Actually the upcoming Blue Dragon on the Xbox 360 comes on 3 DVDs. Which IMO actually suggests the inadequecies of the DVD-DL format..
The fact that a 3 DVD game has already been released should be a suggestion of things to come.
I wonder if we'll see games spanning 5 to 8 DVDs nearer to the end of the lifespan of the 360, or whether they'll start offering the 8 DVDs or 2 HD-DVDs option later down the road.
Personally I think its a pain in the ass to keep 3 disks in pristine condition and/or swap them in and out.
Then again, its not like I'm planning to buy one of these "next gen" consoles in the near future.
Spending $600 every 5 or more years on a new PC is an easily justifiable expenditure. You could load you word processor, web browser, IM program and music player faster.
I guess theres no reason to upgrade if you hardly use the PC at all, but at the cost of $120 per year, why not? In my experience, when you have a newer, faster PC you'll find more things to do with it. Productive or otherwise.
Why splurge on a P3 with 128MB RAM when you can get by with a P100 and 32MB RAM.
Run Win95 or even better Linux. How many years longer do you think your P3 will be sufficient? 5 years? 10 years?
If so, a $600 investment in a new PC, aside from running your current applications two to twenty times faster than your current PC, will last you for the next 15 - 20 years.
Why in the world would you want to disable hardware acceleration?
XP runs noticeably faster with the "fancy graphics" options disabled. I don't see the point to animated sliding windows, shadows under menus, fade effects.
It shouldn't slow down explorer at all, and should in fact speed it up.
All you need to do if you're an LCD user to improve your fonts is to turn Cleartype on, unless you have a low quality LCD in which case you can't really do anything short of replacing it.
"I believe the GC was eventually hacked, but since it used media that wasn't widespread and easily available, modding didn't run rampant for the system."
It was hacked and mod chips are available for the Gamecube.
Also in order to use regular DVD-R media on your modded GC, all you have to do is take off the top half of it, or switch to one of the replacement casings that will sit a regular sized DVD.
"You could rephrase that into the equivalent statment that "XP usually runs on hardware that, while having similar specifications, is usually lower quality than Apple hardware."
You could also rephrase that into an alternative statement that: "OSX usually runs on Apple hardware that, while having relatively higher costs is usually as unreliable as X86 hardware."
First off, I'm not defending the quality of Blade or the Punisher..
But have you seen the crap that passes for a movie these days. The movies targetted at kids are probably the worst offenders.
Spy Kids.. Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D! I didn't need to watch either to tell you that they weren't the pinnacle of movie production. I wonder if they broke even, and if they did.. how the fuck?!
Do you want to pay an extra $130 ($100 cost of drive plus 30% profit margin) on your "new PS2" for a DRM-laden drive that isn't much better than CD-ROM?
Hate to break it to you, but your friend is either pulling your leg or ill informed.
Suso means nothing like fast and/or search in Mandarin. The site appears to be some kind of entertainment portal / message board.
And it uses the Google, Baidu and Yahoo China search engines to conduct its searches.
A more likely explanation would be that the existing search site suso.cn was already very popular or heavily advertised in China.
And yes I am a native speaker of Mandarin and several Chinese dialects (Hokkien [Fujian], Henghwa [a Hokkien sub dialect], Cantonese and a little Teochew)
Actually I have, well not really, closest you can go by is weight of the cartridge or approximate number of prints.
Finding out the picoliter volume of the starter cartridge and a regular one is nigh impossible.
The thing is, though it is likely true that its cheaper to buy a new printer instead of a refill, even with the starter cartridge.
The last time I attempted this, it wasn't cheaper to buy a whole new printer, until the mail in rebates had been applied.
Overall, considering the hassle required to mail in (and wait for) rebates, and lugging new printers in every couple of months. Not to mention the added environmental impact of adding a lexmark to the landfill every couple of months..
I decided to go with the Canon Pixma series of printers, which has fairly cheap refills and very good print quality.
"Except that everyone I know has removed the region coding from their DVD player, and not one of them owns a single pirated disk.
Also I think its pertinent to point out that almost all pirated DVDs are Region-free. There is absolutely no incentive for pirates to region lock their DVDs. Not that I would know from personal experience or anything..
Also to circumvent CSS all you need is a program like DeCSS or AnyDVD. Its not like your DVD drive or player needs to be region free for you to engage in IP infringement.
Everyone who flashed their DVD drives to be region free are doing so because they have original DVDs from a different region that they want to play.
Also it doesn't help that there is the assinine "only 5 region changes before your drive is locked to one region" policy that DVD drive manufacturers adhere to.
"It is cheaper to buy a new Lexmark inkjet, with ink included, than it is to buy Lexmark replacement ink cartridges, in my experience."
You are correct. However, the cartridges which ship with their cheap-ass printers are almost always "Starter / Demo" cartridges which contain only a fraction of the ink their full-priced cartridges contain.
"I remeber when people were telling me VHS was dead and laserdisk was going to replace it."
I think the problem with Laserdisks wasn't so much that the public wasn't ready to embrace the technology.
The format didn't offer recording capabilities which VHS was popular for, and the selection of movies wasn't as good as VHS (at least in the US Market.)
Also they were a little large and unwieldy, as well as prone to scratching or if dropped, cracking.
I own about 10 LDs (Star Wars Trilogy, Dune, Terminator 2, Freejack..etc) mostly pulpy crap that used to pass as entertainment.
But there were fairly few video rental stores that actually rented LDs back in the day, around here.
The only kind of "podcasting" I ever want to hear about again is the kind where they're tossed off the observation deck of the Empire State Building and embed themselves into the pavement below.
I read the last "loaded" statement as meaning something different from your interpretation.
Not so much that providing the most money to the RIAA's coffers entitles them to the right to infringe on copyrights.
Rather that the RIAA is hunting down and alienating the consumers from which they benefit the most.
Also your analogy with Gin could use a slight adjustment.
Closer to the truth, Would perhaps be if you postulated that someone made an exact copy of a bottle of Gin and then proceeded to let their friends make wouldn't otherwise purchase said Gin, copies of the bottle, all at their own cost. Then would you have a problem?
Further if a few of their friends decided to go out and buy bottles of the Gin from the original manufacturers. Where is the damage exactly?
With the sorry current state of popular music, I'd say the RIAA is doing these people a favor. They won't be listening to this crap in the future.
" 1. You seem to assume that everyone joined from the start, and got a full 3 years out of it. Which is just false.
I'm pretty sure it was still on the shelves at EB Games, together with its expansion pack, last weekend. In fact, I almost bought it. (But ended up getting EQ2 instead.)"
Ah my apologies then, I didn't realize that people actually bought and started playing 3 year old MMORPGs off the shelf retail. I would never buy into a three year old MMORPG, let alone buy it retail.
I make it a point to start MMORPGs on week one if possible.
"I don't think even the "but you got 3 years out of it" argument holds much water anyway."
Just look at it as an extended video rental. You buy the game _knowing_ that it will not last forever. And in the case of Turbine, you now know that you don't want to "rent" their content any more in the future and thus should give D&D Online and Middle Earth Online a miss.
"That's in a nutshell my biggest concern with this kind of stuff, and with DRM: it can "unpublish" stuff from our cultural heritage. And AC2 is in a sense a grim landmark: while we all knew that such stuff was theoretically possible, now we can see just that happening."
I'd have to agree, it kinda sucks, but really it comes with the turf if you're playing MMORPGs.
Until a developer figures out a way to host a persistent world in a decentralized fashion whilst still being able to preserve the integrity of the game. There will always be the problem of centralized hosting and its associated costs.
Also just out of curiousity, did you take a free trial of EQ2 before you bought it? I took a trial and I decided I'd rather undergo MMORPG withdrawal (after quitting WoW)than play EQ2.
"What I really want is an invite-only MM game, like G-mail, with invites being per-server."
The launch of FFXI tried something like this. You couldn't pick the server you wanted to go to, and you were randomly assigned to a server with lower populations, to which you pinged lower.
Your friends who had already started playing however could purchase invites with in-game currency.
This infuriated many of the hard core gamers initially, as they were forced to repeatedly re-roll characters until they ended up on the server their friends or guild had decided upon in advance.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the upcoming Blue Dragon on the Xbox 360 comes
on 3 DVDs. Which IMO actually suggests the inadequecies of
the DVD-DL format..
The fact that a 3 DVD game has already been released should
be a suggestion of things to come.
I wonder if we'll see games spanning 5 to 8 DVDs nearer to the
end of the lifespan of the 360, or whether they'll start
offering the 8 DVDs or 2 HD-DVDs option later down the road.
Personally I think its a pain in the ass to keep 3 disks
in pristine condition and/or swap them in and out.
Then again, its not like I'm planning to buy one of these "next gen"
consoles in the near future.
"Everytime Mickey gets close to falling into PD congress will suddenly find it in their interest to extend copyright..."
Arrrghhh.....Our first pirate party act, will be to capture that scurrvy ridden rodent, and have him walk the plank....yarrr....
Not if the Ninja party has anything to say about it.
I've heard Disney just signed Masaaki Hatsumi http://www.geocities.com/mrdsouza/hatsumi.html as their first line of
defense..
*ducks*
In my honest opinion.
Spending $600 every 5 or more years on a new PC is an easily justifiable expenditure. You could load you word processor, web browser, IM program and music player faster.
I guess theres no reason to upgrade if you hardly use the PC at all, but at the cost of $120 per year, why not? In my experience, when you have a newer, faster PC you'll find more things to do with it. Productive or otherwise.
Why splurge on a P3 with 128MB RAM when you can get by with a P100 and 32MB RAM.
Run Win95 or even better Linux. How many years longer do you think your P3 will be sufficient?
5 years? 10 years?
If so, a $600 investment in a new PC, aside from running your current applications two to twenty times faster than your current PC, will last you for the next 15 - 20 years.
Why in the world would you want to disable hardware acceleration?
XP runs noticeably faster with the "fancy graphics" options disabled. I don't see the point to animated sliding windows, shadows under menus, fade effects.
It shouldn't slow down explorer at all, and should in fact speed it up.
All you need to do if you're an LCD user to improve your fonts is to turn Cleartype on, unless you have a low quality LCD in which case you can't really do anything short of replacing it.
Lets see a mac mini outclass a $600 X86 PC of any form factor.
I recently installed Win XP on a customer's old PC.
HP Pavillion P3-600, with 64MB PC100 SDRAM, 20GB HDD.
Describing its performance as "Chugging along" is far too generous.
Honestly I don't think anything less than a 1Ghz processor and 256MB of RAM will run XP at a speed approaching "chugging along."
"I believe the GC was eventually hacked, but since it used media that wasn't widespread and easily available, modding didn't run rampant for the system."
It was hacked and mod chips are available for the Gamecube.
Also in order to use regular DVD-R media on your modded GC, all you have to do is take off the top half of it, or switch to one of the replacement casings that will sit a regular sized DVD.
"You could rephrase that into the equivalent statment that "XP usually runs on hardware that, while having similar specifications, is usually lower quality than Apple hardware."
You could also rephrase that into an alternative statement that: "OSX usually runs on Apple hardware that, while having relatively higher costs is usually as unreliable as X86 hardware."
Did they state that WIN98 and 2K were supported on the box?
If so you should have just taken it back.
Oh yeah and the "America is good" angle is so poorly represented in the news and mass media globally.
Frankly neither angle is shocking at all, and hasn't been for years.
But its the global impression which they inferred from observing the policies and actions of the United States, that it is "no good."
First off, I'm not defending the quality of Blade or the Punisher..
But have you seen the crap that passes for a movie these days. The movies targetted at kids are probably the worst offenders.
Spy Kids.. Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D! I didn't need to watch either to tell you that they weren't the pinnacle of movie production. I wonder if they broke even, and if they did.. how the fuck?!
" I live in the Bahamas.."
Stop..right there. You lucky Sonuvabitch.
You don't want paypal. I'd much rather be living in the Bahamas.
Do you want to pay an extra $130 ($100 cost of drive plus 30% profit margin) on your "new PS2" for a DRM-laden drive that isn't much better than CD-ROM?
No thanks.
Hate to break it to you, but your friend is either pulling your leg or ill informed.
Suso means nothing like fast and/or search in Mandarin. The site appears to be some kind of entertainment portal / message board.
And it uses the Google, Baidu and Yahoo China search engines to conduct its searches.
A more likely explanation would be that the existing search site suso.cn was already very popular or heavily advertised in China.
And yes I am a native speaker of Mandarin and several Chinese dialects (Hokkien [Fujian], Henghwa [a Hokkien sub dialect], Cantonese and a little Teochew)
Actually I have, well not really, closest you can go by is weight of the cartridge or approximate number of prints.
Finding out the picoliter volume of the starter cartridge and a regular one is nigh impossible.
The thing is, though it is likely true that its cheaper to buy a new printer instead of a refill, even with the starter cartridge.
The last time I attempted this, it wasn't cheaper to buy a whole new printer, until the mail in rebates had been applied.
Overall, considering the hassle required to mail in (and wait for) rebates, and lugging new printers in every couple of months. Not to mention the added environmental impact of adding a lexmark to the landfill every couple of months..
I decided to go with the Canon Pixma series of printers, which has fairly cheap refills and very good print quality.
"Except that everyone I know has removed the region coding from their DVD player, and not one of them owns a single pirated disk.
Also I think its pertinent to point out that almost all pirated DVDs are Region-free. There is absolutely no incentive for pirates to region lock their DVDs. Not that I would know from personal experience or anything..
Also to circumvent CSS all you need is a program like DeCSS or AnyDVD. Its not like your DVD drive or player needs to be region free for you to engage in IP infringement.
Everyone who flashed their DVD drives to be region free are doing so because they have original DVDs from a different region that they want to play.
Also it doesn't help that there is the assinine "only 5 region changes before your drive is locked to one region" policy that DVD drive manufacturers adhere to.
"It is cheaper to buy a new Lexmark inkjet, with ink included, than it is to buy Lexmark replacement ink cartridges, in my experience."
You are correct. However, the cartridges which ship with their cheap-ass printers are almost always "Starter / Demo" cartridges which contain only a fraction of the ink their full-priced cartridges contain.
"I remeber when people were telling me VHS was dead and laserdisk was going to replace it."
I think the problem with Laserdisks wasn't so much that the public wasn't ready to embrace the technology.
The format didn't offer recording capabilities which VHS was popular for, and the selection of movies wasn't as good as VHS (at least in the US Market.)
Also they were a little large and unwieldy, as well as prone to scratching or if dropped, cracking.
I own about 10 LDs (Star Wars Trilogy, Dune, Terminator 2, Freejack..etc) mostly pulpy crap that used to pass as entertainment.
But there were fairly few video rental stores that actually rented LDs back in the day, around here.
FWIW I came to this thread looking for lame shark jokes.
My cat is actually very affectionate.
I raised him as a kitten in a single pet environment.
I think it all boils down to luck of the draw and
the environment in which your feline has been raised.
I'd grant that cats are less prone to being affectionate, but I've seen many that are as affectionate if not moreso than dogs.
The only kind of "podcasting" I ever want to hear about again is the kind where they're tossed off the observation deck of the Empire State Building and embed themselves into the pavement below.
I read the last "loaded" statement as meaning something different from your interpretation.
:)
Not so much that providing the most money to the RIAA's coffers entitles them to the right to infringe on copyrights.
Rather that the RIAA is hunting down and alienating the consumers from which they benefit the most.
Also your analogy with Gin could use a slight adjustment.
Closer to the truth, Would perhaps be if you postulated that someone made an exact copy of a bottle of Gin and then proceeded to let their friends make wouldn't otherwise purchase said Gin, copies of the bottle, all at their own cost. Then would you have a problem?
Further if a few of their friends decided to go out and buy bottles of the Gin from the original manufacturers. Where is the damage exactly?
With the sorry current state of popular music, I'd say the RIAA is doing these people a favor. They won't be listening to this crap in the future.
That said, Fuck the RIAA!
" 1. You seem to assume that everyone joined from the start, and got a full 3 years out of it. Which is just false.
I'm pretty sure it was still on the shelves at EB Games, together with its expansion pack, last weekend. In fact, I almost bought it. (But ended up getting EQ2 instead.)"
Ah my apologies then, I didn't realize that people actually bought and started playing 3 year old MMORPGs off the shelf retail. I would never buy into a three year old MMORPG, let alone buy it retail.
I make it a point to start MMORPGs on week one if possible.
"I don't think even the "but you got 3 years out of it" argument holds much water anyway."
Just look at it as an extended video rental. You buy the game _knowing_ that it will not last forever. And in the case of Turbine, you now know that you don't want to "rent" their content any more in the future and thus should give D&D Online and Middle Earth Online a miss.
"That's in a nutshell my biggest concern with this kind of stuff, and with DRM: it can "unpublish" stuff from our cultural heritage. And AC2 is in a sense a grim landmark: while we all knew that such stuff was theoretically possible, now we can see just that happening."
I'd have to agree, it kinda sucks, but really it comes with the turf if you're playing MMORPGs.
Until a developer figures out a way to host a persistent world in a decentralized fashion whilst still being able to preserve the integrity of the game. There will always be the problem of centralized hosting and its associated costs.
Also just out of curiousity, did you take a free trial of EQ2 before you bought it? I took a trial and I decided I'd rather undergo MMORPG withdrawal (after quitting WoW)than play EQ2.
"What I really want is an invite-only MM game, like G-mail, with invites being per-server."
The launch of FFXI tried something like this.
You couldn't pick the server you wanted to go to, and you were randomly assigned to a server with lower populations, to which you pinged lower.
Your friends who had already started playing however could purchase invites with in-game currency.
This infuriated many of the hard core gamers initially, as they were forced to repeatedly re-roll characters until they ended up on the server their friends or guild had decided upon in advance.