It sounds like a great idea to me. If I took over somebody's mind and forced them to commit murder, affray and suicide, I'd be sued and/or incarcerated. Likewise with hypnosis and other similar measures.
Because can't (unless there's some little-known feature that makes it posible) be disabled in CSS. You can use "span { text-decoration: none !important }", but that's overkill - no span tag will ever be underlined, struck through or anything else. It also won't fix other blinking elements, so you'd need * instead of span - and that would be even worse. With the blink tag you get similar problems, but they only apply to the blink tag - it can't be underlined, overlined or struck through either with CSS, but that's less of a problem than preventing all elements.
Take a look at CSS3, I can't remember which module. When that gets accepted and supported, you'll have a solution. Currently, mine would be to use target="_blank" anyway, but I don't have much respect for standards which try to get in my way and the way of the user experience.
The W3C just confuses me. They don't allow marquees; fair enough, I don't either. They're annoying. But now they're implementing them in CSS as well. Are they suddenly not annoying in CSS? (I also saw something about how screen readers might get confused and read it in fragments, but that idea is clearly laughable. I can't find it any more, despite their advocance of accessibility and permanence.) text-decoration: blink has been around for ages, but I'd much rather sites use the nonstandard blink tag because I can stop that from blinking. Targets aren't allowed in HTML because the user should choose when to open a new tab/window, but they are allowed in CSS.
They seem to be moving in both directions between Power to the Webmaster and Don't Piss People Off, and the result is that the user has little to no control over a site. I can block the blink tag, but not span style="text-decoration: bink". When clip: marquee (as it will be implemented, IIRC) becomes supported, I won't be able to block the annoying scrollies. Curently I only have a non-standard way of doing it, but it works.
The fact that users get overriding control over an element means nothing when the elements are all being replaced with stylised div tags. I don't want all divs and spans to look the same, I just don't want annoying 'features' like blink and marquee. How hard would it be for a CSS rule that prevents certain values on certain properties? Without that, nonstandard tags will be preferable because people who don't like them don't get them - and if I want to be able to see a site without styles, that possibility should be hard-coded into the standards, not a feature of my browser.
I hope I made sense. And sorry, no links. I'm doing this from memory and without much time.
That isn't the sort of thing that can't be prevented. When installing an extension, run a one-way encryption algorithm against the name or some other identification string (a checksum of the extension perhaps, to prevent a preexisting extension from being overwritten) using a pseudorandom number generated internally at compile-time and store that in extensions.rdf, then refuse to run extensions when those don't match. In fact, since extensions currently have names like {34274bf4-1d97-a289-e984-17e546307e4f} on disk, I wouldn't be surprised if something like that was already happening. It may well have a wholly different (and almost certainly widely-known) reason though.
One problem would be that most people use the installer, so it would mostly be just one such number. I don't know if it could be generated at install time or not, but at any rate it would help prevent unwanted addons. It would also be slower, especially if you need a checksum of each extension; you could only run the check at intervals or only do a few on startup, but that would leave you open for an arbitrary time period.
Disclaimer: I may well be completely wrong, having only a passing interest in such mundane things as cryptography and privacy. Hopefully I got my gist across, but I wouldn't trust myself to have done much more than that.
In all seriousness though, why should it hurt him? The majority of the "Gates is the Devil" things assume his motive is to get richer. Assuming that isn't true (and let's face it, he's smart enough to realise how much he already has), why should he care? He can't possibly convince people that he isn't in it for the money, especially since the ones he tries to convince will be the least likely to listen. He can either get upset because people don't understand him, or ignore them. People who don't have blonde hair and blue eyes don't get offended because Hitler didn't like them, because Hitler's reasoning was based on the false assumption that blonde hair and blue eyes are superior.
Quite apart from the legal issues, I wouldn't like to know that I might be missing something relevant just because somebody sued Google. If they want to remove references to something because of a lawsuit, shame on them; if they have to remove references to something because of a lawsuit, shame on the legal system.
When you only use a single standard, you need to make sure it's a good one. It needs to be reasonably small on disk, it needs to be scalable, it needs to be backwards-compatible, it needs to be easy to implement. It also needs to be, and obvious as it sounds methinks that this is what the main problem will be, interoperable.
Some things are easy to do that for. But when the featureset is radically different, it's another story entirely. Look at 3D modelling software: I've used both Blender and ProDesktop, and while Blender is by far the more powerful, some things are simply easier to do on ProDesktop. It would be nice if I could switch between the two at will, but that isn't at all likely. PD and Blender perform the same roles, but in radically different ways: Blender uses the traditional method of placing vertices and doing a 'join the dots', but PD looks at everything as a set of deformed shapes. If both used open standards it would be entirely possible to convert between them, but it would be a matter of, 'it looks like this; recreate it' rather than a relatively simple, 'this becomes that and the other goes over there'. Blender -> PD would be almost unworkable without a very lossy conversion alograthim, and that would have to be noticeably lossy, which I don't want.
It all depends what you're trying to do. With formats intended for display, where was you see is what you got, everything using a single standard is great. Jpeg, PNG, and PDF are perfect examples of this. But when there's a lot of data that could be made redundant at the expense of never being able to edit it properly again, it isn't necessarily. If the GIMP could do dynamic filters, which don't factor into edits but are reapplied again afterwards (eg, apply a ripple effect to something and then place some text over the top. The text is rippled like everything else, and you can take the ripple off to make everything including the text sharp again), Photoshop would have a problem: it doesn't understand them, so they just wouldn't show up. Worse, what if a fifth channel was added in one of them on top of RGBA? Save an image in that program and try to open it in the other, it looks like crap. What if the other program devises a different way of achieving the same effect? For a while, neither can read the other. Each has advantages and disadvantages, which gets standardised?
When using a single standard, changes generally need to be made to the standard before they get implemented in the software to avoid it 'forking'. That takes time. It slows down innovation. The W3C takes ages to release a new specifion becase once it's set, it can't be changed without breaking the software that uses it, just added to. Open standards are always good, no question. Bt sometimes it's better to have several and convert between them when necessary.
OTOH, if you don't switch the physical keys around, you won't know where the virtual ones are. I'd hate to have to learn by random guessing or consulting a chart. Maybe you'd learn faster, but it would be much more frustrating.
I switched a few hours ago. I'm making I'd guess 10 WPM, maybe more, probably less. I had to make a few changes (shift-3 became sterling rather than hash and notsign (character 172; sort of a bent hyphen. Not allowed on Slashdot, but check out ¬) appeared above the backtick, for the sake of key/mapping consistency; hash/tilde went to the left of semi/colon, a key which isn't mapped to anything by default (I'm using a British keyboard) for the same reason and for ease-of-use; I left " and @ alone because I've had them messed up before and because having '/" on the same key makes perfect sense), but meh. I can definitely see great improvements and frustration at QWERTY. I wonder if I can get all the school's computers onto Dvorak...
How can PCs be #3 when they are the requirement for #1
Even if that were true, many things are more innovative than their prerequisites. I'd argue that compilers are more innovative than Assembler because they allow for portable, easy to maintain code, but without Assembler there'd be no compilers. Verbal communication is far more innovative than the ability to create and hear sounds, and writing more innovative than a method of making fairly small, precise marks on something.
Gikas said he believes there is "a better than average chance that the Xbox 2 will be backward compatible."
What is average in this context though? So far, only one console (not including handhelds) has been backwards compatible, unless some of the early Sega or Atari ones were. The PS3 will alo be BC, so if you count that, it's only two. Even including handhelds, you only have five. If five out of however many there have been is average, I'd say the chances are still pretty slim.
I'm a member of the newer generation - I'm 15 (but not yet used to it, I still say 14 before realising my mistake). I didn't have a telly until five or six years ago, so my entire childhood recreation consisted of the various computers we had around and books (I didn't have any friends either).
The first computer I remember was a Northstar. I don't remember it having anything other than a text editor, but apparantly it also had games such as Hunt the Wompus that I never found. Well, I was only three or so at the time. However, it did have a Little Red Button. When pushed, this Little Red Button would erase every file on the disk. I never quite grasped that, for some reason.
We also had a DOS of some description. With it were games such as Hocus Pocus, Recue Rover and something where you had to avoid monsters and spell words. We only had demos of them though. It also had a version of BASIC and a simple text editor that I never used. We eventually sold it for ten pounds or so. I was young enough and poor enough to think that that was a lot of money, so it seemed fair at the time. I now know that it's very little money, so it still seems fair.
Then came an Archimedes, running RISC OS 3. We still had the Northstar at that point, but it was unplugged to make way for this new one, which was put on top of the main body. With plenty of room to spare. The monitor was moved to the top of a filing cabinet. Eventually I started doing some BASIC in it, probably because my brother did so first. I was, to put it mildly, crap. I didn't understand the concept of a variable. I could INPUT A$ or GET A and PRINT it, but I didn't know how to do maths with them, even when I saw it being done. Nor could I use loops, although I could just about handle IF A$ = "Foo" THEN GOTO 50. I didn't know what GOSUB meant, or PROC and ENDPROC, and I thought ENDIF was a magical (and I really do mean magical) form of END which somehow worked out what conditional you wanted to END on. We still have it, and some time ago I started toying around with it again. BASIC was less confusing, although I'd now hate to work with it, and I also discovered its command prompt (which I remember thinking was superior to the Windows 98 one because it had a scrollbar and a help command).
Then we got a Windows 95. My time was spent playing Chessmaster 3000 and Civilization II. Eventually the Archimedies made way for The '98 that we still have and where I got reinterested in programming. I started with HTML about five years ago, and then tried to learn Javascript. My original tutorial was sucky, but when I found a better one (Thau's, at Webmonkey), I became passable at it. This of course led to the desire to learn real languages, specifically Perl because my brother knew it. After trying several times to learn from the Camel Book I gave up (I should have skipped over that first chapter, information overload) and found Beginning Perl online as a PDF. Eventually I started making GUIs with it using Tk (my brother was at that point using it to make a program for somebody else, but they never finished it), but I stopped because I was spoiled by HTML/Javascript, and Tk simply isn't as powerful. Or if it is, Mastering Perl/Tk isn't a very good manual. I still only consider myself 'good' at Perl, but that's because the more I learn, the more I realise I have yet to learn.
I made an attempt to learn C++, but I got more information overload. I've since tried again, and got slightly further, but the tutorial I was using simply doesn't cover enough libraries - it explains Terminal I/O, numbers, functions, strings, OOP and then File I/O, but not how to actually do anything useful. I can do simple stuff (such as a program I wrote a few months ago to find the number of odd numbers in the Nth row of Pascal's triangle), but no regexes or cool things like that. It really diesn't explain anything further than basic string usage, so until I get around to looking it up I won't be able to do very much.
Retro is a subsidiary of Nintendo. I'm not sure whether that makes them first or second party (I'd guess first, like Sonic Team compared to Sega, but I really have no clue how these things work), but they aren't third. They were second when they began development on Prime, but got bought before it was finished.
To the GP: I don't have any other consoles, but I have 36 'Cube games. 10 or 12 (Prime and Echoes?) of them are first party, if I counted my bookmarks correctly. Granted I didn't buy all of them myself - my brothers also get some, so I haven't actually played the Sims (doesn't appeal to me, plus I have better uses for my 60 blocks), Rouge Squadron III (the second got boring quickly) or XIII (my brother bought it in France, not realising it would be in French), but that's still 33 that I enjoyed, if only for a short time in some cases. None of the first party titles has disappointed me. There are another two titles that I'd have if I wasn't still playing Echoes, one of which (Paper Mario 2) is first party. I also have seven (or nine if Prime and Echoes aren't first-party) second/third-party exclusives (I don't think any of them have been ported at any rate, although two of them are ports from the Dreamcast, and I missed out some which I wasn't sure about), one of which (Skies of Arcadia Legends) is among my favourite games to date. Nineteen games which I couldn't get on any other platform, and I regret none of them. Replay value is something that can be found in just about any game: leave it on the shelf for a while and eventually you'll want to play it again.
By contrast, there are very few Xbox exclusives which interest me. Halo/Halo 2, obviously, as well as Ninja Gaiden and possibly a few others I've forgotten, but by and large there aren't many that I can't get on Gamecube. If I had an Xbox I wouldn't just buy those of course, but if I attempt to look at this objectively, if I didn't have a 'Cube I think I'd still be interested in at least eight of the exclusives. PS2 has the Final Fantasy games as well as some other kick-ass RPGs, but there isn't much else for it that I'm interested in, and I'd rather have a system with a wider range of genres. I plan to get one at some point, but I can live without.
They're taking code, not ideas. The split happened because of different ideas, not code. Assuming the split team isn't bitter, they're probably glad that the original team isn't bitter either - the two can work together implementing common features, unless and until either they get different enough for that to be impractical or they re-merge. Borrowed code will make merging easier, if that ever happens, and they're likely to stay simlar enough for a remergance to be possible for longer, without necessarily detracting from the quality of either product. Of course, depending on the nature of the project and split, whether or not one of those happens, and when it does happen will vary greatly.
While [kidnapping them] is admittedly not the best way to get a girl's attention, it certainly doesn't leave much room for misinterpretation. (From the XY/XX review)
Doesn't anybody else think it would be the other way around? Kidnapping somebody is bound to get their attention whatever chromosomes they have, but it certainly doesn't scream, "I want your babies", even if you rape them.
Most non-Americans favour Kerry over Bush, or at least the ones who know who Kerry even is - I swear half of us would be anti-Bush even if his opponents were Hitler and Stalin, out of sheer ignorance.
However, we don't have a say in the US election for good reason - we aren't the US. We aren't concerned with terrorism, because terrorism is mostly affecting the US. All most of us think about it that there's a war going on, very possibly with soldiers from our own country, and it ain't our quarrel. Why should we help take out people who want to bomb America? Why can't America do it themselves?
Of course, that's exactly the attitude most of us seem to associate with Americans. And that is exactly the reason patriotism blows.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like a great idea to me. If I took over somebody's mind and forced them to commit murder, affray and suicide, I'd be sued and/or incarcerated. Likewise with hypnosis and other similar measures.
Only the illegal content that they didn't search for.
Because can't (unless there's some little-known feature that makes it posible) be disabled in CSS. You can use "span { text-decoration: none !important }", but that's overkill - no span tag will ever be underlined, struck through or anything else. It also won't fix other blinking elements, so you'd need * instead of span - and that would be even worse. With the blink tag you get similar problems, but they only apply to the blink tag - it can't be underlined, overlined or struck through either with CSS, but that's less of a problem than preventing all elements.
Take a look at CSS3, I can't remember which module. When that gets accepted and supported, you'll have a solution. Currently, mine would be to use target="_blank" anyway, but I don't have much respect for standards which try to get in my way and the way of the user experience.
The W3C just confuses me. They don't allow marquees; fair enough, I don't either. They're annoying. But now they're implementing them in CSS as well. Are they suddenly not annoying in CSS? (I also saw something about how screen readers might get confused and read it in fragments, but that idea is clearly laughable. I can't find it any more, despite their advocance of accessibility and permanence.) text-decoration: blink has been around for ages, but I'd much rather sites use the nonstandard blink tag because I can stop that from blinking. Targets aren't allowed in HTML because the user should choose when to open a new tab/window, but they are allowed in CSS.
They seem to be moving in both directions between Power to the Webmaster and Don't Piss People Off, and the result is that the user has little to no control over a site. I can block the blink tag, but not span style="text-decoration: bink". When clip: marquee (as it will be implemented, IIRC) becomes supported, I won't be able to block the annoying scrollies. Curently I only have a non-standard way of doing it, but it works.
The fact that users get overriding control over an element means nothing when the elements are all being replaced with stylised div tags. I don't want all divs and spans to look the same, I just don't want annoying 'features' like blink and marquee. How hard would it be for a CSS rule that prevents certain values on certain properties? Without that, nonstandard tags will be preferable because people who don't like them don't get them - and if I want to be able to see a site without styles, that possibility should be hard-coded into the standards, not a feature of my browser.
I hope I made sense. And sorry, no links. I'm doing this from memory and without much time.
As a spelling nazi, he'd have to send misspelt words to concentration camps. I'd guess he didn't want to bother with that.
That isn't the sort of thing that can't be prevented. When installing an extension, run a one-way encryption algorithm against the name or some other identification string (a checksum of the extension perhaps, to prevent a preexisting extension from being overwritten) using a pseudorandom number generated internally at compile-time and store that in extensions.rdf, then refuse to run extensions when those don't match. In fact, since extensions currently have names like {34274bf4-1d97-a289-e984-17e546307e4f} on disk, I wouldn't be surprised if something like that was already happening. It may well have a wholly different (and almost certainly widely-known) reason though.
One problem would be that most people use the installer, so it would mostly be just one such number. I don't know if it could be generated at install time or not, but at any rate it would help prevent unwanted addons. It would also be slower, especially if you need a checksum of each extension; you could only run the check at intervals or only do a few on startup, but that would leave you open for an arbitrary time period.
Disclaimer: I may well be completely wrong, having only a passing interest in such mundane things as cryptography and privacy. Hopefully I got my gist across, but I wouldn't trust myself to have done much more than that.
Okay, that's it; you die now.
In all seriousness though, why should it hurt him? The majority of the "Gates is the Devil" things assume his motive is to get richer. Assuming that isn't true (and let's face it, he's smart enough to realise how much he already has), why should he care? He can't possibly convince people that he isn't in it for the money, especially since the ones he tries to convince will be the least likely to listen. He can either get upset because people don't understand him, or ignore them. People who don't have blonde hair and blue eyes don't get offended because Hitler didn't like them, because Hitler's reasoning was based on the false assumption that blonde hair and blue eyes are superior.
Quite apart from the legal issues, I wouldn't like to know that I might be missing something relevant just because somebody sued Google. If they want to remove references to something because of a lawsuit, shame on them; if they have to remove references to something because of a lawsuit, shame on the legal system.
Is it that simple, though?
When you only use a single standard, you need to make sure it's a good one. It needs to be reasonably small on disk, it needs to be scalable, it needs to be backwards-compatible, it needs to be easy to implement. It also needs to be, and obvious as it sounds methinks that this is what the main problem will be, interoperable.
Some things are easy to do that for. But when the featureset is radically different, it's another story entirely. Look at 3D modelling software: I've used both Blender and ProDesktop, and while Blender is by far the more powerful, some things are simply easier to do on ProDesktop. It would be nice if I could switch between the two at will, but that isn't at all likely. PD and Blender perform the same roles, but in radically different ways: Blender uses the traditional method of placing vertices and doing a 'join the dots', but PD looks at everything as a set of deformed shapes. If both used open standards it would be entirely possible to convert between them, but it would be a matter of, 'it looks like this; recreate it' rather than a relatively simple, 'this becomes that and the other goes over there'. Blender -> PD would be almost unworkable without a very lossy conversion alograthim, and that would have to be noticeably lossy, which I don't want.
It all depends what you're trying to do. With formats intended for display, where was you see is what you got, everything using a single standard is great. Jpeg, PNG, and PDF are perfect examples of this. But when there's a lot of data that could be made redundant at the expense of never being able to edit it properly again, it isn't necessarily. If the GIMP could do dynamic filters, which don't factor into edits but are reapplied again afterwards (eg, apply a ripple effect to something and then place some text over the top. The text is rippled like everything else, and you can take the ripple off to make everything including the text sharp again), Photoshop would have a problem: it doesn't understand them, so they just wouldn't show up. Worse, what if a fifth channel was added in one of them on top of RGBA? Save an image in that program and try to open it in the other, it looks like crap. What if the other program devises a different way of achieving the same effect? For a while, neither can read the other. Each has advantages and disadvantages, which gets standardised?
When using a single standard, changes generally need to be made to the standard before they get implemented in the software to avoid it 'forking'. That takes time. It slows down innovation. The W3C takes ages to release a new specifion becase once it's set, it can't be changed without breaking the software that uses it, just added to. Open standards are always good, no question. Bt sometimes it's better to have several and convert between them when necessary.
Doesn't that defeat the point of having multiple passwords? It's a convenience, but it reduces security, surely?
If you're like me, you need the manual. Without it, I'm always afraid I'll screw everything up.
Emacs?
I called it Celda before the name was confirmed, and I liked the change. Still do, in fact. I don't think realism would have suited it at all well.
OTOH, if you don't switch the physical keys around, you won't know where the virtual ones are. I'd hate to have to learn by random guessing or consulting a chart. Maybe you'd learn faster, but it would be much more frustrating.
I switched a few hours ago. I'm making I'd guess 10 WPM, maybe more, probably less. I had to make a few changes (shift-3 became sterling rather than hash and notsign (character 172; sort of a bent hyphen. Not allowed on Slashdot, but check out ¬) appeared above the backtick, for the sake of key/mapping consistency; hash/tilde went to the left of semi/colon, a key which isn't mapped to anything by default (I'm using a British keyboard) for the same reason and for ease-of-use; I left " and @ alone because I've had them messed up before and because having '/" on the same key makes perfect sense), but meh. I can definitely see great improvements and frustration at QWERTY. I wonder if I can get all the school's computers onto Dvorak...
How can PCs be #3 when they are the requirement for #1
Even if that were true, many things are more innovative than their prerequisites. I'd argue that compilers are more innovative than Assembler because they allow for portable, easy to maintain code, but without Assembler there'd be no compilers. Verbal communication is far more innovative than the ability to create and hear sounds, and writing more innovative than a method of making fairly small, precise marks on something.
Gikas said he believes there is "a better than average chance that the Xbox 2 will be backward compatible."
What is average in this context though? So far, only one console (not including handhelds) has been backwards compatible, unless some of the early Sega or Atari ones were. The PS3 will alo be BC, so if you count that, it's only two. Even including handhelds, you only have five. If five out of however many there have been is average, I'd say the chances are still pretty slim.
</readingtoodeep>
I'm a member of the newer generation - I'm 15 (but not yet used to it, I still say 14 before realising my mistake). I didn't have a telly until five or six years ago, so my entire childhood recreation consisted of the various computers we had around and books (I didn't have any friends either).
The first computer I remember was a Northstar. I don't remember it having anything other than a text editor, but apparantly it also had games such as Hunt the Wompus that I never found. Well, I was only three or so at the time. However, it did have a Little Red Button. When pushed, this Little Red Button would erase every file on the disk. I never quite grasped that, for some reason.
We also had a DOS of some description. With it were games such as Hocus Pocus, Recue Rover and something where you had to avoid monsters and spell words. We only had demos of them though. It also had a version of BASIC and a simple text editor that I never used. We eventually sold it for ten pounds or so. I was young enough and poor enough to think that that was a lot of money, so it seemed fair at the time. I now know that it's very little money, so it still seems fair.
Then came an Archimedes, running RISC OS 3. We still had the Northstar at that point, but it was unplugged to make way for this new one, which was put on top of the main body. With plenty of room to spare. The monitor was moved to the top of a filing cabinet. Eventually I started doing some BASIC in it, probably because my brother did so first. I was, to put it mildly, crap. I didn't understand the concept of a variable. I could INPUT A$ or GET A and PRINT it, but I didn't know how to do maths with them, even when I saw it being done. Nor could I use loops, although I could just about handle IF A$ = "Foo" THEN GOTO 50. I didn't know what GOSUB meant, or PROC and ENDPROC, and I thought ENDIF was a magical (and I really do mean magical) form of END which somehow worked out what conditional you wanted to END on. We still have it, and some time ago I started toying around with it again. BASIC was less confusing, although I'd now hate to work with it, and I also discovered its command prompt (which I remember thinking was superior to the Windows 98 one because it had a scrollbar and a help command).
Then we got a Windows 95. My time was spent playing Chessmaster 3000 and Civilization II. Eventually the Archimedies made way for The '98 that we still have and where I got reinterested in programming. I started with HTML about five years ago, and then tried to learn Javascript. My original tutorial was sucky, but when I found a better one (Thau's, at Webmonkey), I became passable at it. This of course led to the desire to learn real languages, specifically Perl because my brother knew it. After trying several times to learn from the Camel Book I gave up (I should have skipped over that first chapter, information overload) and found Beginning Perl online as a PDF. Eventually I started making GUIs with it using Tk (my brother was at that point using it to make a program for somebody else, but they never finished it), but I stopped because I was spoiled by HTML/Javascript, and Tk simply isn't as powerful. Or if it is, Mastering Perl/Tk isn't a very good manual. I still only consider myself 'good' at Perl, but that's because the more I learn, the more I realise I have yet to learn.
I made an attempt to learn C++, but I got more information overload. I've since tried again, and got slightly further, but the tutorial I was using simply doesn't cover enough libraries - it explains Terminal I/O, numbers, functions, strings, OOP and then File I/O, but not how to actually do anything useful. I can do simple stuff (such as a program I wrote a few months ago to find the number of odd numbers in the Nth row of Pascal's triangle), but no regexes or cool things like that. It really diesn't explain anything further than basic string usage, so until I get around to looking it up I won't be able to do very much.
Some time ago I got my own computer.
Retro is a subsidiary of Nintendo. I'm not sure whether that makes them first or second party (I'd guess first, like Sonic Team compared to Sega, but I really have no clue how these things work), but they aren't third. They were second when they began development on Prime, but got bought before it was finished.
To the GP: I don't have any other consoles, but I have 36 'Cube games. 10 or 12 (Prime and Echoes?) of them are first party, if I counted my bookmarks correctly. Granted I didn't buy all of them myself - my brothers also get some, so I haven't actually played the Sims (doesn't appeal to me, plus I have better uses for my 60 blocks), Rouge Squadron III (the second got boring quickly) or XIII (my brother bought it in France, not realising it would be in French), but that's still 33 that I enjoyed, if only for a short time in some cases. None of the first party titles has disappointed me. There are another two titles that I'd have if I wasn't still playing Echoes, one of which (Paper Mario 2) is first party. I also have seven (or nine if Prime and Echoes aren't first-party) second/third-party exclusives (I don't think any of them have been ported at any rate, although two of them are ports from the Dreamcast, and I missed out some which I wasn't sure about), one of which (Skies of Arcadia Legends) is among my favourite games to date. Nineteen games which I couldn't get on any other platform, and I regret none of them. Replay value is something that can be found in just about any game: leave it on the shelf for a while and eventually you'll want to play it again.
By contrast, there are very few Xbox exclusives which interest me. Halo/Halo 2, obviously, as well as Ninja Gaiden and possibly a few others I've forgotten, but by and large there aren't many that I can't get on Gamecube. If I had an Xbox I wouldn't just buy those of course, but if I attempt to look at this objectively, if I didn't have a 'Cube I think I'd still be interested in at least eight of the exclusives. PS2 has the Final Fantasy games as well as some other kick-ass RPGs, but there isn't much else for it that I'm interested in, and I'd rather have a system with a wider range of genres. I plan to get one at some point, but I can live without.
They're taking code, not ideas. The split happened because of different ideas, not code. Assuming the split team isn't bitter, they're probably glad that the original team isn't bitter either - the two can work together implementing common features, unless and until either they get different enough for that to be impractical or they re-merge. Borrowed code will make merging easier, if that ever happens, and they're likely to stay simlar enough for a remergance to be possible for longer, without necessarily detracting from the quality of either product. Of course, depending on the nature of the project and split, whether or not one of those happens, and when it does happen will vary greatly.
He made a typo, get over it. He meant OpenGL#.
You don't buy a portable game system to do things other than play games
(Hint, hint Sony)
Well, that and we don't get so blindly consumed by rage every time we see Bin Ladin's head that we feel the urge to score a headshot with our mouse.
Now if they made a Bill Gates version...
While [kidnapping them] is admittedly not the best way to get a girl's attention, it certainly doesn't leave much room for misinterpretation.
(From the XY/XX review)
Doesn't anybody else think it would be the other way around? Kidnapping somebody is bound to get their attention whatever chromosomes they have, but it certainly doesn't scream, "I want your babies", even if you rape them.
And I'll give one to the first person who can explain how somebody's going to fix it without an account.
No IPods or the like though. Nyer.
Most non-Americans favour Kerry over Bush, or at least the ones who know who Kerry even is - I swear half of us would be anti-Bush even if his opponents were Hitler and Stalin, out of sheer ignorance.
However, we don't have a say in the US election for good reason - we aren't the US. We aren't concerned with terrorism, because terrorism is mostly affecting the US. All most of us think about it that there's a war going on, very possibly with soldiers from our own country, and it ain't our quarrel. Why should we help take out people who want to bomb America? Why can't America do it themselves?
Of course, that's exactly the attitude most of us seem to associate with Americans. And that is exactly the reason patriotism blows.