Not only do they have the poeple, they also have the willingness to die if ordered to do so.
What would an American do if ordered to march into an enemy homeland and surely die? Well, some would go, sure, but most of us would just change the TV channel, radio station, or subscribe to a different magazine.
About the only thing going in our favor is that in a land-invasion of that type, we'd have the natural advantage of having armed citizens, police, and an advanced military. Question is though, is that enough?
(Incidently, there are a bunch of people that want to take away your guns, and the UN fully supports this communistic bullshit point of view. The first time someone tries to take away my gun they're getting shot. Killed until dead. Repeatedly.)
You fail to see the point, because your basing what you think you know on what you've seen (and obviously not seen).
For starters, while a great majority of Amiga users from the early days did use interlaced displays, deinterlaced displays became equally popular after AGA become the standard.
You didn't have to "Rob a ROM". Many people purchased perfectly legal ROMs. Many of the magazines had them for sale so you can leave the whole "pirating the Rom" arguement out.
There were quite a few ways to do Mac emulation perfectly, without any drawbacks and all of the benefits, and all the while still running the Amiga side of things perfectly. Just because you never saw any of these methods put to use does not mean they were not out there.
Well, I was never much for such advocacy no matter what the system is. Though the Amiga WAS in most ways superior to the MAC, and most of the Mac emulators did much better than just 3% performance increases over a real Mac. Some of them were head and shoulders over a real Mac, but that's unimportant to what I'm going to say.
In the end I was never one to force any of my Amigas to run MAC software. If I had wanted a MAC I would have bought a MAC.
That sort of advocacy annoyed me be it from other Amiga users, from MAC users, or more recently, from Linux users.
What am I now? Certainly my Amigas, though they all mostly work, are only so much use to me. And certainly I use Windows for the vast share of software available for it. But now days I consider myself orphaned.
I use FreeBSD, I toy with BeOS from time to time, I use Windows (ME and XP), and I'll play with anything I can get my hands on just to tinker with it.
It's been a long time since I can say I loved an OS. I'm very much a multi-platform guy because no one OS is anywhere close to perfect anymore. Some would say for it's time, AmigaDOS 2.0 was about perfect back then. And others would say OS/2 hit that mark at some point as well. I don't know that I'd say I've ever used a perfect OS and I will certainly say the further along we go the further away from perfect they will all get.
Actually, I think Gateway is less guilty than Escom AG or QuickPak, though I don't think they wanted anything really to do with the Amiga other than wave the name around and hopefully lure in Amiga fans. I don't know how many idiotic Amiga fans I know who bought a Gateway shortly after Gateway bought Amiga.
Amiga Inc. is the last and best chance for Amiga to become something real again. But I'm not even sure that's enough.
As for your reference to the Jargon File entry, I've never run up on that one but it doesn't surprise me much. It's easy to poke fun at machine loyalists when they're using a machine that might just have advantages over what you have (or what you had back then) but you don't want to admit it even if years later.
I for one don't know any Amiga users who felt it was an industry wide conspiracy, however. In fact, I think every real Amiga fan knows that the true culprits were the Commodore Executives, who in one year alone granted themselves a raise higher than the total yearly profits from the previous few years (back when they were ACTUALLY turning profits). Anybody who truely knows anything about Amiga's history knows it wasn't Microsoft or Apple that Commodore had to fear. It was their own fuckwit of a CEO.
So, the Amiga Persecution Complex to which you refer, humorous though it may be, is hardly accurate.
Amiga Inc. is the first time since the Commodore bankruptcy that Amiga has been self owned and run with some sort of direction.
Escom AG only wanted the Amiga brand name. Gateway the same. And QuickPak (who never actually got their hands on the name anyway) had their own uses for Commodore's Intellectual Property as well.
What it boils down to is that all of the previous "Buyers" of the Amiga name didn't actually aim to do anything with the company other than exploit the Amiga community.
Amiga Inc. have a vested interest in the ressurection of the Amiga. Amiga Inc. IS the Amiga.
No, seriously. This is simple to get around. When Zone Alarm (which you are probably using, right?) asks you if you want to give that process access to the net, say no, and tell it to ALWAYS say no.
Non-Windows users have it a bit easier. No Media Player. No problem.
You are _assuming_ that making a backup of your games is 1) non-infringing, and 2) that it will be a substantial use of this device.
Making a copy of your own game is Non-Infringing under Fair Use.
It is Infringing under the newer, more evil law that I dare not mention.
There are wonderful uses for this device to those involved in underground game developement. That scene isn't non-existant, even if it is comparatively small.
I guess I'm just going to make all of that sleep up when I die, because my philosophy is "sleep is for the weak".
I sleep an average of 4-6 hours per night, no more.
The closest thing to "making it up" I get is if I get too drunk on a Saturday night and pull of the rare "full 8 hours" on Sunday. That doesn't happen often.
I hope he knows that if he touched those PLATTERS he's going to DIE!
Those platters are HIGHLY TOXIC, otherwise they wouldn't lock them away in those air-tight drives!
You know, I love telling that to computer newbies. Someone told me that a while back, and it was so funny I had to further propogate the rediculous myth. I'm amazed how many people fall for it.
I can't believe everybody is replying to this post with "Dude, none of the other Game Boys had lights, either..."
It was supposed to be a joke. Pointing out the irony in everyone's complaint that the GBA has no light, when NONE of the other Game Boys ever have, either.
I have a Game Boy Color and the screen is usable in the right conditions. I've toyed with getting the Advance and I can honestly say that in the right lighting it's not THAT much worse.
Still, seeing this Kit makes me want to get an Advance so I can install the Kit. It's got a certain geek charm... or at least it will until I run into some 10 year old who modded his GBA also...
Open standards have reigned supreme on the internet, and nearly everywhere else, but somehow these proprietary video compression algorithms live on.
Sadly, I can think of more contradictions to that statement than examples of it.
We are still using GIF, after all.
http://images.slashdot.org/title.gif {- See?
Oh, and there are a whole lot more more people using MP3 than Ogg.
Oh, and uh - Isn't Flash a pretty darn closed standard?
What about that Windows thing? I think it has a pretty wide installed user base. Doesn't it? Not to mention Internet Explorer.
Sorry, dude. I think your post was a bit off the mark. It's not that I don't agree that it would be nice if stuff was all free and opened and life was good and all, but uh -- well. It's not. Sucks plenty.
If they've had the patent for 5 years, Prio Art is going to get them booted out of court.
It's not like Nintendo didn't release the RUMBLE PACK for the N64 way before any of the other systems had any kind of rumble feature, but as if that weren't enough, Sega's arcade machines have had force beedback since the 80's, as someone else has mentioned.
I don't know how many times I got annoyed at Hang-On and Outrun because just tapping the edge of the road caused a vibration that caused me to lose even more control which further caused me to wipe out entirely. Of course, that's kind of the point, but it also makes for a more thrilling game and that's why I remember Sega's wonderful Coin-Ops.
These guys haven't got a case. And even if they did, why haven't they mentioned the Gamecube? Not to mention all the PC Force Feedback controllers.
Doesn't that just sound like the start of a commercial?
Order now, operators are standing buy.
Re:When will the real evolution of RTS arive?
on
HIstory of RTS Games
·
· Score: 2
Homeworld and Cataclysm both rock.
Definately a one player game for sure, but both stories are top notch and the way they merge the cut-scenes with the game it's self almost makes the whole thing seem like a really well done sci-fi movie.
Homeworld and Cataclysm are BOTH definately 100%'s!
Both are a tad bit difficult, but I'd say the first one was harder than the second one.
Bill Gates would NEVER be sorry about anything Microsoft has done!
How can you be sure of that? How do you know that Bill Gates himself doesn't pace, pop rolaids, and drink tons of coffee thinking about what kinds of screaming rants and angry yelling he can do to the coders to get them to write things that don't crash?
Communication is only possible between equals. There are a WHOLE LOT of people who develope for Microsoft, and it's a fairly safe assumption that they're not all on equal levels (in rank, in skill, in intellect, in etchics, etc.)
I think the sentiment is real. Microsoft DOES want to make the most stable, most secure platform. They want to because it's good business to make the best product and they know (how can they not know?) that they simply don't have the best product. Not by far. It's just that simple. But how do they fix that? What would YOU do if you had to manage thousands of people, all working on different things, each coder with their own egos and unique quirks.
You can't flip a switch, write a memo, make a speech, and wave your hands to fix the problems. I don't envy Microsoft management, or Microsoft coders, for that matter.
Do I think Microsoft can do it? Who knows. Probably not. It won't be easy, not at all. I don't think it would be easy for anyone to do in an environment as big and chaotic as Microsoft's. But then, after looking at how Open Source software works in the complete opposite way, small and chaotic largely without funding and easily derailed by personality conflicts and a lack of formal structure, I don't think the Free Software world could do it either.
So in short, I think Microsoft means it. I don't think it'll do any good, though.
One could have endless fun mutating that over many iterations...
My first reaction was to turn it into a Slashdotism filled rehash (Trolling Goats, Beowulf Clusters, Cowboy Neal, and Natalie Portman...)-- but since the idea is CopyLeft, I'm sure that'll be done before this is all over with. Perhaps, by more than one person.
I would never, ever insult SDL or even try to downplay it's importance. I have high hopes for SDL. I think my only real point originally was that Direct3D, Microsoft-Born or not, is a very nice API, and it's the only real reason to write games for Windows. I honestly think gamers would have jumped ship on Microsoft when Windows 95 began replacing MS-DOS if they hadn't brough out DirectX.
With luck, SDL will reach a level of maturity that will compete rather favorably with DirectX.
DX4, by which I assume you mean the version between 3 and 5 (that might have been available to developers, but was never actually released to to end users), is hardly a fair judgement of the DirectX of today.
Most people admit that DirectX started really shaping up around 5, then again everyone was impressed by the changes made in 7. Now there's version 8 and it just keeps improving.
As for the comparison between Direct3D and OpenGL, I won't touch that either. But I will say this, DirectX includes a wide range of APIs for everything from sound to video to input, and OpenGL is only a graphics library. So, there isn't anything stopping someone from writing a DirectX game that still supports OpenGL, and it's actually done quite often.
Slashdot Mirror
How correct you are.
Not only do they have the poeple, they also have the willingness to die if ordered to do so.
What would an American do if ordered to march into an enemy homeland and surely die? Well, some would go, sure, but most of us would just change the TV channel, radio station, or subscribe to a different magazine.
About the only thing going in our favor is that in a land-invasion of that type, we'd have the natural advantage of having armed citizens, police, and an advanced military. Question is though, is that enough?
(Incidently, there are a bunch of people that want to take away your guns, and the UN fully supports this communistic bullshit point of view. The first time someone tries to take away my gun they're getting shot. Killed until dead. Repeatedly.)
Now, what GTA3 has taught me is how to run people over, then drive my car into a pain show and lose the cops entirely.
They won't even come to my house to get me! Man! My new life if crime wouldn't be possible without the training given to me by video games!
You fail to see the point, because your basing what you think you know on what you've seen (and obviously not seen).
For starters, while a great majority of Amiga users from the early days did use interlaced displays, deinterlaced displays became equally popular after AGA become the standard.
You didn't have to "Rob a ROM". Many people purchased perfectly legal ROMs. Many of the magazines had them for sale so you can leave the whole "pirating the Rom" arguement out.
There were quite a few ways to do Mac emulation perfectly, without any drawbacks and all of the benefits, and all the while still running the Amiga side of things perfectly. Just because you never saw any of these methods put to use does not mean they were not out there.
Well, I was never much for such advocacy no matter what the system is. Though the Amiga WAS in most ways superior to the MAC, and most of the Mac emulators did much better than just 3% performance increases over a real Mac. Some of them were head and shoulders over a real Mac, but that's unimportant to what I'm going to say.
In the end I was never one to force any of my Amigas to run MAC software. If I had wanted a MAC I would have bought a MAC.
That sort of advocacy annoyed me be it from other Amiga users, from MAC users, or more recently, from Linux users.
What am I now? Certainly my Amigas, though they all mostly work, are only so much use to me. And certainly I use Windows for the vast share of software available for it. But now days I consider myself orphaned.
I use FreeBSD, I toy with BeOS from time to time, I use Windows (ME and XP), and I'll play with anything I can get my hands on just to tinker with it.
It's been a long time since I can say I loved an OS. I'm very much a multi-platform guy because no one OS is anywhere close to perfect anymore. Some would say for it's time, AmigaDOS 2.0 was about perfect back then. And others would say OS/2 hit that mark at some point as well. I don't know that I'd say I've ever used a perfect OS and I will certainly say the further along we go the further away from perfect they will all get.
That includes Windows as well as Linux.
Actually, I think Gateway is less guilty than Escom AG or QuickPak, though I don't think they wanted anything really to do with the Amiga other than wave the name around and hopefully lure in Amiga fans. I don't know how many idiotic Amiga fans I know who bought a Gateway shortly after Gateway bought Amiga.
Amiga Inc. is the last and best chance for Amiga to become something real again. But I'm not even sure that's enough.
As for your reference to the Jargon File entry, I've never run up on that one but it doesn't surprise me much. It's easy to poke fun at machine loyalists when they're using a machine that might just have advantages over what you have (or what you had back then) but you don't want to admit it even if years later.
I for one don't know any Amiga users who felt it was an industry wide conspiracy, however. In fact, I think every real Amiga fan knows that the true culprits were the Commodore Executives, who in one year alone granted themselves a raise higher than the total yearly profits from the previous few years (back when they were ACTUALLY turning profits). Anybody who truely knows anything about Amiga's history knows it wasn't Microsoft or Apple that Commodore had to fear. It was their own fuckwit of a CEO.
So, the Amiga Persecution Complex to which you refer, humorous though it may be, is hardly accurate.
Actually, no.
Amiga Inc. is the first time since the Commodore bankruptcy that Amiga has been self owned and run with some sort of direction.
Escom AG only wanted the Amiga brand name. Gateway the same. And QuickPak (who never actually got their hands on the name anyway) had their own uses for Commodore's Intellectual Property as well.
What it boils down to is that all of the previous "Buyers" of the Amiga name didn't actually aim to do anything with the company other than exploit the Amiga community.
Amiga Inc. have a vested interest in the ressurection of the Amiga. Amiga Inc. IS the Amiga.
Log. Trail. Ahuh huh.
No, seriously. This is simple to get around. When Zone Alarm (which you are probably using, right?) asks you if you want to give that process access to the net, say no, and tell it to ALWAYS say no.
Non-Windows users have it a bit easier. No Media Player. No problem.
You are _assuming_ that making a backup of your games is 1) non-infringing, and 2) that it will be a substantial use of this device.
Making a copy of your own game is Non-Infringing under Fair Use.
It is Infringing under the newer, more evil law that I dare not mention.
There are wonderful uses for this device to those involved in underground game developement. That scene isn't non-existant, even if it is comparatively small.
I guess I'm just going to make all of that sleep up when I die, because my philosophy is "sleep is for the weak".
I sleep an average of 4-6 hours per night, no more.
The closest thing to "making it up" I get is if I get too drunk on a Saturday night and pull of the rare "full 8 hours" on Sunday. That doesn't happen often.
Oh yeah, it was Mechan 9, wasn't it?
It's hard to remember sometimes. It's been a looooooooong time.
"WE ARE MECHAN 5. RESPOND."
Once again, few people will get that.
I hope he knows that if he touched those PLATTERS he's going to DIE!
Those platters are HIGHLY TOXIC, otherwise they wouldn't lock them away in those air-tight drives!
You know, I love telling that to computer newbies. Someone told me that a while back, and it was so funny I had to further propogate the rediculous myth. I'm amazed how many people fall for it.
I can't believe everybody is replying to this post with "Dude, none of the other Game Boys had lights, either..."
It was supposed to be a joke. Pointing out the irony in everyone's complaint that the GBA has no light, when NONE of the other Game Boys ever have, either.
I have a Game Boy Color and the screen is usable in the right conditions. I've toyed with getting the Advance and I can honestly say that in the right lighting it's not THAT much worse.
Still, seeing this Kit makes me want to get an Advance so I can install the Kit. It's got a certain geek charm... or at least it will until I run into some 10 year old who modded his GBA also...
Open standards have reigned supreme on the internet, and nearly everywhere else, but somehow these proprietary video compression algorithms live on.
Sadly, I can think of more contradictions to that statement than examples of it.
We are still using GIF, after all.
http://images.slashdot.org/title.gif {- See?
Oh, and there are a whole lot more more people using MP3 than Ogg.
Oh, and uh - Isn't Flash a pretty darn closed standard?
What about that Windows thing? I think it has a pretty wide installed user base. Doesn't it? Not to mention Internet Explorer.
Sorry, dude. I think your post was a bit off the mark. It's not that I don't agree that it would be nice if stuff was all free and opened and life was good and all, but uh -- well. It's not. Sucks plenty.
If they've had the patent for 5 years, Prio Art is going to get them booted out of court.
It's not like Nintendo didn't release the RUMBLE PACK for the N64 way before any of the other systems had any kind of rumble feature, but as if that weren't enough, Sega's arcade machines have had force beedback since the 80's, as someone else has mentioned.
I don't know how many times I got annoyed at Hang-On and Outrun because just tapping the edge of the road caused a vibration that caused me to lose even more control which further caused me to wipe out entirely. Of course, that's kind of the point, but it also makes for a more thrilling game and that's why I remember Sega's wonderful Coin-Ops.
These guys haven't got a case. And even if they did, why haven't they mentioned the Gamecube? Not to mention all the PC Force Feedback controllers.
Doesn't that just sound like the start of a commercial?
Order now, operators are standing buy.
Homeworld and Cataclysm both rock.
Definately a one player game for sure, but both stories are top notch and the way they merge the cut-scenes with the game it's self almost makes the whole thing seem like a really well done sci-fi movie.
Homeworld and Cataclysm are BOTH definately 100%'s!
Both are a tad bit difficult, but I'd say the first one was harder than the second one.
Quantum Perl - "No longer will there be more than one way to do something, but rather there are an infinite number of ways to do everything!"
Bill Gates would NEVER be sorry about anything Microsoft has done!
How can you be sure of that? How do you know that Bill Gates himself doesn't pace, pop rolaids, and drink tons of coffee thinking about what kinds of screaming rants and angry yelling he can do to the coders to get them to write things that don't crash?
Communication is only possible between equals. There are a WHOLE LOT of people who develope for Microsoft, and it's a fairly safe assumption that they're not all on equal levels (in rank, in skill, in intellect, in etchics, etc.)
I think the sentiment is real. Microsoft DOES want to make the most stable, most secure platform. They want to because it's good business to make the best product and they know (how can they not know?) that they simply don't have the best product. Not by far. It's just that simple. But how do they fix that? What would YOU do if you had to manage thousands of people, all working on different things, each coder with their own egos and unique quirks.
You can't flip a switch, write a memo, make a speech, and wave your hands to fix the problems. I don't envy Microsoft management, or Microsoft coders, for that matter.
Do I think Microsoft can do it? Who knows. Probably not. It won't be easy, not at all. I don't think it would be easy for anyone to do in an environment as big and chaotic as Microsoft's. But then, after looking at how Open Source software works in the complete opposite way, small and chaotic largely without funding and easily derailed by personality conflicts and a lack of formal structure, I don't think the Free Software world could do it either.
So in short, I think Microsoft means it. I don't think it'll do any good, though.
One could have endless fun mutating that over many iterations...
My first reaction was to turn it into a Slashdotism filled rehash (Trolling Goats, Beowulf Clusters, Cowboy Neal, and Natalie Portman...)-- but since the idea is CopyLeft, I'm sure that'll be done before this is all over with. Perhaps, by more than one person.
From that site: The playstation2 can not read CD-Rs.
UGH! That kind of puts a cramp in what you can do with the machine if you can't burn an OS of choice to run on it.
I think that's an arguement for the legality of MOD chips and adapters.
"But I don't want to pirate games, I just want to install a new OS."
This will be a neat kit, and I'll likely spring for it. The hardware is worth it alone...
But out of serious curiousity -- I wonder how hard it will be to get BSD running on it... Hmm.
IBM has been calling it Rapid-Resume for years.
I would never, ever insult SDL or even try to downplay it's importance. I have high hopes for SDL. I think my only real point originally was that Direct3D, Microsoft-Born or not, is a very nice API, and it's the only real reason to write games for Windows. I honestly think gamers would have jumped ship on Microsoft when Windows 95 began replacing MS-DOS if they hadn't brough out DirectX.
With luck, SDL will reach a level of maturity that will compete rather favorably with DirectX.
DX4, by which I assume you mean the version between 3 and 5 (that might have been available to developers, but was never actually released to to end users), is hardly a fair judgement of the DirectX of today.
Most people admit that DirectX started really shaping up around 5, then again everyone was impressed by the changes made in 7. Now there's version 8 and it just keeps improving.
As for the comparison between Direct3D and OpenGL, I won't touch that either. But I will say this, DirectX includes a wide range of APIs for everything from sound to video to input, and OpenGL is only a graphics library. So, there isn't anything stopping someone from writing a DirectX game that still supports OpenGL, and it's actually done quite often.