold off till Metal Gear 4. I realized I have tons of GREAT PS2 games in my library that I still play from time to time. Not having 100% compatability is not an option.
My purchase was not a frantic "OMG I'm gonna loose if i dont buy now", it was more of the thought of having to keep my 7 year old PS2 still hooked up to my TV. Space is a comodity and my Entertainment center is loosing.
The PS3 was the first console to replace my SONY DVD player that I've had since 1998 or so. I'm not one bit disapointed with that choice. It brought new life into my old Dolby DTS stereo reciever. Sound no longer cuts out in intense action scenes.
I am happy with the PS3 as it stands. Sure I wish I got it on the 65nm Press but oh well. It'll keep my VERY warm in the winter. I will admit that I did need to re-engineer my Entertainment center to allow better heat disipation, but that was a minor inconvenience. The Ps3 is seated on Sheet aluminum with chopsticks glued to the bottom to allow better air flow. I imagine Xbox 360 would have required it's own AC unit installed.
That still wont stop me from installing a Supercharger under the hood and getting a custom exhaust done. As long as the exhaust is under I believe 98decibles it's legal.
If touching anything under the hood is considered illegal then K&N, Greddy blah blah would not be such a booming business they are today.
At least with car modding, you dont get to spend 30 years in prison watching murderers and rapists come and go.
300 Pound wall of muscle "What you in for man?"
Geek: "I modded my Xbox so I could play games off the Hard Drive, I got 30 years. How about you?"
Wall: "I murdered 6 people with rusty shards of metal, I'm out in 15 sweety"
I bought my Xbox in 2001 I believe. To be honest it was an amazing console. I loved that I could insert a CD and rip it to the xbox into a media library that could then be played in my games. What i didnt like was the CD's didnt at the time connect to the CD Database and named them for me. Therefor I learned to hate that feature very quickly. Using the dashboard to type in the CD names and song titles was wretched. Also the miniscule 8 gig drive filled up. With no way of adding a bigger drive...
Later that year I discovered a mod chip that would simply plug onto the motherboard and one screw to secure it to the board. All of the sudden I could drop in a 60 gig drive, later a 120 gig drive. Amazingly now I could store my entire CD collection on my Xbox, 60 CD's in all. I believe about 12 gigs worth of MP3. Add in Xbox Media Center (player back then) and I could pretty much play all my MP3's to my home theater system complete with playlists and visualizations.
Now because of the much bigger drive I copied some of my (Legally purchased) games directly to the hard drive. AMAZING load times were much faster. No more waiting forever to play Mercenaries. My Xbox became the center of my living room with it's feature rich entertainment possabilities. So far the uses mentioned are legal, well aside from this DMCA making it illegal to circumvent copyright.
My POV is simple. MS designed and gave us a game console with quite a bit of power and expandability. The mod community made this better and locked me into using the Xbox. I BUY games for it still to this day (The exception being if there is a PC port). I use my Xbox to play tunes when I dont feel like waiting 15 minutes for my winXP system to boot up and load all that garbage and do checks and stuff before the OS becomes usable.
Microsoft didnt fully "realize" the Xbox potential and underground groups brought that to light making something good better. Is there really anything wrong with that? I love mod chips and really believe they should stay. Modding Cars, Game consoles, houses pretty much everything is what people want, make it so.
(for comparison, look into the Car modding scene, it's HUGE. Now look at the Console mod... small due to litigation.)
I was being specific to the unique Car stunts. I've played through all the GTA games. SA added in exercise at the Gym and airplane flying. For non violence you could help some demented kid shoot down remote control planes.
GTA 3 was great in that it had lots to do and was a very open game. The stunts bonuses you could get added a nice non violent touch to the game. That aspect was greatly lost in the next 2 installments of the genre.
Basically the PS3 is baught once GTA4 and Metal Gear 4 come out on it. I just seriously hope Sony doesn't gut it too much by the time I woujld like to buy. I would realy love them to keep the PS2 hardware in the system. But... I guess emulation is a good thing too. They can somewhat enhance the graphics of the PS2 games and possibly add in more frame rate if done right.
Imagine a sheet like this, transparent and plastered on the windshield or in a corner of one. Then it's fed from a GPS computer for map information right in front of you. This would make GPS navigation a little safer.
Add in some of the "Object detection" systems they've been pawning off for a few years and we're talking about a nice feature for the future of cars.
Fighter Jets as well as commercial airliners can make use of this technology as well.
There's a million uses other then the silly and mundane.
Do you expect newcomers to/ignore 2 of the 3 hours they play?
You can't autoboot someone who is on X ammount of ignore lists. It'd make for some serious DoS potential.
Even on ignore people can still find a multitude of ways to be annoying.
The only sure way to assure the user community of nice and polite players is to have a RL mobile unit in each city that will personally visit the basement of the annoying troll and give him a nice and polite looking over with an aluminum baseball bat.
It brings back memories of driving the ghost busting mobile down the streets and capturing ghosts. building and customizing the car and people for better catching was amazing back then. I'm feeling old now.
I too have become bored of the IT world. from the constant need for a "Pro/Con" spreadsheet for EVERY change and concept to no one being able to agree, ever. I'm just tired of sitting in a chair, arguing with the boss about 8 year old servers, then going home and staring at a screen till I fall asleep. It's a life that lacks, well anything.
Recently I bought myself a nice "used" car with a decently powerful V8 engine and started down the path to racing. (yes there is HUGE politics in the pro leagues). I feel that it's a huge shift in career, but it's similar. Car's need all sorts of knowledge to run, tune, adjust, and time. You also need split second reflexes that have undoubtedly been aquired in the years of gaming.
I also thought of getting into psychology, but I realize i've already dealt with enough crazy people in the IT field (me included in that number).
Essentailly, that "after IT" career change, it's all about what YOU personally want. I'm just sharing with you what i want to do with my life post IT escape.
They can have mordor, and the mines of Moria, and Rohan and all the other lovely cities and still keep to the story.
We dont know exactly when the mines were overrun (maybe it's in one of the books), we just know they were at some point within a few years. They could simply have the mines open with some quest to get inside. Key rooms should remain sealed to preserve the "books" timeline showing undisturbed bodies and the journal.
Rohan and the white city can all be in the books. You're questing during a time of an uneasy peace. Work for Wormtongue, unkowingly aiding Sarumon. There are so many directions you can take with these locations pre-trilogy. It was a troubled time and there was always a war going on.
Dont forget the time frame the Hobbit took place. That, in itself was a huge area and took place roughly 50 years prior to Fellowship. There were huge epic battles in the Hobbit's timeline and chances are there were many in between.
Turbine has quite a bit to work with. Many locations (Tom Bombadil's moore mounds) and vast settings. To put middle Earth into a game is great if they can do it right, and creatively. There are tons of weird monsters, and there can be many "undiscovered" things that the books never mentioned.
The Fellowship, and Bilbo before them, only took a path of least resistance. The other paths can be rife with dangers and adventures. I'm excited thinking of all the alternative locations.
Linux is the roots to where I started my career back in '96. I was outwardly loyal to it for many years and at one time had a linux farm in my place. As long as i didnt try to recompile the Kernel or update the system I was good.
Then I discovered Free and OpenBSD. It was a miracle, I could create a slim custom kernel with almost no issues. I ran this for a few more years. Though I dreaded system update days. Tar configs, install new package, reconfigure test, pray. It'd be a weekend to just to update sendmail/postfix, spam filtering and the DNS servers. To update one thing you'd need to update ALL your libraries and underlying code base because everyone used latest/greatest.
Then I moved to a company that only used Solaris. This was a nice rock solid OS, though a little long in the tooth. While it was good, patching and updates were sort of difficult and lenghty process.
I dabbled in HP-UX as well. THis was a nice system, quick and easy to patch and update. The machine may have taken up a good portion of the computer room but it gave little problems.
Enter AIX. This is an OS that is a dream come. OS updates come in two flavors. The Maintenence/tech levels and the OS update level. If there is a failure in hardware or OS IBM can be onsite within 1-3 hours. They're always a phone call away, and the techs are well trained and knowledgable.
Smitty is their main tool for maintaining the OS. You can resize filesystems at the click of a button, tweak kernel parameters (sysctl in linux) and do a wide range of other things with ease. When I look at our few linux systems these days, I cringe to think i'd need to update them. While they run reliably, i dread patching and updating linux. I dread reconfiguring it. Ask me to patch and configure an AIX box and i'm all for it. It takes a few hours, vs the few days for linux.
With AIX you also have several options for OS imaging and installs. You can run an easy to configure NIM server, or simply run the mksysb command to backup the entire OS. Volume groups (filesystem groups) can be backed up just as easily. If the hardware fails, you can install the mksysb image onto another machine and be back up and runnning in 1-2 hours tops.
I know there are ways to make linux images and backup sets. It just needs 3rd party tools (last i knew) and is oftena pain.
I trust an airport running AIX. This isn't just million dollar planes, this is potentially my life at stake.
that Jack Thompson is in fact suing all these companies. It means he's falling and knows it. He's going to try to take whoever he can with him. within a year no one will know he existed.
THe best thing to ever happen in the favor of gamers was Jack's soap box jump within hours of Vtech. Blaming games, and saying Cho never would NEVER have "learned to enjoy killing withoutplaying violent video games". Only to later find out, that Cho, well never really played games. Maybe mine sweaper to pass some boring class time.
He made the biggest fool of himself and lost all credibility he had. Jack's an empty shell and a nobody now. While someone else will eventually take his place in the crusade, gamers everywhere can comfortably play games without scrutiny.
I agree, playing driving/racing games give you better car control.
In our recent freak snow storm, I manged to get sideways a few times on the highway slush, and get back in full control without ever coming to a stop, or skipping a heart beat. I'm sure the drivers around me had to change some undies though.
(Disclaimer: too lazy today to care about grammar/spelling)
A long lost Speilburg game that was produced and distributed by Lucas Arts. It was a great adventure game with a wonderful story, and really good sound effects/music for its day.
The tale was about a "killer" asteroid heading to earth, and the space shuttle crew sent to blow it to pieces. It ended up being a ship sending them to a far off planet, where they discover an ancient race that is seemingly extinct.
The game while short was compelling and well laid out. THe story was well told and it lacked excessive "fluff" to make the story longer than it should be.
While many think this is bad and invasion of privacy, think of it as this:
when we normally click "I DONT Agree" the software does nothing. But if it sends the message back home with statistics of how many dont agree, it tells the software company some people dont agree.
We can argue EULA's till our fingers are raw and bloody, but it doesnt matter if the company in question doesnt read the conversations.
In short, by clicking the Dont agree button and having it sent home to MS we're telling them we dont want that crap on our machines. Maybe (deity willing) MS will start to listen. More companies may adopt that approach and we'll get less and less one sided (retarded) EULA's.
anyone Remember Borland's |"like a book" EULA? Great stuff.
I loved rocket jockey. I bought it cheap when Egghead decided to go online only and close all their stores (sad face).
From what i remember of that game is i spent a very large portion of my time grapling opponents and draging them around the arena "Ben Hur" style. It was an extremely simple game at its core, but tons of fun. I've been dying for a remake/sequal ever since. Reading this post makes me want to dig out my CD and play it again. Ironically I've been thinking about this game for the last month or two.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a BluerAy DVD player that can play games.
You can buy 2 PS3 games and breakfast for 2 with that cash.
the above poster is trolling and is not worth a reply.
I Bought my Ps3 just recently. I'd originally intended to hold off till Metal Gear 4. I realized I have tons of GREAT PS2 games in my library that I still play from time to time. Not having 100% compatability is not an option.
My purchase was not a frantic "OMG I'm gonna loose if i dont buy now", it was more of the thought of having to keep my 7 year old PS2 still hooked up to my TV. Space is a comodity and my Entertainment center is loosing.
The PS3 was the first console to replace my SONY DVD player that I've had since 1998 or so. I'm not one bit disapointed with that choice. It brought new life into my old Dolby DTS stereo reciever. Sound no longer cuts out in intense action scenes.
I am happy with the PS3 as it stands. Sure I wish I got it on the 65nm Press but oh well. It'll keep my VERY warm in the winter. I will admit that I did need to re-engineer my Entertainment center to allow better heat disipation, but that was a minor inconvenience. The Ps3 is seated on Sheet aluminum with chopsticks glued to the bottom to allow better air flow. I imagine Xbox 360 would have required it's own AC unit installed.
That still wont stop me from installing a Supercharger under the hood and getting a custom exhaust done. As long as the exhaust is under I believe 98decibles it's legal.
If touching anything under the hood is considered illegal then K&N, Greddy blah blah would not be such a booming business they are today.
At least with car modding, you dont get to spend 30 years in prison watching murderers and rapists come and go.
300 Pound wall of muscle "What you in for man?"
Geek: "I modded my Xbox so I could play games off the Hard Drive, I got 30 years. How about you?"
Wall: "I murdered 6 people with rusty shards of metal, I'm out in 15 sweety"
I bought my Xbox in 2001 I believe. To be honest it was an amazing console. I loved that I could insert a CD and rip it to the xbox into a media library that could then be played in my games. What i didnt like was the CD's didnt at the time connect to the CD Database and named them for me. Therefor I learned to hate that feature very quickly. Using the dashboard to type in the CD names and song titles was wretched. Also the miniscule 8 gig drive filled up. With no way of adding a bigger drive...
Later that year I discovered a mod chip that would simply plug onto the motherboard and one screw to secure it to the board. All of the sudden I could drop in a 60 gig drive, later a 120 gig drive. Amazingly now I could store my entire CD collection on my Xbox, 60 CD's in all. I believe about 12 gigs worth of MP3. Add in Xbox Media Center (player back then) and I could pretty much play all my MP3's to my home theater system complete with playlists and visualizations.
Now because of the much bigger drive I copied some of my (Legally purchased) games directly to the hard drive. AMAZING load times were much faster. No more waiting forever to play Mercenaries. My Xbox became the center of my living room with it's feature rich entertainment possabilities. So far the uses mentioned are legal, well aside from this DMCA making it illegal to circumvent copyright.
My POV is simple. MS designed and gave us a game console with quite a bit of power and expandability. The mod community made this better and locked me into using the Xbox. I BUY games for it still to this day (The exception being if there is a PC port). I use my Xbox to play tunes when I dont feel like waiting 15 minutes for my winXP system to boot up and load all that garbage and do checks and stuff before the OS becomes usable.
Microsoft didnt fully "realize" the Xbox potential and underground groups brought that to light making something good better. Is there really anything wrong with that? I love mod chips and really believe they should stay. Modding Cars, Game consoles, houses pretty much everything is what people want, make it so.
(for comparison, look into the Car modding scene, it's HUGE. Now look at the Console mod... small due to litigation.)
At that level of loss/gain $10 million difference is like being short changed 4 cents..
I was being specific to the unique Car stunts. I've played through all the GTA games. SA added in exercise at the Gym and airplane flying. For non violence you could help some demented kid shoot down remote control planes.
I think my favorite was VC.
GTA 3 was great in that it had lots to do and was a very open game. The stunts bonuses you could get added a nice non violent touch to the game. That aspect was greatly lost in the next 2 installments of the genre.
Basically the PS3 is baught once GTA4 and Metal Gear 4 come out on it. I just seriously hope Sony doesn't gut it too much by the time I woujld like to buy. I would realy love them to keep the PS2 hardware in the system. But... I guess emulation is a good thing too. They can somewhat enhance the graphics of the PS2 games and possibly add in more frame rate if done right.
Oregon Trail and lemonaid stand did it for me. To this day, I still stink at these types of games. Sim City? yeah I go bankrupt fast.
He didnt finish. THe car hit the wall with little visible damage, but was undrivable after.
Regardless, they did really good considering they only raise $16,000 for the race.
Imagine a sheet like this, transparent and plastered on the windshield or in a corner of one. Then it's fed from a GPS computer for map information right in front of you. This would make GPS navigation a little safer.
Add in some of the "Object detection" systems they've been pawning off for a few years and we're talking about a nice feature for the future of cars.
Fighter Jets as well as commercial airliners can make use of this technology as well.
There's a million uses other then the silly and mundane.
Do you expect newcomers to /ignore 2 of the 3 hours they play?
You can't autoboot someone who is on X ammount of ignore lists. It'd make for some serious DoS potential.
Even on ignore people can still find a multitude of ways to be annoying.
The only sure way to assure the user community of nice and polite players is to have a RL mobile unit in each city that will personally visit the basement of the annoying troll and give him a nice and polite looking over with an aluminum baseball bat.
It brings back memories of driving the ghost busting mobile down the streets and capturing ghosts. building and customizing the car and people for better catching was amazing back then. I'm feeling old now.
I too have become bored of the IT world. from the constant need for a "Pro/Con" spreadsheet for EVERY change and concept to no one being able to agree, ever. I'm just tired of sitting in a chair, arguing with the boss about 8 year old servers, then going home and staring at a screen till I fall asleep. It's a life that lacks, well anything.
Recently I bought myself a nice "used" car with a decently powerful V8 engine and started down the path to racing. (yes there is HUGE politics in the pro leagues). I feel that it's a huge shift in career, but it's similar. Car's need all sorts of knowledge to run, tune, adjust, and time. You also need split second reflexes that have undoubtedly been aquired in the years of gaming.
I also thought of getting into psychology, but I realize i've already dealt with enough crazy people in the IT field (me included in that number).
Essentailly, that "after IT" career change, it's all about what YOU personally want. I'm just sharing with you what i want to do with my life post IT escape.
They can have mordor, and the mines of Moria, and Rohan and all the other lovely cities and still keep to the story.
We dont know exactly when the mines were overrun (maybe it's in one of the books), we just know they were at some point within a few years. They could simply have the mines open with some quest to get inside. Key rooms should remain sealed to preserve the "books" timeline showing undisturbed bodies and the journal.
Rohan and the white city can all be in the books. You're questing during a time of an uneasy peace. Work for Wormtongue, unkowingly aiding Sarumon. There are so many directions you can take with these locations pre-trilogy. It was a troubled time and there was always a war going on.
Dont forget the time frame the Hobbit took place. That, in itself was a huge area and took place roughly 50 years prior to Fellowship. There were huge epic battles in the Hobbit's timeline and chances are there were many in between.
Turbine has quite a bit to work with. Many locations (Tom Bombadil's moore mounds) and vast settings. To put middle Earth into a game is great if they can do it right, and creatively. There are tons of weird monsters, and there can be many "undiscovered" things that the books never mentioned.
The Fellowship, and Bilbo before them, only took a path of least resistance. The other paths can be rife with dangers and adventures. I'm excited thinking of all the alternative locations.
There are a few DJ's that hit it into the Big time. Paul Van Dyk...
It's not as common, but it does happen.
Linux is the roots to where I started my career back in '96. I was outwardly loyal to it for many years and at one time had a linux farm in my place. As long as i didnt try to recompile the Kernel or update the system I was good.
Then I discovered Free and OpenBSD. It was a miracle, I could create a slim custom kernel with almost no issues. I ran this for a few more years. Though I dreaded system update days. Tar configs, install new package, reconfigure test, pray. It'd be a weekend to just to update sendmail/postfix, spam filtering and the DNS servers. To update one thing you'd need to update ALL your libraries and underlying code base because everyone used latest/greatest.
Then I moved to a company that only used Solaris. This was a nice rock solid OS, though a little long in the tooth. While it was good, patching and updates were sort of difficult and lenghty process.
I dabbled in HP-UX as well. THis was a nice system, quick and easy to patch and update. The machine may have taken up a good portion of the computer room but it gave little problems.
Enter AIX. This is an OS that is a dream come. OS updates come in two flavors. The Maintenence/tech levels and the OS update level. If there is a failure in hardware or OS IBM can be onsite within 1-3 hours. They're always a phone call away, and the techs are well trained and knowledgable.
Smitty is their main tool for maintaining the OS. You can resize filesystems at the click of a button, tweak kernel parameters (sysctl in linux) and do a wide range of other things with ease. When I look at our few linux systems these days, I cringe to think i'd need to update them. While they run reliably, i dread patching and updating linux. I dread reconfiguring it. Ask me to patch and configure an AIX box and i'm all for it. It takes a few hours, vs the few days for linux.
With AIX you also have several options for OS imaging and installs. You can run an easy to configure NIM server, or simply run the mksysb command to backup the entire OS. Volume groups (filesystem groups) can be backed up just as easily. If the hardware fails, you can install the mksysb image onto another machine and be back up and runnning in 1-2 hours tops.
I know there are ways to make linux images and backup sets. It just needs 3rd party tools (last i knew) and is oftena pain.
I trust an airport running AIX. This isn't just million dollar planes, this is potentially my life at stake.
that Jack Thompson is in fact suing all these companies. It means he's falling and knows it. He's going to try to take whoever he can with him. within a year no one will know he existed.
THe best thing to ever happen in the favor of gamers was Jack's soap box jump within hours of Vtech. Blaming games, and saying Cho never would NEVER have "learned to enjoy killing withoutplaying violent video games". Only to later find out, that Cho, well never really played games. Maybe mine sweaper to pass some boring class time.
He made the biggest fool of himself and lost all credibility he had. Jack's an empty shell and a nobody now. While someone else will eventually take his place in the crusade, gamers everywhere can comfortably play games without scrutiny.
I agree, playing driving/racing games give you better car control. In our recent freak snow storm, I manged to get sideways a few times on the highway slush, and get back in full control without ever coming to a stop, or skipping a heart beat. I'm sure the drivers around me had to change some undies though. (Disclaimer: too lazy today to care about grammar/spelling)
Better yet, just have him as a sit in guest on the in game talk radio show. It would be an embarassing parody.
A long lost Speilburg game that was produced and distributed by Lucas Arts. It was a great adventure game with a wonderful story, and really good sound effects/music for its day.
The tale was about a "killer" asteroid heading to earth, and the space shuttle crew sent to blow it to pieces. It ended up being a ship sending them to a far off planet, where they discover an ancient race that is seemingly extinct.
The game while short was compelling and well laid out. THe story was well told and it lacked excessive "fluff" to make the story longer than it should be.
While many think this is bad and invasion of privacy, think of it as this:
when we normally click "I DONT Agree" the software does nothing. But if it sends the message back home with statistics of how many dont agree, it tells the software company some people dont agree.
We can argue EULA's till our fingers are raw and bloody, but it doesnt matter if the company in question doesnt read the conversations.
In short, by clicking the Dont agree button and having it sent home to MS we're telling them we dont want that crap on our machines. Maybe (deity willing) MS will start to listen. More companies may adopt that approach and we'll get less and less one sided (retarded) EULA's.
anyone Remember Borland's |"like a book" EULA? Great stuff.
I loved rocket jockey. I bought it cheap when Egghead decided to go online only and close all their stores (sad face).
From what i remember of that game is i spent a very large portion of my time grapling opponents and draging them around the arena "Ben Hur" style. It was an extremely simple game at its core, but tons of fun. I've been dying for a remake/sequal ever since. Reading this post makes me want to dig out my CD and play it again. Ironically I've been thinking about this game for the last month or two.
Rayman: psycho bunnies.