"Saying you'll have OpenGL on your CD is good and all but you still need something to talk to the hardware."
I mentioned it as a package with catalyst/detonator for the nVidia/ATI cards, since those tend to be the 2 most-common gaming cards. I mentioned in another post how you could easily have another dongle that holds the driver. So you have 1 save card for game data and 1 card for a driver than translates OGL to the hw layer.
It's called OpenGL. It lets me run Quake1 on my Radeon 9800.
Yes, OpenGL would be on these discs. It'd be stupid to not have an abstraction layer.
Did you even read my post before replying? I've addresses all these strawmen about drivers.
" Can you say "I've got a perfectly good hard disk in my PC"? You might as well buy a XBox/PS2/GameCube/Whatever"
If there's an HD we want to use, it'll have to be in a standard layout. Since you probably want your own config for GP use of your PC, you'll want to use the USB dongle for data storage. Plus it means you can move your profiles easy, not like the Xbox (which, I should point out, has an HD, and the PS2 has an HD option you gloss over).
"Try closer to 250 MB minimum for a working install, probably more, like in the 300 range. More, if you assume a person might need a web-browser, or things like that as well."
No. No browser is needed, no QT is needed, no GTK+ is needed. Only the game binaries, OpenGL, a set of drivers for the most common 3D cards, X, and a kernel. Slackware can run in 250mb with a full OS. You need way less as a base for 1 gaming program which is the sole application.
"That take space. (sic) Most games need on the order of 10-20 MB per save file. Looks like that memory card got more expensive."
No. If they are designing games for this purpose, they will optimize the save/load features. There is no reason to save a huge dump of every flag or internal variable of an engine when a handful of variables in a couple of data structures can adequately describe the situation. You're advocating bloaty code. That way lies madness.
"Only the very big developers (read, id, Epic, EA) can afford to say, only people with the best hardware can run this game. Valve showed with their HL survey that most peopel run on very low-end hardware."
I was talking about nVidia's positioning on releasing drivers that would be distributable in such a fashion. If you can have a guaranteed abstraction layer (OpenGL or DirectX), it's pretty easy to write games that'll work on all setups (note: I am simplifying, there are buggy drivers). If you really want to simplify even more, you could sell the actual OpenGL/DirectX layers on another USB dongle. 1 for saving, 1 for your video card. That'd make it so you could use universal discs on any PC that has a driver dongle available. You could even make it so that the driver dongles could take any standard download, like nVidia's detonator set. Standarization is something you're ignoring.
"Its (sic) a much more elitest group."
Yea, PC gamers are many things which polite people don't say in polite conversation. BeOS users are elistist too, as are Amiga users, etc. PC gamers can either work together to make PC gaming easy to do, or they can go the way of the dodo, because the majority of the people have control of money.
"Also, load times on a CD from a PC will probably be slower, as the read patterns and filesystem aren't optimized for it."
Slower than what? That's an OS layer problem. Let the purpose-based config people deal with it, because they will be able to change how UDF is read at the block layer to make things easier. Heck, Linux already makes reading from DVD/CD super quick. If you're using it as a base, I expect to see awesome results in any normal PC (as I said before, better caching and more RAM = fast). Just let the people who know about such things build an SDK, and you could revolutionize PC gaming.
I suspect Microsoft's trying to go this way with PC gaming anyways, based on all the news that's been put out about it.
"1) The operating system would take up a significant amount of space on the disc."
Linux takes maybe 120-200mb. That's talking about a kernel (1mb) plus a basic set of OpenGL + X + X driver for cards. That's not much of a 4.5 or 9gb disc. It'd be even less if there was actual work on making it into a standard.
"2) A read-only filesystem makes saving preferences, screenshots, etc. difficult"
My PS2 and GameCube and PS1 and Dreamcast, etc, all seem to save fine. I can get a 16mb USB dongle for 16$ CDN. Why not have it save prefs to a USB dongle? Can you say memory card?
"3) Extreme variances in architectures and hardware would limit the playability."
That's why you have a standard, like MPC was supposed to be a standard about 14 years ago. If you have a set (Athlon/ATI disc, Pentium/ATI disc, etc), you'll be able to make that OS footprint smaller and allow better gaming. Serious gamers only have one of 4 possible combinations (nCr from Athlon or Pentium with ATI or NVidia). Shitty computers with same Cirrus logic bullshit won't be used for this kind of work anyways.
"4) Liscense violations against non-free components (nvidia)."
Whatever sells more video cards (Hey, games that have great OOB experiencies!) will change their distribution policy. Money talks.
"5) Slow load times."
If people will put up with PS2 load times, there is nothing to worry about with the much faster and easier to cache (PCs usually have more than 64mb of RAM, the amount of UMA RAM the Xbox has) PC memory and DVD-ROM technology.
"6) Game patches and updates would require the download of an entire new disc."
Hey, maybe PC game companies will start shipping games that aren't broken. I mean, 20 years of console games has taught me that it's easy to ship games that aren't bugshit. You just have to put in the QA effort.
"7) CD/DVDs deteriorate rapidly. Constant inserts/removals can lead to irreversible damage."
Right. That's exactly why I somehow can't play any of my Saturn and Dreamcast games anymore... wait a second!:p
The shock goes from the audience not knowing (which wasn't really a shocker since the early 1980s anyways, since everyone knows), to Luke having to come to terms with the fact that his father is the man responsible for destroying Alderaan in episode 4, and also responsible for a great many other evils.
This coming to terms with how twisted Vader is and how close they are together is a major turning point for Skywalker's character.
But I'm sure you just want to nitpick and whine more.
I'm reading all these posts.
on
Is DOS Gaming Dead?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
DOSEmu is wicked. It's great. It's not VMWare (no $$ required), it's not Windows (no $$ to MS), it's not BOCHS (so it runs decently). I've used it with many DOS games.
It comes with FreeDOS, but I was able to easily put the Win95 command.com version 7 in with some other tweaks to make an easy-to-use DOS enviroment I've used to play through many Sierra and Lucas Arts adventure games.
The support is a lot more complete than, say, Wine, because all it has to do is provide a virtualized x86, which is what the OS and hardware are built to provide anyways. Most of it is just a thin BIOS compatibility layer. It's no where near as complex as a whole DirectX translator:)
Try it out. It's quick and easy to install, and is fairly mature. It'll run a lot.
A late game is a late game, but a bad game is bad forever.
However, there's more to it. If TF2 doesn't sell worth a dang because of how long they waited, it won't be worth anything. At least if they had released it they could've patched it if it sucked.
Is that, for example, they could've released TF2 back in 1999 based on the HL1 engine, enjoyed decent success, and made Team Fortress that much more fresh in people's minds. Then they could've started updating it as Team Fortress 3 on the HL2 engine as they're doing now with 2.
Whenever a company decides to miss a ship window like that, they're deciding against income and market share. I don't think it was a wise business decision, because it could've easily been another one of those Half-Life 1-based items that generated attention and income for the team while working on Half-Life 2. All they have to show for their work is vapour and promises, not products.
I just went to the CCRA website and went through an online efiling. I found out about this cool site. Since I made less than $25,000 CDN last year (being a student and all), it was even free.
Any Nine Inch Nails album (not single or remix collection) has a very good focus. Marilyn Manson also has a focus on a few albums (notably Antichrist Superstar, which was unsurprisingly enouch produced my Mr. Trent Reznor).
Really, there are artists that produce albums, you're just not listening hard enough.
Man, everyone who plays games on the go has a Gameboy. Maybe you thought the GBA wasn't worth while or something, but the thing is, the SP is pretty dang worthit, cheap, and has a good selection of games. Plus it plays my old crap from a decade ago.
It's certainly a lot better thought out than the VMU games on the Dreamcast.
Latest File Releases Package Version Date Notes / Monitor Download This Project Has Not Released Any Files [View All Project Files]
No files exist to download. I've looked and looked, and all I see is a pretty PR stating that they released something in March. But I can't download it, and I can't find it, so they might as well have released a paper hat for all the use I'm getting out of it.
What I want is something I can use under Linux that'll produce movie files that RealOne on my N-Gage will play. I'd also like to be able to sync it to my Palm Calender and Address book, and have voice dialing work again. Any hints?
As someone who quite seriously bought the N-Gage as the cheapest unlocked GSM worldphone I could get, I think I'm in the position to review the changes;)
In positives steps, the new N-Gage QD is:
* A bit smaller (nice of them).
* Hot-swapable MMC (not a big deal, really).
* Better battery life (YAY).
* Separate OK button (double YAY!).
* The d-pad and buttons seem ok (E3 well tell if they're any good).
* Auto-run for inserted MMC games (eeh).
* Vibration/enchanced speaker for games.
* Quick-game key (handy if they had good games).
However, there are some significant drawbacks for those who want some of the features of the original phone:
* It's dual-band (EGSM 900/1800) -- no more 1900 support (the band we use in North America). No more GSM phone use in North America with N-Gage QD.
* Also no more radio support, which also means no more recording radio (I listen to the radio a lot when I've listened to the MP3s I have too much).
* And no more MP3 or AAC support (which is the main use for my phone besides a phone).
* Movies? Nope!
Essentially, it's a $200 USD Gameboy in North America, since it has none of the features which redeemed the original N-Gage, except the ability to play AAA-quality gaming titles on MMC.
I don't know how the folks at Nokia can claim that the N-Gage games are AAA-quality titles. I guess most Gameboy games are AAAAAAAAAA-quality titles, because every single one of the games I've tried has sucked so fucking much. But, hey, at least I got a phone/mp3 player/movie phone/mms capable/colour with calendering device out of it. Purchasers of the N-Gage QD won't get that at all.
I don't think Nokia will be back for a third round, considering they've lost the second round right here. If they'd managed to get any decent titles, it might be a different story, but no one except maybe Nintendo seems to have the ability to float a platform with 1st-party titles. Without really great 3rd-party wooing via buckets of money (MS) or sheer momentum (Sony), there's no way to get into the game market. Sorry, Nokia, but I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Yea, that's why they're not in direct competition, because they are targetted at different markets. CDRs aren't a serious backup technology for companies.
In terms of backups and dead storage, it's nice to see something that's not a tape drive. Tapes are expensive and very linear -- restoring anything from tape sucks ass. You have to unspool and respool the entire thing to get at the data.
It doesn't matter if people WANT their proprietary standard, because PEOPLE aren't the target audience.
If you actually check your access_log for the partner entry, you'll see it's a request for the SEARCH command which seems to be a new IIS exploit heading around. My vulnerable 1.3.28 also spits out: [Sun Apr 11 00:45:43 2004] [error] [client 24.78.143.66] request failed: URI too long
You haven't identified the problem at all. I just wish there was an easy way to filter out those requests before they hit by Apache and crapfill my logs.
For a pithy 150 domains, setup TinyDNS. It takes about 20 minutes to download/compile/install. There are plenty of helpful guides to setting up the software.
If you are unsure about the format, use a zone-xfer to get them to TinyDNS format. Then your DNS is 100% under your control (easy updating!), cost effective (TinyDNS needs to maintenance), and has a light impact on the server (usually 1 second of CPU time for every few days + a few hundred kb of HD space). On top of that, you can transfer your registrations to an alternative registrar (like Joker) which would be cheaper in the long run.
Half-life is a wicked game. You get that and the engine when you buy it. Most of the rest of the expansions are free, and this is good because it allows Valve to get higher ROI in the engine. Because the same engine was used on Half-Life, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress Classic, Counterstrike, etc, they kept raking in money because people would buy Half-life to access these. Doom had a similar start -- since everyone could release content for it, wonderful wads were made for it, and allowed it to continue to have strong sales longer than most games. Best of all, towards the end, the true cream of the crop became bundled (Final Doom -- with TNT and Plutonia wads).
What does this mean? Half-Life 2 is all well and good, but if Valve is smart, they'll have contests for modders. Best mods get official distribution and licencing, which allows the modders to get money, Valve to get more return on their HL2 engine, and keep interest high in HL2 technology games. Win-win!
You can quite creatively cook your books, ensuring via your $30,000 wardrobe and $500,000 limo rentals that all the child companies (which the studios happen to have stakes in) make money, while the film itself makes nothing.
In this way, they avoid a lot of taxes. If you taxed the income of the companies, they'd all just stop making money. They'd break even, sure, but no profits would be recorded except by mistake.
But which one will be patched sooner so that img src= is restricted to http/https protocols only? (Except for HTML from file://, which can also access file://...)
IF you try. Shenmue 2 on the Xbox looks essentially like Shenmue 2 on the DC. The problems the DC version had were mainly load times, and slowdown on the more polygonally intense scenes.
The PS2 just isn't easy to program, while the DC was very easy to program. You could do Primal level graphics on the DC with way less developer experience, which was why a lot of the later DC games still look pretty good when stacked up against the games of the past couple of years.
However, the GCN and Xbox are very easy to program. Development houses that take the extra month or two to really understand the extra features and design them into the games (rather than just taking on reflections everywhere, ala EA's horrible porting efforts), really show through. Like Super Monkey Ball's excellent ground detail everywhere.
A lot of early DC games looked like ass mainly because the developers were writing to the PS1 feature-set. Sega and a couple of other developers really pushed the limit, and did great stuff before the end.
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"Saying you'll have OpenGL on your CD is good and all but you still need something to talk to the hardware."
I mentioned it as a package with catalyst/detonator for the nVidia/ATI cards, since those tend to be the 2 most-common gaming cards. I mentioned in another post how you could easily have another dongle that holds the driver. So you have 1 save card for game data and 1 card for a driver than translates OGL to the hw layer.
Make sense?
It's called OpenGL. It lets me run Quake1 on my Radeon 9800.
Yes, OpenGL would be on these discs. It'd be stupid to not have an abstraction layer.
Did you even read my post before replying? I've addresses all these strawmen about drivers.
" Can you say "I've got a perfectly good hard disk in my PC"? You might as well buy a XBox/PS2/GameCube/Whatever"
If there's an HD we want to use, it'll have to be in a standard layout. Since you probably want your own config for GP use of your PC, you'll want to use the USB dongle for data storage. Plus it means you can move your profiles easy, not like the Xbox (which, I should point out, has an HD, and the PS2 has an HD option you gloss over).
"Try closer to 250 MB minimum for a working install, probably more, like in the 300 range. More, if you assume a person might need a web-browser, or things like that as well."
No. No browser is needed, no QT is needed, no GTK+ is needed. Only the game binaries, OpenGL, a set of drivers for the most common 3D cards, X, and a kernel. Slackware can run in 250mb with a full OS. You need way less as a base for 1 gaming program which is the sole application.
"That take space. (sic) Most games need on the order of 10-20 MB per save file. Looks like that memory card got more expensive."
No. If they are designing games for this purpose, they will optimize the save/load features. There is no reason to save a huge dump of every flag or internal variable of an engine when a handful of variables in a couple of data structures can adequately describe the situation. You're advocating bloaty code. That way lies madness.
"Only the very big developers (read, id, Epic, EA) can afford to say, only people with the best hardware can run this game. Valve showed with their HL survey that most peopel run on very low-end hardware."
I was talking about nVidia's positioning on releasing drivers that would be distributable in such a fashion. If you can have a guaranteed abstraction layer (OpenGL or DirectX), it's pretty easy to write games that'll work on all setups (note: I am simplifying, there are buggy drivers). If you really want to simplify even more, you could sell the actual OpenGL/DirectX layers on another USB dongle. 1 for saving, 1 for your video card. That'd make it so you could use universal discs on any PC that has a driver dongle available. You could even make it so that the driver dongles could take any standard download, like nVidia's detonator set. Standarization is something you're ignoring.
"Its (sic) a much more elitest group."
Yea, PC gamers are many things which polite people don't say in polite conversation. BeOS users are elistist too, as are Amiga users, etc. PC gamers can either work together to make PC gaming easy to do, or they can go the way of the dodo, because the majority of the people have control of money.
"Also, load times on a CD from a PC will probably be slower, as the read patterns and filesystem aren't optimized for it."
Slower than what? That's an OS layer problem. Let the purpose-based config people deal with it, because they will be able to change how UDF is read at the block layer to make things easier. Heck, Linux already makes reading from DVD/CD super quick. If you're using it as a base, I expect to see awesome results in any normal PC (as I said before, better caching and more RAM = fast). Just let the people who know about such things build an SDK, and you could revolutionize PC gaming.
I suspect Microsoft's trying to go this way with PC gaming anyways, based on all the news that's been put out about it.
"1) The operating system would take up a significant amount of space on the disc."
:p
Linux takes maybe 120-200mb. That's talking about a kernel (1mb) plus a basic set of OpenGL + X + X driver for cards. That's not much of a 4.5 or 9gb disc. It'd be even less if there was actual work on making it into a standard.
"2) A read-only filesystem makes saving preferences, screenshots, etc. difficult"
My PS2 and GameCube and PS1 and Dreamcast, etc, all seem to save fine. I can get a 16mb USB dongle for 16$ CDN. Why not have it save prefs to a USB dongle? Can you say memory card?
"3) Extreme variances in architectures and hardware would limit the playability."
That's why you have a standard, like MPC was supposed to be a standard about 14 years ago. If you have a set (Athlon/ATI disc, Pentium/ATI disc, etc), you'll be able to make that OS footprint smaller and allow better gaming. Serious gamers only have one of 4 possible combinations (nCr from Athlon or Pentium with ATI or NVidia). Shitty computers with same Cirrus logic bullshit won't be used for this kind of work anyways.
"4) Liscense violations against non-free components (nvidia)."
Whatever sells more video cards (Hey, games that have great OOB experiencies!) will change their distribution policy. Money talks.
"5) Slow load times."
If people will put up with PS2 load times, there is nothing to worry about with the much faster and easier to cache (PCs usually have more than 64mb of RAM, the amount of UMA RAM the Xbox has) PC memory and DVD-ROM technology.
"6) Game patches and updates would require the download of an entire new disc."
Hey, maybe PC game companies will start shipping games that aren't broken. I mean, 20 years of console games has taught me that it's easy to ship games that aren't bugshit. You just have to put in the QA effort.
"7) CD/DVDs deteriorate rapidly. Constant inserts/removals can lead to irreversible damage."
Right. That's exactly why I somehow can't play any of my Saturn and Dreamcast games anymore... wait a second!
The shock goes from the audience not knowing (which wasn't really a shocker since the early 1980s anyways, since everyone knows), to Luke having to come to terms with the fact that his father is the man responsible for destroying Alderaan in episode 4, and also responsible for a great many other evils.
This coming to terms with how twisted Vader is and how close they are together is a major turning point for Skywalker's character.
But I'm sure you just want to nitpick and whine more.
Yet I see no mention of DOSEmu.
:)
DOSEmu is wicked. It's great. It's not VMWare (no $$ required), it's not Windows (no $$ to MS), it's not BOCHS (so it runs decently). I've used it with many DOS games.
It comes with FreeDOS, but I was able to easily put the Win95 command.com version 7 in with some other tweaks to make an easy-to-use DOS enviroment I've used to play through many Sierra and Lucas Arts adventure games.
The support is a lot more complete than, say, Wine, because all it has to do is provide a virtualized x86, which is what the OS and hardware are built to provide anyways. Most of it is just a thin BIOS compatibility layer. It's no where near as complex as a whole DirectX translator
Try it out. It's quick and easy to install, and is fairly mature. It'll run a lot.
Please, folks. Doom, Doom 2, Wolfenstein have already been ported to the GBA and sold commercially, let alone by hobbyists.
Whinning about keyboards and mice is a boring lament from those PC gamers who can't be bothered to learn how to use anything else.
A late game is a late game, but a bad game is bad forever.
However, there's more to it. If TF2 doesn't sell worth a dang because of how long they waited, it won't be worth anything. At least if they had released it they could've patched it if it sucked.
Is that, for example, they could've released TF2 back in 1999 based on the HL1 engine, enjoyed decent success, and made Team Fortress that much more fresh in people's minds. Then they could've started updating it as Team Fortress 3 on the HL2 engine as they're doing now with 2.
Whenever a company decides to miss a ship window like that, they're deciding against income and market share. I don't think it was a wise business decision, because it could've easily been another one of those Half-Life 1-based items that generated attention and income for the team while working on Half-Life 2. All they have to show for their work is vapour and promises, not products.
I just went to the CCRA website and went through an online efiling. I found out about this cool site. Since I made less than $25,000 CDN last year (being a student and all), it was even free.
Works quite well in Mozilla.
Any Nine Inch Nails album (not single or remix collection) has a very good focus. Marilyn Manson also has a focus on a few albums (notably Antichrist Superstar, which was unsurprisingly enouch produced my Mr. Trent Reznor).
Really, there are artists that produce albums, you're just not listening hard enough.
Man, everyone who plays games on the go has a Gameboy. Maybe you thought the GBA wasn't worth while or something, but the thing is, the SP is pretty dang worthit, cheap, and has a good selection of games. Plus it plays my old crap from a decade ago.
It's certainly a lot better thought out than the VMU games on the Dreamcast.
Latest File Releases
Package Version Date Notes / Monitor Download
This Project Has Not Released Any Files
[View All Project Files]
No files exist to download. I've looked and looked, and all I see is a pretty PR stating that they released something in March. But I can't download it, and I can't find it, so they might as well have released a paper hat for all the use I'm getting out of it.
What I want is something I can use under Linux that'll produce movie files that RealOne on my N-Gage will play. I'd also like to be able to sync it to my Palm Calender and Address book, and have voice dialing work again. Any hints?
As someone who quite seriously bought the N-Gage as the cheapest unlocked GSM worldphone I could get, I think I'm in the position to review the changes ;)
In positives steps, the new N-Gage QD is:
* A bit smaller (nice of them).
* Hot-swapable MMC (not a big deal, really).
* Better battery life (YAY).
* Separate OK button (double YAY!).
* The d-pad and buttons seem ok (E3 well tell if they're any good).
* Auto-run for inserted MMC games (eeh).
* Vibration/enchanced speaker for games.
* Quick-game key (handy if they had good games).
However, there are some significant drawbacks for those who want some of the features of the original phone:
* It's dual-band (EGSM 900/1800) -- no more 1900 support (the band we use in North America). No more GSM phone use in North America with N-Gage QD.
* Also no more radio support, which also means no more recording radio (I listen to the radio a lot when I've listened to the MP3s I have too much).
* And no more MP3 or AAC support (which is the main use for my phone besides a phone).
* Movies? Nope!
Essentially, it's a $200 USD Gameboy in North America, since it has none of the features which redeemed the original N-Gage, except the ability to play AAA-quality gaming titles on MMC.
I don't know how the folks at Nokia can claim that the N-Gage games are AAA-quality titles. I guess most Gameboy games are AAAAAAAAAA-quality titles, because every single one of the games I've tried has sucked so fucking much. But, hey, at least I got a phone/mp3 player/movie phone/mms capable/colour with calendering device out of it. Purchasers of the N-Gage QD won't get that at all.
I don't think Nokia will be back for a third round, considering they've lost the second round right here. If they'd managed to get any decent titles, it might be a different story, but no one except maybe Nintendo seems to have the ability to float a platform with 1st-party titles. Without really great 3rd-party wooing via buckets of money (MS) or sheer momentum (Sony), there's no way to get into the game market. Sorry, Nokia, but I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.
A pen is 12cm long. Shuttle PCs are 30-40cm long.
A wrist watch is 5 x 5 x 2cm. A totally different size scale.
10x8x.8 is closer to an old GB cartrige that's a bit wider and longer than normal.
about 35gb of data on a CDR? ...
Yea, that's why they're not in direct competition, because they are targetted at different markets. CDRs aren't a serious backup technology for companies.
In terms of backups and dead storage, it's nice to see something that's not a tape drive. Tapes are expensive and very linear -- restoring anything from tape sucks ass. You have to unspool and respool the entire thing to get at the data.
It doesn't matter if people WANT their proprietary standard, because PEOPLE aren't the target audience.
Slackware-current has Apache 1.3.29, which happens to be the version listed as not vulnerable.
If you're running Slack, just download the source, run apache.SlackBuild, and upgradepkg to become non-vulnerable.
If you actually check your access_log for the partner entry, you'll see it's a request for the SEARCH command which seems to be a new IIS exploit heading around. My vulnerable 1.3.28 also spits out:
[Sun Apr 11 00:45:43 2004] [error] [client 24.78.143.66] request failed: URI too long
You haven't identified the problem at all. I just wish there was an easy way to filter out those requests before they hit by Apache and crapfill my logs.
For a pithy 150 domains, setup TinyDNS. It takes about 20 minutes to download/compile/install. There are plenty of helpful guides to setting up the software.
If you are unsure about the format, use a zone-xfer to get them to TinyDNS format. Then your DNS is 100% under your control (easy updating!), cost effective (TinyDNS needs to maintenance), and has a light impact on the server (usually 1 second of CPU time for every few days + a few hundred kb of HD space). On top of that, you can transfer your registrations to an alternative registrar (like Joker) which would be cheaper in the long run.
Yes, it's the content that drives gaming.
Half-life is a wicked game. You get that and the engine when you buy it. Most of the rest of the expansions are free, and this is good because it allows Valve to get higher ROI in the engine. Because the same engine was used on Half-Life, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress Classic, Counterstrike, etc, they kept raking in money because people would buy Half-life to access these. Doom had a similar start -- since everyone could release content for it, wonderful wads were made for it, and allowed it to continue to have strong sales longer than most games. Best of all, towards the end, the true cream of the crop became bundled (Final Doom -- with TNT and Plutonia wads).
What does this mean? Half-Life 2 is all well and good, but if Valve is smart, they'll have contests for modders. Best mods get official distribution and licencing, which allows the modders to get money, Valve to get more return on their HL2 engine, and keep interest high in HL2 technology games. Win-win!
You can quite creatively cook your books, ensuring via your $30,000 wardrobe and $500,000 limo rentals that all the child companies (which the studios happen to have stakes in) make money, while the film itself makes nothing.
In this way, they avoid a lot of taxes. If you taxed the income of the companies, they'd all just stop making money. They'd break even, sure, but no profits would be recorded except by mistake.
But which one will be patched sooner so that img src= is restricted to http/https protocols only? (Except for HTML from file://, which can also access file://...)
though Darwin can engineer smarter drivers, engineers can save stupid people.
And thus the cycle continues.
IF you try. Shenmue 2 on the Xbox looks essentially like Shenmue 2 on the DC. The problems the DC version had were mainly load times, and slowdown on the more polygonally intense scenes.
The PS2 just isn't easy to program, while the DC was very easy to program. You could do Primal level graphics on the DC with way less developer experience, which was why a lot of the later DC games still look pretty good when stacked up against the games of the past couple of years.
However, the GCN and Xbox are very easy to program. Development houses that take the extra month or two to really understand the extra features and design them into the games (rather than just taking on reflections everywhere, ala EA's horrible porting efforts), really show through. Like Super Monkey Ball's excellent ground detail everywhere.
A lot of early DC games looked like ass mainly because the developers were writing to the PS1 feature-set. Sega and a couple of other developers really pushed the limit, and did great stuff before the end.
The PS2 lacks many features that GCN and Xbox have, notably good T&L, hardware bumpmapping, extra levels of texture filtering, and memory speed.
The PS2 and Dreamcast are of the same generation.