Let's look at what we're saying here, though. The whole big issue.
There are two basic polarities for game design. Only two! And this is more than just for RPG's. There is the closed, tight, event and trigger driven storyline. Then there is the open ended methodology, where the player is left to decide what things to do and which places to go.
This is really more like an axis than two seperate directions. Many storyline driven games will include set "choose-your-own-adventure" decisions that branch off into slightly different pathways. Many open-ended games will have a plot that the player can choose to follow if they want to. Many simulators include scenarios that steer the direction of play.
You can't bag a game because it sits on one or other end of the "open-closed" gameplay axis! Some people will like an open-ended game. Other people like to be led through the story.
The worst part is, it looks like this will be a console exclusive release (of course). Presumably only for XBox-2, as it doesn't seem to be in Sony's arena.
We might be lucky and get a console port however (the PC's of the time will undoubtedly be at least as powerful as XBox2). Hopefully PC gamers won't need to buy a gamepad to play the game.
Part right. nVidia didn't bother getting a license to do intel. We know the technology worked - just look at XBox. I don't think they revealed any particular reason for not pushing intel harder for a license, although it may have been some strange crosslicensing issues with Xbox and Microsoft. Also, it's possible that nVidia wanted to test the water with AMD's CPUs first, and found that market successful enough. Anyone with AMD would know that nVidia dominate the chipset market for AMD - and for good reason, the performance and stability are unmatched.
What's to bet one of those guys has gone into one frame and put "I was here '04" in a slightly slightly lighter shade of black in one of the blacker space scenes. Bastard.
I don't think he's running out... but I think he does like the cash. Also there has to be some kind of perverted satisfaction with altering his successful work from 1977 and replacing it with a sweaty, crude, and mismatched looking set of special effects and previously deleted scenes that should have stayed on the cutting room floor.
I'm more concerned about his plans for a TV series and for more movies. Although, looking at it another way, TV is way too small for Lucas to directly intefere with as he does with the movies. For that reason, it's quite likely the TV series could be pure gold - with quality actors being allowed to act properly, something noticeably missing from the prequels.
Of course let's assume there are multiple copies of the master for backup purposes and in seperate locations. This is likely because of the amount of changes that have occured to the original, presumably all the "in work" copies are also archived all over the place.
Secondly I'm pretty sure DVD media degrades from bacteria slower than film degrades from sitting around in cans.
Finally, the rate at which Lucas re-releases Star Wars is relatively high (in fact, Star Wars has to be the most re-released movie in time ever). So he's going to be going to the originals and remastering them at regular intervals.
I would say that Star Wars is well preserved. The real problem is finding a version that Lucas hasn't photoshopped Jar Jar Binks into.
Unfortunately, the closest you will get is laserdisc rips in DVD-R format from your friendly and varied P2P applications. The quality is good although not exceptional, however, most importantly, they are the unaltered theatrical releases.
MS gets bashed for ripping off UI elements from Apple, Xerox. Gnome/KDE are celebrated for using UI elements ripped off from MS.
It's amazing, because of course good ideas need to be used wherever possible and applicable, it's the best way to have success. It's also what free open source is about - making good ideas free.
Either way, this Linux driver from the web system is the most promising development I've seen in a long time for Linux. If it's done right and people put in enough effort to building a driver data base, Linux could easily surpass Windows in many respects for ease of driver handling.
Yes, a market that even Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo will be happy to join forces in just to stomp Infinium out.
Then, Infinium will sue Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony for anticompetitive practices.
They may also claim they own proprietary code or patents, after the anticompetitive cases are thrown out. While the final stages are underway, the executives will relocate to a non-extradition country.
True, Infinium would be screwed if they didn't have some decent publishers/titles available for Phantom when the time comes. So instead they had better hope that $68M got them some decent publishers or they're really stuffed. And some of the bigger game houses are already "owned" by MS, Sony, Nintendo. They won't be very obliging about helping more competition into their market. I wouldn't suggest people invest in Infinium right now.
Let's play with the numbers. $35,000,000 in one year. Let's say they're selling PC's that play games for about $500 each (reasonable price for a desktop gaming PC on the very low end). So, game sales and royalties aside, they'd need to sell 70,000 consoles to make up that revenue.
That's not a totally unreaslitic figure - I guess there are at least 70,000 suckers in the world, although I imagine that there will be fewer sales and more revenue from subscriptions or whatever model the Phantom is supposed to use for gaming.
The problem is that I can't see $35M revenue (not profit) paying Infiniums costs or paying any of that $68M debt. How exactly do you rack up $68M in debt developing a PC anyway? The personal computer is pretty straightforward as it is... most of the work has already been done.
Needless to say, they also have a poor reputation from that legal fight with Kyle earlier on, that won't help them get sales because reputation counts for a lot in the gaming industry.
The icons are actually on the right side of the desktop, where they won't be covered up by every window you open!
Or, to put it a better way, OS/X uses much more of your desktop real estate. You will not be able to easily enjoy having your foreground application in the foreground as you might under Linux or Windows. Icons will clutter the screen irrespective of your foreground app.
"Shut Down" is not under "Start"
It's hidden somewhere else. Good luck finding it. Don't think you can right click for it either.
Windows don't automatically fill the entire screen unless you want them to!
Steve Jobs decided that your desktop wallpaper is much more important than any kind of work you might want to be using your computer for. You'll basically need to open an application then go through another procedure to maximise it, instead of the typical "launch an app, use the app" approach most people prefer.
There are very few crashes for normal users of Macs, and the ones that do occur generally affect only the program crashing rather than bringing down the whole machine.
Of course you would know that this is typical of Windows if you used Windows 2000 or Windows XP, and has been this way since 1999. One thing to be aware of with the Mac is that they try and sell you common advantages as if they are unique:
"My Macintosh never crashes!" (A common fallacy. My PC never crashes either, although I do tend to use handpicked components and I ensure everything works correctly - it cost me more, but not as much as a Mac would have cost me, and I enjoy the same or superior stability under both Linux and Windows on this rig.) "I can play AAC files from iTunes!" (MP3's have been common on Windows PC's for years) "I can use the CTRL key to access different options with my mouse button!" (Most Windows PC's have mouses with 3 or more buttons, and often a convenient scroll wheel. These functions are customisable, but you will not have this capability on Mac). "My iBook has an LCD screen and is portable!" (Laptops have been available less expensively than iBooks and run Windows or Linux, depending on your preferences) "I can do anything a Windows user can!" (Macs have a version of MS Office available for them, however it does not contain the same range of productivity applications that are available to Windows/Office users) "There are great games for Mac!" (Windows PC gaming is broader reaching with more titles released than any other platform in history, including consoles. Some Windows games are ported to Mac, and a very small number of games are specifically created for Mac). "My Mac never has technical problems!" (This is a fallacy. The Apple Mac is quite capable of generating application errors and crashing, just like any other *nix based system. Furthermore, when your hardware breaks, the guy at the corner computer store will not be able to help you. Expect to wait several months for spare parts. You will not be able to buy parts off the shelf and install them and have them work. Device capability is roughly the same as you might expect for a Linux PC for peripheral devices, if not much worse, as of course the Open Source community has done much work in making devices work under Linux that normally wouldn't).
If I might amend that a little because they are all good points but missing something:
0) Do not run Windows 98. This is the year 2004. 1998 was released 6 years ago. Microsoft have released three (3!) major desktop operating system revisions since then. If you thought MS was bad for security now, try and remember what they were like 6 years ago!
If you won't pay for Windows XP, I am certain that you can get a free operating system that will do all the things you can do with your Windows 98 install. You've managed to make it to "Ask Slashdot" once, I am sure someone here knows of some kind of free OS you can use.
There are some benefits to A/V software, especially because the system is a laptop and therefore may plug directly into a foreign network and therefore be exposed to all manner of nasties. As mentioned many times before, AVG is free, not a ripoff, and very good quality software.
But if you want to remove the x, you can't be vague about the 86 - you'd need to reference the full 8086-64, although the CPU's we use today are markedly different from 8086, more like 80586-64, but then the 586 was really the pentium(tm) brand, so to be correct and without using an "x", you have to call it the pentium-64, which is really inaccurate because AMD's K8 hammer family is very different to a pentium internally, much more powerful CPU's. So it just isn't going to work.
Amusingly enough, in the novel, Tyler (whoever he is) sets off the bombs, thinks he's dead, dreams he meets God, who explains to him that no, he's not the all singing all dancing crap of the world, and no, he's not a movie star or a super hero, he just is, so he should stop stressing about it and get on with his life. Quite a different ending to the movie.
Nonetheless, the philosophies within the text are borrowed from some extent from bhuddism and taoism. Are you suggesting that these philosophies are worse than "crap"?
Amusingly, you seem to have missed the point of the film - Tyler not only decided that people were missing a lot of the point of life (this is quite true, as we can tell from your post), he decided to intervene. Violently. Which to an extent made big differences in the way people lived. A parable that we can certainly learn something from.
Why not attribute your quote, this is from Fight Club. God, I hate people who get their philosophies from movies. Can't you at least come up with another way of phrasing the idea, rather than ripping it off wholesale?
Okeydokey. The author of Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk (The movie, Fight Club, is a loose adaptation of the book), borrowed most of his assertions from Bhuddism and Taoism, although he did not credit his source - although it is a courtesy to do so, the sources have long since passed into the public domain as the Tao Te Ching and core bhuddist texts are thousands of years old. I admit I didn't apply the correct courtesy to Lao Tzu. Neither did Chuck Palahniuk, and neither did the director of the movie adapted from his book.
So, in response to your completely uninformed post, I suggest the following to you. Check your facts before you assume the first place you see something is the only place it ever existed. You may not suddenly know everything about a topic even if you saw a movie about it once.
This is surely just a case of a serious PC gamer devolving down the evolutionary ladder of quality to a console gamer.
Console games, as console gamers continually remind me, are more "fun" than PC games because they are simpler and you can just pick them up and play right away. They're also shorter and have considerably less replayability than a PC game - this is a good marketing strategy, similar to car manufacturers. If you make a car that lasts 20 years - you won't see that customer for 20 years. If you make a car that lasts 2 years, over a 20 year period you'll see that customer 10 times.
PC gamers tend to be more discerning, where playability and the quality of investment are much more important, as well as modability and improvements to the game via patches over a longer time period. This is great if you're a dedicated gamer.
What gets me is that the writer is trying to tell us we need shorter, lower quality games which are more simple, just because *he* doesn't have time to play games like he used to. I'm not sure why we should suffer because he's shifted lower than the lowest common denominator, though.
It's a well known fact that a lot of developers are idiots, and hence develop text editors that need to access the internet. The benefit of the open source community is that the community works in a pseudo-democratic way in many respects and therefore developers like that tend to shy away. There is not much demand for internet enabled text editors, so they are difficult to come by on Linux.
The people who develop the internet enabled text editors continue to churn out their apps for Windows. Sometimes third party apps can be frightening and almost lovecraftish in their crude and otherworldly construction. Perhaps the great Old Ones are still working on these developers.
Like you can configure Windows firewall as a part of the installation process (I've applied SP2 at home).
As Mr FUD is suggesting, Windows users won't configure the firewall at install time (which is why those apps don't work). To be fair we'll also assume that you won't configure your linux firewall at install time.
Any good firewall will block outgoing traffic just as well as it blocks ingoing traffic, by default. The new windows firewall in SP2 blocks outgoing traffic (the SP1 version of the firewall was inbound blocking only).
So, without configuration, you'll find all those linux distros you've listed share this same problem - when you install an unconfigured (all ports closed 2-way) firewall on them, some applications will break.
You can't go and say that it's a "non-existent" problem, because you have to assume that any user who can't configure a firewall under Windows couldn't do it under Linux either. What we're really seeing here is Windows moving closer to Linux's security methodology - secure by default. So the problems mentioned in the article are directly applicable to any Linux distro that is secure by default - yet people are hanging it on MS despite this.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's look at what we're saying here, though. The whole big issue.
There are two basic polarities for game design. Only two! And this is more than just for RPG's. There is the closed, tight, event and trigger driven storyline. Then there is the open ended methodology, where the player is left to decide what things to do and which places to go.
This is really more like an axis than two seperate directions. Many storyline driven games will include set "choose-your-own-adventure" decisions that branch off into slightly different pathways. Many open-ended games will have a plot that the player can choose to follow if they want to. Many simulators include scenarios that steer the direction of play.
You can't bag a game because it sits on one or other end of the "open-closed" gameplay axis! Some people will like an open-ended game. Other people like to be led through the story.
Music to my ears!
The worst part is, it looks like this will be a console exclusive release (of course). Presumably only for XBox-2, as it doesn't seem to be in Sony's arena.
We might be lucky and get a console port however (the PC's of the time will undoubtedly be at least as powerful as XBox2). Hopefully PC gamers won't need to buy a gamepad to play the game.
Part right. nVidia didn't bother getting a license to do intel. We know the technology worked - just look at XBox. I don't think they revealed any particular reason for not pushing intel harder for a license, although it may have been some strange crosslicensing issues with Xbox and Microsoft. Also, it's possible that nVidia wanted to test the water with AMD's CPUs first, and found that market successful enough. Anyone with AMD would know that nVidia dominate the chipset market for AMD - and for good reason, the performance and stability are unmatched.
What's to bet one of those guys has gone into one frame and put "I was here '04" in a slightly slightly lighter shade of black in one of the blacker space scenes. Bastard.
Not to mention the exhorbitant costs for the Star Trek DVD's, more expensive than any TV series I've seen!
I don't think he's running out... but I think he does like the cash. Also there has to be some kind of perverted satisfaction with altering his successful work from 1977 and replacing it with a sweaty, crude, and mismatched looking set of special effects and previously deleted scenes that should have stayed on the cutting room floor.
I'm more concerned about his plans for a TV series and for more movies. Although, looking at it another way, TV is way too small for Lucas to directly intefere with as he does with the movies. For that reason, it's quite likely the TV series could be pure gold - with quality actors being allowed to act properly, something noticeably missing from the prequels.
Of course let's assume there are multiple copies of the master for backup purposes and in seperate locations. This is likely because of the amount of changes that have occured to the original, presumably all the "in work" copies are also archived all over the place.
Secondly I'm pretty sure DVD media degrades from bacteria slower than film degrades from sitting around in cans.
Finally, the rate at which Lucas re-releases Star Wars is relatively high (in fact, Star Wars has to be the most re-released movie in time ever). So he's going to be going to the originals and remastering them at regular intervals.
I would say that Star Wars is well preserved. The real problem is finding a version that Lucas hasn't photoshopped Jar Jar Binks into.
Unfortunately, the closest you will get is laserdisc rips in DVD-R format from your friendly and varied P2P applications. The quality is good although not exceptional, however, most importantly, they are the unaltered theatrical releases.
Why is it news when an article of hardware works in a non-Microsoft system? It's not even a news article when hardware works under Linux!
It's funny what the parallels are like:
MS gets bashed for ripping off UI elements from Apple, Xerox.
Gnome/KDE are celebrated for using UI elements ripped off from MS.
It's amazing, because of course good ideas need to be used wherever possible and applicable, it's the best way to have success. It's also what free open source is about - making good ideas free.
Either way, this Linux driver from the web system is the most promising development I've seen in a long time for Linux. If it's done right and people put in enough effort to building a driver data base, Linux could easily surpass Windows in many respects for ease of driver handling.
Yes, a market that even Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo will be happy to join forces in just to stomp Infinium out.
Then, Infinium will sue Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony for anticompetitive practices.
They may also claim they own proprietary code or patents, after the anticompetitive cases are thrown out. While the final stages are underway, the executives will relocate to a non-extradition country.
True, Infinium would be screwed if they didn't have some decent publishers/titles available for Phantom when the time comes. So instead they had better hope that $68M got them some decent publishers or they're really stuffed. And some of the bigger game houses are already "owned" by MS, Sony, Nintendo. They won't be very obliging about helping more competition into their market. I wouldn't suggest people invest in Infinium right now.
Let's play with the numbers. $35,000,000 in one year. Let's say they're selling PC's that play games for about $500 each (reasonable price for a desktop gaming PC on the very low end). So, game sales and royalties aside, they'd need to sell 70,000 consoles to make up that revenue.
That's not a totally unreaslitic figure - I guess there are at least 70,000 suckers in the world, although I imagine that there will be fewer sales and more revenue from subscriptions or whatever model the Phantom is supposed to use for gaming.
The problem is that I can't see $35M revenue (not profit) paying Infiniums costs or paying any of that $68M debt. How exactly do you rack up $68M in debt developing a PC anyway? The personal computer is pretty straightforward as it is... most of the work has already been done.
Needless to say, they also have a poor reputation from that legal fight with Kyle earlier on, that won't help them get sales because reputation counts for a lot in the gaming industry.
The icons are actually on the right side of the desktop, where they won't be covered up by every window you open!
Or, to put it a better way, OS/X uses much more of your desktop real estate. You will not be able to easily enjoy having your foreground application in the foreground as you might under Linux or Windows. Icons will clutter the screen irrespective of your foreground app.
"Shut Down" is not under "Start"
It's hidden somewhere else. Good luck finding it. Don't think you can right click for it either.
Windows don't automatically fill the entire screen unless you want them to!
Steve Jobs decided that your desktop wallpaper is much more important than any kind of work you might want to be using your computer for. You'll basically need to open an application then go through another procedure to maximise it, instead of the typical "launch an app, use the app" approach most people prefer.
There are very few crashes for normal users of Macs, and the ones that do occur generally affect only the program crashing rather than bringing down the whole machine.
Of course you would know that this is typical of Windows if you used Windows 2000 or Windows XP, and has been this way since 1999. One thing to be aware of with the Mac is that they try and sell you common advantages as if they are unique:
"My Macintosh never crashes!" (A common fallacy. My PC never crashes either, although I do tend to use handpicked components and I ensure everything works correctly - it cost me more, but not as much as a Mac would have cost me, and I enjoy the same or superior stability under both Linux and Windows on this rig.)
"I can play AAC files from iTunes!" (MP3's have been common on Windows PC's for years)
"I can use the CTRL key to access different options with my mouse button!" (Most Windows PC's have mouses with 3 or more buttons, and often a convenient scroll wheel. These functions are customisable, but you will not have this capability on Mac).
"My iBook has an LCD screen and is portable!" (Laptops have been available less expensively than iBooks and run Windows or Linux, depending on your preferences)
"I can do anything a Windows user can!"
(Macs have a version of MS Office available for them, however it does not contain the same range of productivity applications that are available to Windows/Office users)
"There are great games for Mac!"
(Windows PC gaming is broader reaching with more titles released than any other platform in history, including consoles. Some Windows games are ported to Mac, and a very small number of games are specifically created for Mac).
"My Mac never has technical problems!" (This is a fallacy. The Apple Mac is quite capable of generating application errors and crashing, just like any other *nix based system. Furthermore, when your hardware breaks, the guy at the corner computer store will not be able to help you. Expect to wait several months for spare parts. You will not be able to buy parts off the shelf and install them and have them work. Device capability is roughly the same as you might expect for a Linux PC for peripheral devices, if not much worse, as of course the Open Source community has done much work in making devices work under Linux that normally wouldn't).
If I might amend that a little because they are all good points but missing something:
0) Do not run Windows 98. This is the year 2004. 1998 was released 6 years ago. Microsoft have released three (3!) major desktop operating system revisions since then. If you thought MS was bad for security now, try and remember what they were like 6 years ago!
If you won't pay for Windows XP, I am certain that you can get a free operating system that will do all the things you can do with your Windows 98 install. You've managed to make it to "Ask Slashdot" once, I am sure someone here knows of some kind of free OS you can use.
There are some benefits to A/V software, especially because the system is a laptop and therefore may plug directly into a foreign network and therefore be exposed to all manner of nasties. As mentioned many times before, AVG is free, not a ripoff, and very good quality software.
But if you want to remove the x, you can't be vague about the 86 - you'd need to reference the full 8086-64, although the CPU's we use today are markedly different from 8086, more like 80586-64, but then the 586 was really the pentium(tm) brand, so to be correct and without using an "x", you have to call it the pentium-64, which is really inaccurate because AMD's K8 hammer family is very different to a pentium internally, much more powerful CPU's. So it just isn't going to work.
Amusingly enough, in the novel, Tyler (whoever he is) sets off the bombs, thinks he's dead, dreams he meets God, who explains to him that no, he's not the all singing all dancing crap of the world, and no, he's not a movie star or a super hero, he just is, so he should stop stressing about it and get on with his life. Quite a different ending to the movie.
Nonetheless, the philosophies within the text are borrowed from some extent from bhuddism and taoism. Are you suggesting that these philosophies are worse than "crap"?
Amusingly, you seem to have missed the point of the film - Tyler not only decided that people were missing a lot of the point of life (this is quite true, as we can tell from your post), he decided to intervene. Violently. Which to an extent made big differences in the way people lived. A parable that we can certainly learn something from.
Why not attribute your quote, this is from Fight Club. God, I hate people who get their philosophies from movies. Can't you at least come up with another way of phrasing the idea, rather than ripping it off wholesale?
Okeydokey. The author of Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk (The movie, Fight Club, is a loose adaptation of the book), borrowed most of his assertions from Bhuddism and Taoism, although he did not credit his source - although it is a courtesy to do so, the sources have long since passed into the public domain as the Tao Te Ching and core bhuddist texts are thousands of years old. I admit I didn't apply the correct courtesy to Lao Tzu. Neither did Chuck Palahniuk, and neither did the director of the movie adapted from his book.
So, in response to your completely uninformed post, I suggest the following to you. Check your facts before you assume the first place you see something is the only place it ever existed. You may not suddenly know everything about a topic even if you saw a movie about it once.
It's not the having, it's the getting! Looks like you are stuck on an acquisition cycle. I should know, I'm stuck on one, too.
Just remember, the things you own end up owning you.
This is surely just a case of a serious PC gamer devolving down the evolutionary ladder of quality to a console gamer.
Console games, as console gamers continually remind me, are more "fun" than PC games because they are simpler and you can just pick them up and play right away. They're also shorter and have considerably less replayability than a PC game - this is a good marketing strategy, similar to car manufacturers. If you make a car that lasts 20 years - you won't see that customer for 20 years. If you make a car that lasts 2 years, over a 20 year period you'll see that customer 10 times.
PC gamers tend to be more discerning, where playability and the quality of investment are much more important, as well as modability and improvements to the game via patches over a longer time period. This is great if you're a dedicated gamer.
What gets me is that the writer is trying to tell us we need shorter, lower quality games which are more simple, just because *he* doesn't have time to play games like he used to. I'm not sure why we should suffer because he's shifted lower than the lowest common denominator, though.
At the rate at which AMD is selling A64's? I reckon they'll work it out pretty soon!
It's a well known fact that a lot of developers are idiots, and hence develop text editors that need to access the internet. The benefit of the open source community is that the community works in a pseudo-democratic way in many respects and therefore developers like that tend to shy away. There is not much demand for internet enabled text editors, so they are difficult to come by on Linux.
The people who develop the internet enabled text editors continue to churn out their apps for Windows. Sometimes third party apps can be frightening and almost lovecraftish in their crude and otherworldly construction. Perhaps the great Old Ones are still working on these developers.
I think it's a bit odd that you think Word, Excel, and Office in general need to have ports open on a firewall to work properly.
Knowing MS I wouldn't be that surprised if they did, on the other hand.
At least we have this new installed-everywhere firewall, which should decrease the noise of Worm attacks and so on.
Like you can configure Windows firewall as a part of the installation process (I've applied SP2 at home).
As Mr FUD is suggesting, Windows users won't configure the firewall at install time (which is why those apps don't work). To be fair we'll also assume that you won't configure your linux firewall at install time.
Any good firewall will block outgoing traffic just as well as it blocks ingoing traffic, by default. The new windows firewall in SP2 blocks outgoing traffic (the SP1 version of the firewall was inbound blocking only).
So, without configuration, you'll find all those linux distros you've listed share this same problem - when you install an unconfigured (all ports closed 2-way) firewall on them, some applications will break.
You can't go and say that it's a "non-existent" problem, because you have to assume that any user who can't configure a firewall under Windows couldn't do it under Linux either. What we're really seeing here is Windows moving closer to Linux's security methodology - secure by default. So the problems mentioned in the article are directly applicable to any Linux distro that is secure by default - yet people are hanging it on MS despite this.