It's too high for just a download service, but if they sent me the actual DVD in the mail and provided me this download immediately, I'd definitely consider it. Heck, I'd probably even put up with the download's DRM as long as a physical DVD comes in the mail.
As an American, I like immediate gratification and I'm lazy, so getting immediate access to the material I bought and not having to rip the DVD myself (even if my rip won't have DRM) would definitely motivate me to buy the DVD for Amazon over "Best" Buy, etc.
Even if there's a slight premium, eg. Best Buy charges $12 for just the DVD that I'd need to drive to the store for and Amazon charges $16 for the DVD in the mail plus an immediate download, I'd consider going with Amazon. Of course by that logic, their download would be worth about $4 to me which actually sounds about right. Basically I think what they're charging for rentals should be what they charge to permanent downloads.
While the Saturn was definitely a flop, it was still an amazing console (arguably the best 2D focused console ever made). It's a shame that Sega chose to go 2D when the world went 3D, but the Saturn was still a huge jump from the Genesis (even with Sega CD & 32X attached).
I've always wondered what would have happened had Sega made a switch to 3D with the Saturn. They had an amazing 3D sonic prototype (the demo of a level was on Sonic Jam), there's a great article called The Greatest Sonic Game We Never Got to Play [1] which shows it in detail.
Even though the hardware was focused on rendering 2D sprites, it still had some amazing games. Standout titles included: NiGHTS Into Dreams (one of my favorite games ever) Panzer Dragoon 1/2/Saga (Saga still fetches $100+ on eBay) Radiant Silvergun Shining Force III Virtua Fighter II Guardian Heroes Dragon Force I/II Daytona USA
A few of these games had Genesis/32X versions and the difference was night and day. While the Saturn was a flop (and a slap on the face to people that got a 32X which was released just months before the unexpected Saturn launch), it was definitely a step above any of the current systems of its time. While I won't call it more advanced then the PlayStation, I wouldn't call it less advanced either. Sony bet on polygons, sega went with sprites, and the public chose 3D. The Saturn is still a great system though.
I'm actually very impressed by Gentoo's new init system (baselayout-2) which was released to ~x86 not too long ago. It's so fast I'm actually considering just disabling the splash image, and it's very simple to configure (and even works with the init replacement projects like init-ng & einit). At work I'm mostly stuck with Sun's SMF (Service Management Facility) and find it too complex and inflexible. I haven't tried Apple's one, but I'm all for diversity. At the very least both Gentoo and Sun (and I'd presume Apple) can work with the legacy scripts, so if you don't like the fancy new methods feel free to stick with the old.
"I'm a sysadmin and use KDE all day long, with Konsole as my terminal. I tried the preview release of Fedora 9 and found that the new Konsole - has less features!"
They must be going for the Gnome look...
All kidding aside, I'm very surprised they went with KDE4. I've been playing around with it on Gentoo for several months now, and I could understand making it an option, but to not provide KDE3 out of the box at all (http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/en_US/sn-Desktop.html#sn-KDE) is shocking. I thought even the KDE folks were recommending waiting until 4.1. Oh well, Fedora always likes the latest and greatest.
I hope they consider extending it to their crypto accelerator. Even low end Via boards (like the C3 I bought two years ago for $60 from newegg) include a hardware RNG and low level AES routines, and it would be cool to get some proper support. I've used Sun's crypto accelerators on their T2000's and the difference on certain algorithms is stunning.
You're missing the point, the people looking for an ultraportable notebook wouldn't even consider a model with a 15.4" screen, heck 13" is pushing it. While of course you could find a 15.4" model from Dell (or just about any other vendor) for under a grand, you can be gauranteed those things will weigh at least over 5lbs. The ultraportable notebook market targets people who carry a notebook with them all day and don't want something that will weigh them down or be cumbersome to open. What they want/need is something that you won't even notice you're carrying, that can be opened on a plane even when the jerk in front of you is fully reclined, something with enough battery to get you through your last sales call.
I agree that $1800 is way too much to spend, but the fact of the matter is all the modern models that are under 3lbs cost around that range. Personally, when I needed a ultraportable, I bought a 2.6lb Portege 2000 for about $200 from eBay last year, and while it's by no means a powerful machine by today's standards, it has more than enough power for most people's ultraportable needs. It's a P3 750 w/ 256MB RAM, and it runs Fedora Core 6 with Fluxbox amazingly fast. The places I use this laptop, I wouldn't even consider bringing my 14.1" D610, and anything larger would be out of the question. At the same time, if I was doing CAD or art, or many other types of work, there'd be no point for a laptop this small or slow, and those larger models become really attractive.
On top of that, the victim also notes that she herself thinks 54 mil is too much, but thinks it is necessary to get the media attention to make Best Buy do the right thing.
She seems to want a minimum of $100,000 according to her blog http://www.bestbuybadbuyboycott.blogspot.com/ which I feel is a bit much even for what she claims to have gone through. From her blog:
3) Full compensation ($25,000, per my letter to Mr. Feivor) for my direct expenses and time related to restoring my property and resolving this issue.
4) Treble and other damages in the amount of $75,000, for the completely unnecessary 6- month ordeal Best Buy has put me through.
Yeah, what happened sucks, but I'm of the opinion what she's asking for is still a bit unreasonable. I'm by no means an apologist for Best Buy, in fact I really dislike them, but I think 54 mil is completely ludicrous and $100,000 is a bit greedy.
The author seems to not be making a distinction between the Linux kernel (which Linus obviously can and should speak for) and the GNU/Linux distributions. While Linus' influence on the way major distributions package the OS may be minimal, he has a direct impact on the guts of them as long as he remains head of the kernel. He has direct control over how and when major changes (eg. udev, KVM, sysfs, ABI changes, etc.) get implemented into the 2.6 kernel which has a direct impact on the distributions. Personally I've disagreed with some of his opinions and I'm definitely not alone (eg. Con Kolivas), but to see his opinion doesn't matter for Linux is completely naïve and short sighted.
I leave my "file server" always on at home, so I wanted to pick up something with low power. I went with the VIA CPU/Mobo/VGA combo from newegg for about $60 a couple years ago. The Via 2000+ C3 is basically like a P3 800MHz, but it's power consumption is ultra low (we're talking half the wattage of its celeron equivalent). I picked up a small form factor shuttle like case from Fry's with a built in PSU (200W I believe), 512MB of PC2100, and have two 250GB HDD's in there. The system is now running Fedora Core 7 (would have preferred Gentoo, but it's kinda pointless to use the binary version of that in my opinion).
While it's fairly weak compared to modern systems, it has more then enough power for serving files, so I have it set up as my web & email server as well. I also have a UPnP server running to share music/video's to my Xbox 360 & SlimServer for listening to my music collection remotely.
For a while I ran MythTV on it with a Hauppage 150 card, and it ran fine (could even transcode on the fly to watch live TV in horrible quality on my Motorola Q). I also picked up a battery backup from APC which I configured with nut for when we have rolling blackouts.
One thing I'd recommend doing is sticking with NFS for file sharing if you have a choice. All major platforms now support it (well I can't speak for Vista, but XP works so I presume it would as well). If you need to share to Windows XP, you need to download the (now free) Services for Unix 3.5 from MS to get their NFS client. I'm not a Mac person, but I know you can mount NFS on those out of the box (at least from the CLI). I use amd (Auto Mount Daemon) for my other Linux systems to auto mount. The performance of NFS blows Samba out of the water, I can stream Xvid on 802.11B with NFS with virtually no issues (can't do that with Samba).
I should probably note I'm a Unix sys admin at work, so I'm fairly competent in Linux, but with that said I think even a novice could set this all up (exceptions being the email server and MythTV) without too many headaches. I let yum take care of all my system updates and am quite happy with my investment in this system (under $350 total).
I hate it when stores use transaction fees as an excuse for not accepting credit cards (or creating artificial minimums). I can't tell you how many times I'd eat the fee and buy something, but walked away instead because that wasn't an option.
I'm fairly confident the real reason they don't allow small increments is the same reason they use points -- to obscure the real cost from the consumer. As an engineer I have virtually no background in physcology, but I can say from personal experience, it's easier to spend 1000 points than $5 (even when the value of points is much greater than the dollar amount). I'm also confident that designing the system so it's easy to end up with an odd amount of points that requires a bulk purchase to do anything again was intentional (eg. I have 200 Wii points right now and the cheapest purchase is 500).
Shadowrun is a perfect franchise for making a modern sandbox RPG. Heck, I'd be thrilled if someone just remakes a 3D version of the fantastic Genesis Shadowrun title. The whole time I've been playing Mass Effect, I keep thinking how easy it would be for someone to use that engine for Shadowrun (in fact, a lot of ME's elements are similar to Shadowrun on the Genesis, it's mainly just a different setting and calling magic "technology"). A good Shadowrun game would be enough motivation for me to buy a console for it if it were exclusive.
Zelda 2 allowed you to level up and even offered a "new game+" mode where your player kept their old stats. If you were having trouble on a boss, fight enough random battles to level up your attack. The game didn't scale the enemies up with your level (enemy difficulty was determined by location). I don't believe difficulty was a major reason why people disliked Zelda 2, there were a few cheap death areas that were frustrating, but most enemies (even bosses) could easily be defeated if you played through the levels following the normal path and picking up heart pieces along the way.
I believe you hit the nail on the head; when I think Mario I want a platformer, not a sandbox game. Mario, like most Nintendo titles, have always seem to done better when sticking to their roots. A classical example of this is the early Zelda series. Zelda 2: The Adventures of Link, an excellent adventure/platformer in its own right, completely diverged from the style of the original Legend of Zelda, and Z2 was met with criticism. Whereas Zelda: A Link To The Past returns to its roots and did much better in terms of fan reception.
While I do believe evolution and experimentation are important, and this applies just as much to music and many other arts, at the same time I believe its critical to understand the heart of the original product and to be able to stay true with it in future iterations.
I'm about a quarter of the stars through MG (probably be done if I didn't get swallowed up by Mass Effect), and I have to say I've already ran across several levels that totally remind me of Super Mario Brothers 3 (my favorite Mario game by far, and one of my favorite games ever). The one that stands out the most in my mind so far is the Sweet Sweet Galaxy which totally reminds me of the directional scrolling levels in SMB3. I played through M64, and while I admit it's a solid title, I didn't care for it as much as either SMB3 or SMW. I'm not sure how, but they did a fantastic of capturing the heart of older Mario titles.
Still not as cool as a TurboGrafx Express with TurboVision. Too bad the damn thing sucked batteries down like you wouldn't believe (we're talking 3 hours on 6AA's!).
Nice 3D graphics are great, but if I'm buying a mobile PC I'm more concerned about my battery life. The 8800M article mentions, "Power Mizer 7.0 Technology," but the lack of numbers backing it is concerning.
Although to be fair they're probably targeting 17" "laptops" anyway, and at that size I guess it's fair to say battery life shouldn't be a primary concern (heck if you're carrying it around I'd be more worried about getting a hernia).
At best case I'd hope they're only doing this to identify the ticket holders who buy tickets solely to scalp them for a profit. While they're playing nice now limiting the resale site to face value, we have no reason to expect them to always behave that way. I'm from California, and I have no clue what the current owner of the Patriots, Robert Kraft, is like. What I do know is one day he will not be the owner, and there's definitely no way of knowing how the next person (or group) will be, and I'd rather not have them be the only way to get tickets.
On a side note, I've actually never paid above face using stubhub (although it's usually close to it after their service fee). For example, after Barry Bonds hit the #756, Giants ticket values plummeted and I got a ton of great deals between there and craigslist from people dumping.
Yes, I agree what they're doing NOW (a point in time which they don't have a monopoly on the market) is great, however the Patriots, like every other NFL team (and for-profit business for that matter) are in the business to make a profit. There's no guarantee they'll continue this practice in the future (especially when they have no competition).
This is an interesting case, but scalping laws vary by state, so it should pretty much only apply to MA. In Cali, it's only illegal to resale if you do it on event premises (CA Penal Code 346) without permission. It may be less stringent than that (I seem to recall it needing to be on the day of the event for over face value to qualify, but I'm not sure and IANAL).
Personally I hate professional scalpers, but at the same time I don't have a problem with some fan selling their seat (even for above face) if they can't make it. I've used stubhub to purchase tickets to Giants games in the past, and probably will again in the future. You'd have to be naïve to believe that the Patriots are doing this for anyone's best interest but their own, and I do believe they're merely trying to corner the market for their tickets (must be taking notes from their business partner, ticketmon^H^Haster).
I can't believe they're allowing that game to slip past the holiday season. I'm sure the Wii will still sell out, but that's a major title that a lot of people were expecting. I wonder whether this was caused by development issues or to boost their sales numbers in the retail slump between Christmas & Easter. On a side note the article lists a 2/10 US release date (only mentioning it since it's not in the summary).
Unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity to investigate it much further (and I no longer work for that research institute). From what I recall, we partition the cards into two volumes. The first volume was set to read-only and contained static OS files (eg./etc,/lib,/[s]bin...) and we had a second partition for logging (which obviously could and did fill up). I believe the read-only volume was larger than the space actually used so we never filled the cards completely; it's probably fair to estimate we hovered around 60-85% most of the time. All the CF cards were off-the-shelf components bought in one big purchase (so it may have been related to that batch); they were typical cards you'd throw into a camera and I'm unsure what speed they were.
When I was hired on, I was actually developing embedded devices which would work over the mesh network provided by the mesh nodes mentioned above, so I didn't get to try larger cards, etc. (but that's an interesting theory and would have been good to test). I would also have been curious to just leave one node on for the whole time (not rebooted like the other nodes) and see if it failed around the same time.
A couple years ago (Fall 2005) I did my senior engineering project in college using embedded Linux devices which utilized 512MB flash drives (CF) as the only storage mechanism. The devices were basically Soekris boards with Debian and some highly custom WiFi drivers/software designed for mesh networking research. After my project, I was hired on by the research institute which funded the project, so I got to play with these things for a while. Nearly every mesh node that used flash ran into "hard drive" issues within a year (we suspected the failure frequency was directly related to how often we used the devices). Most of the time it was simply the MBR becoming corrupt which you could fix by mounting the card on a Linux computer, chroot'ing and re-running LILO; but in a few cases we had to replace the entire card due to corruption. These devices had fairly typical usage patterns of a normal desktop/laptop (booted daily), and we were no where near the 3-5 year estimates most people give flash drives.
I browsed the article but didn't see it specify how they'll be going about getting the effects. I presume AIGLX, although in personal experience (been running compiz since the coffee-buzz days on Gentoo), XGL has been the better performer (albeit it requires the proprietary ATI fglrx drivers). For the last couple months I switched to the r300 drivers on my Dell D610 laptop with the X300M card, and while I like the fact that it's free, I do admit I got better performance from fglrx (which doesn't support AIGLX at the moment). ATI's recent moves to open their drivers more may be interesting, I just hope that offering compiz too soon without good hardware & driver support may spoil some peoples experience on it (I am aware Fedora has had beryl since FC6, but it wasn't set by default).
On a side note, I upgraded to Xorg 7.3 (xorg-server-1.4) on Monday, and that seems to have broken compiz-fusion (probably due to the new ABI changes). This is on the same ati card with the r300 drivers mentioned above, re-emerging my xorg/compiz components didn't help (I haven't tried since than though).
I've been running Compiz in its various forms (compiz-quinnstorm, beryl, now compiz-fusion) on Gentoo since around March of 2006, and while I can see where you're coming from I have found some of its features actually useful. The ones I particularly like are: the expose clone (google 'expose mac to see what I'm referring to), the live alt-tabs (you see what's running in the alt-tab windows), it allows for extensive key bindings (I know you can use other programs like xbindkeys, but it at least beats Metacity's binding capability), and transparency (compiz isn't required to do this, but it makes it a lot easier than other WM's -- basically it's designed with that in mind).
Most of the eye candy doesn't eat too much CPU, and it all easily be enabled and disabled from it's control panel (compiz-fusion uses ccsm which works great, beryl-settings-manager was also pretty good). I was also impressed by beryl-manager (now fusion-icon) which made switching windows and decoration managers easier than ever.
The more significant figures would be whether the amount of EMI music being passed on peer to peer services has changed. I highly doubt it has increased more than its usual variance (it may even have decreased), and I hope the other RIAA companies notice this. I'm of the opinion that there's roughly a fixed number of people who would pirate regardless, and distributing music without DRM won't change this. However making music harder to listen due to DRM might actually drive piracy numbers up.
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It's too high for just a download service, but if they sent me the actual DVD in the mail and provided me this download immediately, I'd definitely consider it. Heck, I'd probably even put up with the download's DRM as long as a physical DVD comes in the mail.
As an American, I like immediate gratification and I'm lazy, so getting immediate access to the material I bought and not having to rip the DVD myself (even if my rip won't have DRM) would definitely motivate me to buy the DVD for Amazon over "Best" Buy, etc.
Even if there's a slight premium, eg. Best Buy charges $12 for just the DVD that I'd need to drive to the store for and Amazon charges $16 for the DVD in the mail plus an immediate download, I'd consider going with Amazon. Of course by that logic, their download would be worth about $4 to me which actually sounds about right. Basically I think what they're charging for rentals should be what they charge to permanent downloads.
While the Saturn was definitely a flop, it was still an amazing console (arguably the best 2D focused console ever made). It's a shame that Sega chose to go 2D when the world went 3D, but the Saturn was still a huge jump from the Genesis (even with Sega CD & 32X attached).
I've always wondered what would have happened had Sega made a switch to 3D with the Saturn. They had an amazing 3D sonic prototype (the demo of a level was on Sonic Jam), there's a great article called The Greatest Sonic Game We Never Got to Play [1] which shows it in detail.
Even though the hardware was focused on rendering 2D sprites, it still had some amazing games. Standout titles included:
NiGHTS Into Dreams (one of my favorite games ever)
Panzer Dragoon 1/2/Saga (Saga still fetches $100+ on eBay)
Radiant Silvergun
Shining Force III
Virtua Fighter II
Guardian Heroes
Dragon Force I/II
Daytona USA
A few of these games had Genesis/32X versions and the difference was night and day. While the Saturn was a flop (and a slap on the face to people that got a 32X which was released just months before the unexpected Saturn launch), it was definitely a step above any of the current systems of its time. While I won't call it more advanced then the PlayStation, I wouldn't call it less advanced either. Sony bet on polygons, sega went with sprites, and the public chose 3D. The Saturn is still a great system though.
[1]http://www.gamesradar.com/f/the-greatest-sonic-game-we-never-got-to-play/a-2008042416124625044/p-8
I'm actually very impressed by Gentoo's new init system (baselayout-2) which was released to ~x86 not too long ago. It's so fast I'm actually considering just disabling the splash image, and it's very simple to configure (and even works with the init replacement projects like init-ng & einit). At work I'm mostly stuck with Sun's SMF (Service Management Facility) and find it too complex and inflexible. I haven't tried Apple's one, but I'm all for diversity. At the very least both Gentoo and Sun (and I'd presume Apple) can work with the legacy scripts, so if you don't like the fancy new methods feel free to stick with the old.
"I'm a sysadmin and use KDE all day long, with Konsole as my terminal. I tried the preview release of Fedora 9 and found
that the new Konsole - has less features!"
They must be going for the Gnome look...
All kidding aside, I'm very surprised they went with KDE4. I've been playing around with it on Gentoo for several months now, and I could understand making it an option, but to not provide KDE3 out of the box at all (http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/en_US/sn-Desktop.html#sn-KDE) is shocking. I thought even the KDE folks were recommending waiting until 4.1. Oh well, Fedora always likes the latest and greatest.
I hope they consider extending it to their crypto accelerator. Even low end Via boards (like the C3 I bought two years ago for $60 from newegg) include a hardware RNG and low level AES routines, and it would be cool to get some proper support. I've used Sun's crypto accelerators on their T2000's and the difference on certain algorithms is stunning.
You're missing the point, the people looking for an ultraportable notebook wouldn't even consider a model with a 15.4" screen, heck 13" is pushing it. While of course you could find a 15.4" model from Dell (or just about any other vendor) for under a grand, you can be gauranteed those things will weigh at least over 5lbs. The ultraportable notebook market targets people who carry a notebook with them all day and don't want something that will weigh them down or be cumbersome to open. What they want/need is something that you won't even notice you're carrying, that can be opened on a plane even when the jerk in front of you is fully reclined, something with enough battery to get you through your last sales call.
I agree that $1800 is way too much to spend, but the fact of the matter is all the modern models that are under 3lbs cost around that range. Personally, when I needed a ultraportable, I bought a 2.6lb Portege 2000 for about $200 from eBay last year, and while it's by no means a powerful machine by today's standards, it has more than enough power for most people's ultraportable needs. It's a P3 750 w/ 256MB RAM, and it runs Fedora Core 6 with Fluxbox amazingly fast. The places I use this laptop, I wouldn't even consider bringing my 14.1" D610, and anything larger would be out of the question. At the same time, if I was doing CAD or art, or many other types of work, there'd be no point for a laptop this small or slow, and those larger models become really attractive.
She seems to want a minimum of $100,000 according to her blog http://www.bestbuybadbuyboycott.blogspot.com/ which I feel is a bit much even for what she claims to have gone through. From her blog:
3) Full compensation ($25,000, per my letter to Mr. Feivor) for my direct expenses and time related to restoring my property and resolving this issue. 4) Treble and other damages in the amount of $75,000, for the completely unnecessary 6- month ordeal Best Buy has put me through.Yeah, what happened sucks, but I'm of the opinion what she's asking for is still a bit unreasonable. I'm by no means an apologist for Best Buy, in fact I really dislike them, but I think 54 mil is completely ludicrous and $100,000 is a bit greedy.
The author seems to not be making a distinction between the Linux kernel (which Linus obviously can and should speak for) and the GNU/Linux distributions. While Linus' influence on the way major distributions package the OS may be minimal, he has a direct impact on the guts of them as long as he remains head of the kernel. He has direct control over how and when major changes (eg. udev, KVM, sysfs, ABI changes, etc.) get implemented into the 2.6 kernel which has a direct impact on the distributions. Personally I've disagreed with some of his opinions and I'm definitely not alone (eg. Con Kolivas), but to see his opinion doesn't matter for Linux is completely naïve and short sighted.
I leave my "file server" always on at home, so I wanted to pick up something with low power. I went with the VIA CPU/Mobo/VGA combo from newegg for about $60 a couple years ago. The Via 2000+ C3 is basically like a P3 800MHz, but it's power consumption is ultra low (we're talking half the wattage of its celeron equivalent). I picked up a small form factor shuttle like case from Fry's with a built in PSU (200W I believe), 512MB of PC2100, and have two 250GB HDD's in there. The system is now running Fedora Core 7 (would have preferred Gentoo, but it's kinda pointless to use the binary version of that in my opinion).
While it's fairly weak compared to modern systems, it has more then enough power for serving files, so I have it set up as my web & email server as well. I also have a UPnP server running to share music/video's to my Xbox 360 & SlimServer for listening to my music collection remotely.
For a while I ran MythTV on it with a Hauppage 150 card, and it ran fine (could even transcode on the fly to watch live TV in horrible quality on my Motorola Q). I also picked up a battery backup from APC which I configured with nut for when we have rolling blackouts.
One thing I'd recommend doing is sticking with NFS for file sharing if you have a choice. All major platforms now support it (well I can't speak for Vista, but XP works so I presume it would as well). If you need to share to Windows XP, you need to download the (now free) Services for Unix 3.5 from MS to get their NFS client. I'm not a Mac person, but I know you can mount NFS on those out of the box (at least from the CLI). I use amd (Auto Mount Daemon) for my other Linux systems to auto mount. The performance of NFS blows Samba out of the water, I can stream Xvid on 802.11B with NFS with virtually no issues (can't do that with Samba).
I should probably note I'm a Unix sys admin at work, so I'm fairly competent in Linux, but with that said I think even a novice could set this all up (exceptions being the email server and MythTV) without too many headaches. I let yum take care of all my system updates and am quite happy with my investment in this system (under $350 total).
I hate it when stores use transaction fees as an excuse for not accepting credit cards (or creating artificial minimums). I can't tell you how many times I'd eat the fee and buy something, but walked away instead because that wasn't an option.
I'm fairly confident the real reason they don't allow small increments is the same reason they use points -- to obscure the real cost from the consumer. As an engineer I have virtually no background in physcology, but I can say from personal experience, it's easier to spend 1000 points than $5 (even when the value of points is much greater than the dollar amount). I'm also confident that designing the system so it's easy to end up with an odd amount of points that requires a bulk purchase to do anything again was intentional (eg. I have 200 Wii points right now and the cheapest purchase is 500).
Shadowrun is a perfect franchise for making a modern sandbox RPG. Heck, I'd be thrilled if someone just remakes a 3D version of the fantastic Genesis Shadowrun title. The whole time I've been playing Mass Effect, I keep thinking how easy it would be for someone to use that engine for Shadowrun (in fact, a lot of ME's elements are similar to Shadowrun on the Genesis, it's mainly just a different setting and calling magic "technology"). A good Shadowrun game would be enough motivation for me to buy a console for it if it were exclusive.
Zelda 2 allowed you to level up and even offered a "new game+" mode where your player kept their old stats. If you were having trouble on a boss, fight enough random battles to level up your attack. The game didn't scale the enemies up with your level (enemy difficulty was determined by location). I don't believe difficulty was a major reason why people disliked Zelda 2, there were a few cheap death areas that were frustrating, but most enemies (even bosses) could easily be defeated if you played through the levels following the normal path and picking up heart pieces along the way.
I believe you hit the nail on the head; when I think Mario I want a platformer, not a sandbox game. Mario, like most Nintendo titles, have always seem to done better when sticking to their roots. A classical example of this is the early Zelda series. Zelda 2: The Adventures of Link, an excellent adventure/platformer in its own right, completely diverged from the style of the original Legend of Zelda, and Z2 was met with criticism. Whereas Zelda: A Link To The Past returns to its roots and did much better in terms of fan reception.
While I do believe evolution and experimentation are important, and this applies just as much to music and many other arts, at the same time I believe its critical to understand the heart of the original product and to be able to stay true with it in future iterations.
I'm about a quarter of the stars through MG (probably be done if I didn't get swallowed up by Mass Effect), and I have to say I've already ran across several levels that totally remind me of Super Mario Brothers 3 (my favorite Mario game by far, and one of my favorite games ever). The one that stands out the most in my mind so far is the Sweet Sweet Galaxy which totally reminds me of the directional scrolling levels in SMB3. I played through M64, and while I admit it's a solid title, I didn't care for it as much as either SMB3 or SMW. I'm not sure how, but they did a fantastic of capturing the heart of older Mario titles.
Still not as cool as a TurboGrafx Express with TurboVision. Too bad the damn thing sucked batteries down like you wouldn't believe (we're talking 3 hours on 6AA's!).
Nice 3D graphics are great, but if I'm buying a mobile PC I'm more concerned about my battery life. The 8800M article mentions, "Power Mizer 7.0 Technology," but the lack of numbers backing it is concerning.
Although to be fair they're probably targeting 17" "laptops" anyway, and at that size I guess it's fair to say battery life shouldn't be a primary concern (heck if you're carrying it around I'd be more worried about getting a hernia).
At best case I'd hope they're only doing this to identify the ticket holders who buy tickets solely to scalp them for a profit. While they're playing nice now limiting the resale site to face value, we have no reason to expect them to always behave that way. I'm from California, and I have no clue what the current owner of the Patriots, Robert Kraft, is like. What I do know is one day he will not be the owner, and there's definitely no way of knowing how the next person (or group) will be, and I'd rather not have them be the only way to get tickets.
On a side note, I've actually never paid above face using stubhub (although it's usually close to it after their service fee). For example, after Barry Bonds hit the #756, Giants ticket values plummeted and I got a ton of great deals between there and craigslist from people dumping.
Yes, I agree what they're doing NOW (a point in time which they don't have a monopoly on the market) is great, however the Patriots, like every other NFL team (and for-profit business for that matter) are in the business to make a profit. There's no guarantee they'll continue this practice in the future (especially when they have no competition).
This is an interesting case, but scalping laws vary by state, so it should pretty much only apply to MA. In Cali, it's only illegal to resale if you do it on event premises (CA Penal Code 346) without permission. It may be less stringent than that (I seem to recall it needing to be on the day of the event for over face value to qualify, but I'm not sure and IANAL). Personally I hate professional scalpers, but at the same time I don't have a problem with some fan selling their seat (even for above face) if they can't make it. I've used stubhub to purchase tickets to Giants games in the past, and probably will again in the future. You'd have to be naïve to believe that the Patriots are doing this for anyone's best interest but their own, and I do believe they're merely trying to corner the market for their tickets (must be taking notes from their business partner, ticketmon^H^Haster).
I can't believe they're allowing that game to slip past the holiday season. I'm sure the Wii will still sell out, but that's a major title that a lot of people were expecting. I wonder whether this was caused by development issues or to boost their sales numbers in the retail slump between Christmas & Easter. On a side note the article lists a 2/10 US release date (only mentioning it since it's not in the summary).
Unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity to investigate it much further (and I no longer work for that research institute). From what I recall, we partition the cards into two volumes. The first volume was set to read-only and contained static OS files (eg. /etc, /lib, /[s]bin...) and we had a second partition for logging (which obviously could and did fill up). I believe the read-only volume was larger than the space actually used so we never filled the cards completely; it's probably fair to estimate we hovered around 60-85% most of the time. All the CF cards were off-the-shelf components bought in one big purchase (so it may have been related to that batch); they were typical cards you'd throw into a camera and I'm unsure what speed they were.
When I was hired on, I was actually developing embedded devices which would work over the mesh network provided by the mesh nodes mentioned above, so I didn't get to try larger cards, etc. (but that's an interesting theory and would have been good to test). I would also have been curious to just leave one node on for the whole time (not rebooted like the other nodes) and see if it failed around the same time.
A couple years ago (Fall 2005) I did my senior engineering project in college using embedded Linux devices which utilized 512MB flash drives (CF) as the only storage mechanism. The devices were basically Soekris boards with Debian and some highly custom WiFi drivers/software designed for mesh networking research. After my project, I was hired on by the research institute which funded the project, so I got to play with these things for a while. Nearly every mesh node that used flash ran into "hard drive" issues within a year (we suspected the failure frequency was directly related to how often we used the devices). Most of the time it was simply the MBR becoming corrupt which you could fix by mounting the card on a Linux computer, chroot'ing and re-running LILO; but in a few cases we had to replace the entire card due to corruption. These devices had fairly typical usage patterns of a normal desktop/laptop (booted daily), and we were no where near the 3-5 year estimates most people give flash drives.
I browsed the article but didn't see it specify how they'll be going about getting the effects. I presume AIGLX, although in personal experience (been running compiz since the coffee-buzz days on Gentoo), XGL has been the better performer (albeit it requires the proprietary ATI fglrx drivers). For the last couple months I switched to the r300 drivers on my Dell D610 laptop with the X300M card, and while I like the fact that it's free, I do admit I got better performance from fglrx (which doesn't support AIGLX at the moment). ATI's recent moves to open their drivers more may be interesting, I just hope that offering compiz too soon without good hardware & driver support may spoil some peoples experience on it (I am aware Fedora has had beryl since FC6, but it wasn't set by default).
On a side note, I upgraded to Xorg 7.3 (xorg-server-1.4) on Monday, and that seems to have broken compiz-fusion (probably due to the new ABI changes). This is on the same ati card with the r300 drivers mentioned above, re-emerging my xorg/compiz components didn't help (I haven't tried since than though).
I've been running Compiz in its various forms (compiz-quinnstorm, beryl, now compiz-fusion) on Gentoo since around March of 2006, and while I can see where you're coming from I have found some of its features actually useful. The ones I particularly like are: the expose clone (google 'expose mac to see what I'm referring to), the live alt-tabs (you see what's running in the alt-tab windows), it allows for extensive key bindings (I know you can use other programs like xbindkeys, but it at least beats Metacity's binding capability), and transparency (compiz isn't required to do this, but it makes it a lot easier than other WM's -- basically it's designed with that in mind).
Most of the eye candy doesn't eat too much CPU, and it all easily be enabled and disabled from it's control panel (compiz-fusion uses ccsm which works great, beryl-settings-manager was also pretty good). I was also impressed by beryl-manager (now fusion-icon) which made switching windows and decoration managers easier than ever.
The more significant figures would be whether the amount of EMI music being passed on peer to peer services has changed. I highly doubt it has increased more than its usual variance (it may even have decreased), and I hope the other RIAA companies notice this. I'm of the opinion that there's roughly a fixed number of people who would pirate regardless, and distributing music without DRM won't change this. However making music harder to listen due to DRM might actually drive piracy numbers up.