It has to be especially nettlesome since Microsoft managed to slowly strangle out all of its profit-driven competitors by the late '90s. Other than the boutique / couture PCs Apple offered, the only way to compete with Microsoft was with free software. There's no debating that it's taken Linux a long time to get into a competitive position on the desktop, but its flexibility and nimbleness are starting to overcome Microsoft's inertia and the sheer size and increasing unmanageable nature of the Windows codebase.
That's not vodka at all, sir. I believe this would dovetail more neatly into the great pantheon of bum wines: your Mad Dog 20/20, Thunderbird, and what have you.:)
Nah, I've got two systems built on low-cost Core 2 Duos already - one for work, one for play, both built largely from scavenged or old parts. Both are hilariously fast by my standards, and barring catastrophic equipment failure I don't foresee myself buying or wanting a new PC in at least the next five years. If I got a tax-free check for $10,000 right now I'd pay off my student loans and throw the rest at my car note. Simple as that.
Sega was that crazy friend of yours who was funny as hell and had so many good times with, and is now happily filling out TPS reports and saying he can't go out because he's got to work Sunday too.
Note that most of those films were made after Star Wars made his reputation, that the first two Star Wars films were clearly either constrained by the studio or largely handed off to other people, and that despite its resounding success Return of the Jedi - the film over which Lucas had the most creative control - is widely regarded to be the worst of the first three films. His then-wife also apparently had quite a bit of creative input, if this interview with Mark Hamill is accurate.
I was sort of hoping that Unreal would lead the way, but the large number of Quake II engine licensees,lingering holdouts for software renderers, and a large population of fairlycrappy3Dcards held things back. People also wanted more dark 'n' gritty - this was the '90s, remember what comic books looked like?:)
Quake was brown because id had to create a realistically lightmapped 3D environment with a VGA color palette. I greatly enjoyed the first Quake and still believe that technical limitations can result in good, interesting design choices, but the fact that a game designed to run on Pentium CPUs and 1 MB graphics cards has continued to profoundly influence game graphics and people's expectations thereof is... well... sad.
As for Diablo III, if people want to kick their feet and scream that it's too colorful, then Blizzard just needs to add a post-processing shader option to thump certain color ranges down a bit. See ATI's SmartShader or Far Cry's "graphics filters" for an example.
If I remember correctly, when a user selects a pixel shader effect that the video card can't render then the rendering fails gracefully, i.e. it simply doesn't get rendered. I don't know about more fundamental effects, but would imagine that they're just rendered really, really slowly, if Compiz doesn't just exit outright.
DOS 7's been out for a long time, technically - it's the command interpreter for Windows 95 & 98. Other than supporting FAT32 and large quantities of RAM it's not much different, aside from its considerable size (around 90k, which necessitates creating custom boot disks all too frequently due to the 640k RAM issue). In fact, someone hacked the 98 COMMAND.COM to identify itself as MS-DOS 7.10, and I never had any issues upgrading an old DOS box to it at all.:) I believe Windows ME technically used MS-DOS 8.0, though I can't imagine they actually changed anything...
Well, let's be fair: Windows 95 was supposed to be able to scale down to 386 CPUs, which were capable of 32-bit code but thrived on 16-bit code. How well it did this is a matter of some debate, and generally you didn't want to do anything "serious" with the OS on less than a 486, but at the time there were a lot more potential customers using a 386 than there were using 686 CPUs, and the codebase indicates as much.:)
...will ultimately be whether Apple is willing to sacrifice its high margins to gain optimal market penetration before some *nix derivative succeeds in being easy to use and "good enough" for most people. I'm glad to see Apple systems gaining ground - diversity of any kind is entirely welcome after seeing everything get eaten up by Microsoft in the last fifteen years - but Apple seems awfully content to exist as a relatively high margin, low unit number OEM. Also keep in mind just how far Linux has come in the last three years...
What's clear is that something is going to move into the vacuum opening under Vista. What that will be isn't as cut 'n' dry as assuming that products manufactured by a company with no prior history of conquering an entrenched market sector will satisfy that requirement just because they're pretty and well-designed.
It would be too time-consuming to evaluate the third-party Doom / Hexen ports to determine which would work best for the overwhelming number of system configurations on which Steam will run, and most users would want as authentic an experience as possible. Evaluating newer ports for security problems, flaws in feature implementation, or bugs that only appear on some hardware configuration would also be time-consuming and expensive for a QA department. It would be simplest to make DOSbox cooperate with Steam and run the latest official DOS executable, and that's clearly the decision that id and Valve chose. I'd have done the same in their position.
As for the old Win32 port, Carmack himself once said that was Microsoft's baby (or possibly Monolith's...), and that he had no idea where the source code to it went.
You're forgetting about the substantial quantity of OS X that's based upon various forms of BSD, an operating system which has been in development since the 1970s.
Witness the release of Vista, and then witness a re-release a couple of years later with bug fixes, feature improvements, security improvement rollups, and a few new (probably non-exclusive) applications rolled in to make the pill go down more sweetly.
Everything old is made new again. Move along.
Revisiting old video games while minimizing the impact of decade+ old prejudice yields fascinating insight into the mechanics of electronic entertainment from the past. The original Sonic the Hedgehog games were very tightly designed, fast-paced action games with emphases both subtly and distinctly different from Nintendo's action roster. A non-verbal, edgy-looking character in a surreal universe having to balance his strengths (i.e. going really, really fast and being nearly invincible when attacking) with the demands of the game world in which he lived (sometimes having to be patient and waiting for an opening) made for memorable and challenging experiences. Initially the addition of new characters didn't detract significantly from the gameplay; it was sorta cool for Sonic to have a sidekick, and both Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 allowed you to get rid of the little guy if you wanted to. Playing as Knuckles forced you to re-evaluate old choices and visit parts of levels previously inaccessible - in a way, it was like getting a new lease on the same old game.
But ever since the last Genesis and Game Gear games (including the Sonic & Knuckles pack, which took the entertaining Sonic 3 and turned it into a weird little epic), the series has completely lost its focus. This is somewhat surprising since one of the series' original founders left Sonic Team. bersl2 pointed out that a good deal of this is due to the desire to balance the needs of young and older gamers. Frankly a choice should have been made a long time ago: cater to the needs of younger children by rounding out characters in squeaky-clean fashion, or just go abstract and sophisticated, introducing complex new techniques and making the games artistic little masterpieces of old-school design with creative new wrinkles.
Compromised game designs lead to compromised games. It's not complicated.
Yeah, that was really weird. I remember renting a 32X because I briefly flirted with the idea of purchasing one, and hooked it up improperly. My reward was seeing the background of Knuckles Chaotix being rendered darkly with nothing being displayed in the foreground until I switched some video cables around and things were made right again. Really, uncompromisingly dreadful games along with an awkward (and probably infuriating to develop for) hardware setup buried the 32X deep early.
Actually I'd LOVE to see it, and I'm a Texan with family going back here eight generations. I'm honestly befuddled about why we don't let them supervise our elections.
Development on Duke Nukem Forever reportedly started back around January of 1997. A decade of development, more than two engines' worth of work, and at least three game design documents later, and the end's still nowhere in sight. And I say this as someone who's actually seen a development build of the thing running...
*shrugs* Live and let live. I've got no interest in thumping him if he's excited about it; the release of Vista isn't going to prevent me from using Slackware, so I really don't give a shit.:)
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but it was said by a person who didn't even play the Linux card...
It has to be especially nettlesome since Microsoft managed to slowly strangle out all of its profit-driven competitors by the late '90s. Other than the boutique / couture PCs Apple offered, the only way to compete with Microsoft was with free software. There's no debating that it's taken Linux a long time to get into a competitive position on the desktop, but its flexibility and nimbleness are starting to overcome Microsoft's inertia and the sheer size and increasing unmanageable nature of the Windows codebase.
That's not vodka at all, sir. I believe this would dovetail more neatly into the great pantheon of bum wines: your Mad Dog 20/20, Thunderbird, and what have you. :)
Nah, I've got two systems built on low-cost Core 2 Duos already - one for work, one for play, both built largely from scavenged or old parts. Both are hilariously fast by my standards, and barring catastrophic equipment failure I don't foresee myself buying or wanting a new PC in at least the next five years. If I got a tax-free check for $10,000 right now I'd pay off my student loans and throw the rest at my car note. Simple as that.
Sega was that crazy friend of yours who was funny as hell and had so many good times with, and is now happily filling out TPS reports and saying he can't go out because he's got to work Sunday too.
So.....Sega got married?
To the wrong person, maybe...
...but in the past, he had interference.
Note that most of those films were made after Star Wars made his reputation, that the first two Star Wars films were clearly either constrained by the studio or largely handed off to other people, and that despite its resounding success Return of the Jedi - the film over which Lucas had the most creative control - is widely regarded to be the worst of the first three films. His then-wife also apparently had quite a bit of creative input, if this interview with Mark Hamill is accurate.
I think you meant Brown Hole.
Or pink. :)
I was sort of hoping that Unreal would lead the way, but the large number of Quake II engine licensees,lingering holdouts for software renderers, and a large population of fairly crappy 3D cards held things back. People also wanted more dark 'n' gritty - this was the '90s, remember what comic books looked like? :)
Quake was brown because id had to create a realistically lightmapped 3D environment with a VGA color palette. I greatly enjoyed the first Quake and still believe that technical limitations can result in good, interesting design choices, but the fact that a game designed to run on Pentium CPUs and 1 MB graphics cards has continued to profoundly influence game graphics and people's expectations thereof is... well... sad. As for Diablo III, if people want to kick their feet and scream that it's too colorful, then Blizzard just needs to add a post-processing shader option to thump certain color ranges down a bit. See ATI's SmartShader or Far Cry's "graphics filters" for an example.
If I remember correctly, when a user selects a pixel shader effect that the video card can't render then the rendering fails gracefully, i.e. it simply doesn't get rendered. I don't know about more fundamental effects, but would imagine that they're just rendered really, really slowly, if Compiz doesn't just exit outright.
Perhaps Windows ME was New Coke and Vista is just Pepsi.
So, which OS is Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper?
Plan 9. Duh. :P
DOS 7's been out for a long time, technically - it's the command interpreter for Windows 95 & 98. Other than supporting FAT32 and large quantities of RAM it's not much different, aside from its considerable size (around 90k, which necessitates creating custom boot disks all too frequently due to the 640k RAM issue). In fact, someone hacked the 98 COMMAND.COM to identify itself as MS-DOS 7.10, and I never had any issues upgrading an old DOS box to it at all. :) I believe Windows ME technically used MS-DOS 8.0, though I can't imagine they actually changed anything...
Well, let's be fair: Windows 95 was supposed to be able to scale down to 386 CPUs, which were capable of 32-bit code but thrived on 16-bit code. How well it did this is a matter of some debate, and generally you didn't want to do anything "serious" with the OS on less than a 486, but at the time there were a lot more potential customers using a 386 than there were using 686 CPUs, and the codebase indicates as much. :)
What if you connect an external monitor?
Or in Connecticut, where he was born...
...will ultimately be whether Apple is willing to sacrifice its high margins to gain optimal market penetration before some *nix derivative succeeds in being easy to use and "good enough" for most people. I'm glad to see Apple systems gaining ground - diversity of any kind is entirely welcome after seeing everything get eaten up by Microsoft in the last fifteen years - but Apple seems awfully content to exist as a relatively high margin, low unit number OEM. Also keep in mind just how far Linux has come in the last three years... What's clear is that something is going to move into the vacuum opening under Vista. What that will be isn't as cut 'n' dry as assuming that products manufactured by a company with no prior history of conquering an entrenched market sector will satisfy that requirement just because they're pretty and well-designed.
Incidentally, an Ext2 driver for Linux has existed since at least 2002, and can be found . Could not agree more that bringing the software world's features to Windows is a hell of a lot more important at this juncture than trying to bring Windows features to the rest of the world... Microsoft just drags its feet too hard and too deliberately for that to work. But they're beginning to reap what they've sown. :)
It would be too time-consuming to evaluate the third-party Doom / Hexen ports to determine which would work best for the overwhelming number of system configurations on which Steam will run, and most users would want as authentic an experience as possible. Evaluating newer ports for security problems, flaws in feature implementation, or bugs that only appear on some hardware configuration would also be time-consuming and expensive for a QA department. It would be simplest to make DOSbox cooperate with Steam and run the latest official DOS executable, and that's clearly the decision that id and Valve chose. I'd have done the same in their position. As for the old Win32 port, Carmack himself once said that was Microsoft's baby (or possibly Monolith's...), and that he had no idea where the source code to it went.
You're forgetting about the substantial quantity of OS X that's based upon various forms of BSD, an operating system which has been in development since the 1970s.
Witness the release of Vista, and then witness a re-release a couple of years later with bug fixes, feature improvements, security improvement rollups, and a few new (probably non-exclusive) applications rolled in to make the pill go down more sweetly. Everything old is made new again. Move along.
Revisiting old video games while minimizing the impact of decade+ old prejudice yields fascinating insight into the mechanics of electronic entertainment from the past. The original Sonic the Hedgehog games were very tightly designed, fast-paced action games with emphases both subtly and distinctly different from Nintendo's action roster. A non-verbal, edgy-looking character in a surreal universe having to balance his strengths (i.e. going really, really fast and being nearly invincible when attacking) with the demands of the game world in which he lived (sometimes having to be patient and waiting for an opening) made for memorable and challenging experiences. Initially the addition of new characters didn't detract significantly from the gameplay; it was sorta cool for Sonic to have a sidekick, and both Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 allowed you to get rid of the little guy if you wanted to. Playing as Knuckles forced you to re-evaluate old choices and visit parts of levels previously inaccessible - in a way, it was like getting a new lease on the same old game.
But ever since the last Genesis and Game Gear games (including the Sonic & Knuckles pack, which took the entertaining Sonic 3 and turned it into a weird little epic), the series has completely lost its focus. This is somewhat surprising since one of the series' original founders left Sonic Team. bersl2 pointed out that a good deal of this is due to the desire to balance the needs of young and older gamers. Frankly a choice should have been made a long time ago: cater to the needs of younger children by rounding out characters in squeaky-clean fashion, or just go abstract and sophisticated, introducing complex new techniques and making the games artistic little masterpieces of old-school design with creative new wrinkles.
Compromised game designs lead to compromised games. It's not complicated.
Yeah, that was really weird. I remember renting a 32X because I briefly flirted with the idea of purchasing one, and hooked it up improperly. My reward was seeing the background of Knuckles Chaotix being rendered darkly with nothing being displayed in the foreground until I switched some video cables around and things were made right again. Really, uncompromisingly dreadful games along with an awkward (and probably infuriating to develop for) hardware setup buried the 32X deep early.
Actually I'd LOVE to see it, and I'm a Texan with family going back here eight generations. I'm honestly befuddled about why we don't let them supervise our elections.
Development on Duke Nukem Forever reportedly started back around January of 1997. A decade of development, more than two engines' worth of work, and at least three game design documents later, and the end's still nowhere in sight. And I say this as someone who's actually seen a development build of the thing running...
*shrugs* Live and let live. I've got no interest in thumping him if he's excited about it; the release of Vista isn't going to prevent me from using Slackware, so I really don't give a shit. :)