Planetside is a game that is very team-based. If you're involved in a good Outfit that likes to play in an organized style, and their style is fun, then you're probably going to enjoy yourself.
If you just run around in a tank and blow stuff up without a care in the world, the game is definitely going to get boring after a while.
Fortunately, the game has enough of a dedicated following to sustain it for the time being. An obvious indication of this is the in-game advertising. SOE obviously has enough of an audience to entice advertisers and also has enough faith in the game's fan base to spend the money and effort to do so. Hopefully the added revenue will lengthen the life of the game long enough to hold me over till the next great MMOFPS comes along.
You must live in Iowa. Here in upstate NY it's about $9.75 for a ticket, $5.50 for a small popcorn, and $5 for a small soda. That's about $20 for one person. Close enough to $30 for my taste.
Of course, since no one goes alone (unless you're from/.), that ticket price automatically puts you at $20 without the food for 2 people. So basically his estimate of $30 is pretty realistic.
Well said. I personally think that the only people buying the DS right now are the groupies and parents for their children. The PSP guarantees that the DS will not penetrate the adult market very much. The minute you show your friend that you have a web browser, movie player, and video game console all in one, they're going to want one. Immediately. Add to it the possibility of sharing photos and listening to music and it instantly becomes a great deal for $250. The DS, on the other hand, was built exclusively for games. While many will argue the games for the DS are better right now, I'll point out that the games coming out for the PSP are targeted right to adults. I don't want to play some dumb Yoshi or Wario game. I want my shooters , my GTA, and my RPGs. You can have your puzzle games that use the "groundbreaking" mechanic of a stylus. I just want to blow shit up.
Currently the PSP has zero UMD Video titles rated G.
I have a feeling that Sony isn't marketing the PSP to those who would rent a G rated movie. Obviously the DS is marketed to those people. I mean, even Ape Escape has monkeys with Uzis in it. I don't think you buy the PSP with the idea that you'll watch Beauty and the Beast on it.
So you're going to walk around with your MP3 player, your DVD player, and your DS all in your pocket? That, my friend, is the lure of the PSP. And I know what someone is going to say - you can't walk around with the PSP in your pocket cause the screen will scratch. That's why I bought me a nice screen cover from Pelican.
Regarding the DVD release, all I know is what my friends told me. Apparently they're wrong.
As I said above, the smaller game library is because the DS has been around for a while. Give the PSP till Christmas and its library will definitely be better. As for the battery life, I can get about 6-8 hours when playing a game such as Dynasty Warriors or Mercury. That's more than enough time for any roadtrip anyone will be taking their machine on. And finally, I've used the touchscreen on the DS. Sure, it's a new feature for handhelds, but is it really something that I like? Personally, no. The touchscreen is going to be a feature that some will like and others will find useless. I would rather have the contiguous screen of the PSP and have it divided up by the game then have the split screen of the DS and have an interface forced upon me because the developer has no other choice. The split screen is by far the stupidest feature of the system. Some might counter, "Two people can play on one system at once!" That's nice if you want to play Pong. I prefer to use my modern game device to play modern games.
The problem with that statement is that the PSP when released in the US had a patch on it that prevented homebrewed apps from working. The homebrew apps only work on firmware 1.50 and lower. Currently PSPs sold in the US start out with version 1.51. I bought mine about a month ago with version 1.51 installed already, so I've never been able to run homebrewed apps on my PSP.
Personally I feel like the PSP really is going to change the face of portable gaming. Its power is downright amazing for a handheld. I don't mind that most of the games are ports from PS2 because I didn't own a PS2. I love the fact that I'm able to play (some) games wirelessly over the internet against other players. I love the fact that I can rent movies to take with me on trips. I'm not a huge music addict so the 1GB memory stick is more than enough space for me. And finally, the games that are coming out for it are more to my taste. I don't like most of what Nintendo offers in its lineup and I definitely like more mature games like GTA or Coded Arms versus Donkey Kong or Wario.
I realize that sales of the PSP are dismal at the moment. I think it's probably the price and game selection that's really hurting it. However, it's only been 4 months since the release. DS has been out a while longer and has many more games for a much lower hardware price. That's what's helping the DS at the moment. I think three things are going to help the PSP in sales. The web browser and the upcoming game launch of GTA Liberty City Stories hopefully will help it out. My personal favorite is also the fact that the Final Fantasy movie is being released exclusively on UMD. My Nintendo loving friends have asked to borrow my PSP just so they can watch the movie. This Christmas I believe something around another 20 games are being released at least. Don't put a nail in the coffin of the PSP just yet.
The reason why he could only get $50,000 dollars was because he could only get $500 per each count of the law that Richter violated. Richter settled with Spitzer for 80 counts of violating GBL Section 350-d, the False Advertising Statute. That amounts to $40k plus an extra $10k for legal expenses of the state of New York.
I'd check your facts before you bash Spitzer. The legislature makes the laws and the Attorney General enforces them. The paltry $500 is the fault of the legislature in this case. You can check out this link on Spitzer's anti-spyware case for more info on the $500 per count. The law itself is printed here. The PDF of Richter's settlement is here.
I know most geeks like the PSP but the DS has fantastic games for it (Kirby)
I think that this is kind of the statement I'm hearing all around from anyone who follows these two devices. I actually own a PSP myself but most of my gaming friends are fans of the DS. I think that the DS offers a really good dorm-room environment - it has a lot of excellent games that are fun to play with your friends off of a single hot-spot. On the other hand, I think the PSP offers the user a better individual experience. Movies, music, video games, plus now the web browser all add up to a personal media player that serves my needs. The ipod is great for music nuts and a portable DVD player is great for movie nuts, but what if you're kind of a fan of both but really a game nut? We've all heard about the all-in-one cell phones but the PSP is really the first step towards this. I don't think I'll ever use a device like the PSP as a cell phone (I'd rather it be much smaller) but I definitely will use it as a multimedia device. It's perfect for that use.
I agree with you on many points that you mentioned. I think that Sony definitely needs to release a developer kit for homebrewed software. This thing would sell like hotcakes then. The current game offerings are pretty lackluster but I don't mind Dynasty Warriors or Fifa Soccer. Even Mercury is good for some quality entertainment.
However, I'll also point out that buying a $300 portable so you can play your Game Boy games is kind of back asswards. Just get a Game Boy Advanced and go nuts.
I'll be psyched for the movies once places like Blockbuster start renting them. I'm also looking forward to games like GTA and Lemmings. I like the MP3 playback that I don't get with a DS and I think I think an actual excellent idea would be to sell UMD's with music videos on them (like those NOW! CD's you see in Walmart).
I'm updating mine as soon as the network update is available. The ability to browse the web without popping open a laptop anywhere just to check the news or Slashdot is too irresistible.
Recently I took a course at my university on network programming. Our professor gave us the choice for our Unix OS between programming on Solaris and programming on FreeBSD. I had never programmed on FreeBSD before but had done most of my undergraduate work on Solaris, so I voted for FreeBSD, along with the rest of the class.
That was the last time I will ever choose FreeBSD over Solaris. FreeBSD support for shared resources between processes is non-existant. You have but one option - file locking. File locking?!?!? I read through everything I could find to get semaphores and mutexes working but most of system calls I used all gave me error EACCES, a permissions error. I eventually gave up in frustration. If I can't figure it out in 8 hours for a program that should only take 20 hours maximum to write, it's not worth my time to figure out.
This is the only real complaint I have against FreeBSD. Recently, however, the CS department replaced all of its Solaris machines with FreeBSD machines in the lab, so I guess I'm going to be seeing more of the OS than I thought I would.
I used to work in a Tuxedo Rental store when I was a teenager. All of the merchandise had those UPC style barcodes that allowed us to track when a customer returned them and such. We had the hand-held wireless readers that let you scan a bit away from the desk. They would beep whenever you scanned. At night when the mall closed we'd strap on some rental vests inside-out and play laser tag with the readers. It was great fun and didn't get us in trouble because nine times out of ten the stupid wireless scanner never actually connected to the charger set anyways and you had to have the application open to get the scan processed, otherwise it was ignored.
My regional manager (tag was the store manager's idea) could never figure out why our batteries were constantly dying in the readers though.
I heard about it and immediately thought it might be the IRA - the fact that it was London and Scotland in the news recently would have made sense.
I also find it strange that most of the people they've interviewed on CNN, ABC, and NBC here in the states have said that they've never heard of this orginaztion before. It is possible that this is not tied to AQ or as the grandparent suggests there never was an AQ.
As for why they did this today and not yesterday, I'm pretty sure that they wanted the contrast that they are hearing on the news now. Everyone mentions in one breath the attack and the Olympics/G8. Not to mention that even if they did attack yesterday there was no guarantee that A) London would have won the bid (remember this was during morning rush hour - the same time as the Olympic announcement) and B) they wanted to stop the bid. These guys don't expect to be successful, they expect to scare the bejeezus out of everybody.
warcraft ran fine on the same machine without any opengl acceleration at all.
I believe the Parent was referring to Warcraft 3, which was referred to in the post. I'm pretty sure WC3 required a 3D accelerator.
I actually did a presentation on Coral for a class I took in Grad School. Coral's DHT (which they refer to as a Distributed Sloppy Hash Table) is really cool in that it is abstract from the underlying network protocol. That is, you can run Coral on top of any P2P protocol in existence including Chord, Pastry, Tapestry, and the other non-Chord protocols as well.
Re:Are CRTs on the way out?
on
Are CRTs History?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It really is bad when my 19" monitor weighs almost as much as my server chassis fully loaded with all components, 3 HDs and 3 CD/DVD Disc Drives and a 550W Power Supply. However, until those LCDs really can improve their refresh rate to the point where you can reliably play video games on them without any weird visual effects, I'm stuck with the CRT myself.
Actually, I remember seeing something about him on the Donny Brasco DVD. He is actually quite interesting. He talked about actually meeting mobsters as part of his research for the film. Combined with the fact that he also directed Mona Lisa's Smile (which I'm willing to admit I liked), I actually am kind of looking forward to his work on this film.
The search for Mars Polar Lander was hampered by inexperience: the team didn't know what a parachute should look like or how the ground would be disturbed by the landing rockets.
NASA Janitor 1:...and my favorite Calvin and Hobbes of all time was the strip when the went to Mars. NASA Janitor 2: You mean when they see Voyager and take their wagon to meet a new alien? NASA Janitor 1: Yeah they just launch into outer space by riding their wagon down a hill and projecting into space! NASA Intern passing by: Why didn't I think of that! How did they land?
I personally think ATI is horrible when it comes to support and especially when it comes to writing reliable drivers.
I decided about two years ago to purchase a Radeon 9800 with 256 MB when it first came out. I had to order it overseas it was so new. However, the graphics drivers suck. I see more artifacting than I ever have before. The same thing happens on my laptop which has a radeon 9600. It has to be ATI and not the games because the artifacting happens in every graphical application.
It's the last time I ever make the mistake of buying an ATI card over NVIDIA. I had a GeForce3 before the 9800 and it ran absolutely perfectly. The only reason I didn't go with NVIDIA this time was because their card took up 2 slots in my PC. I'm not supporting that either. If your card can't take up only one slot, what good is it?
And don't get me started on linux support from ATI. There was a period of about 1-2 months in the fall where the ati proprietary drivers caused X.org 6.8 to crash. 2 months to fix a major bug? Screw them.
I was talking to Jesse Schell, the chairperson of the IGDA, about two weeks ago at the RPI GameFest about the work he's been doing at CMU. We were using Torque for our game development but he actually told me he was using Panda3D for their work. Not surprising when you consider that he's a former employee of Disney but apparently it has great qualities including editing, compiling, and modifying the engine while it's running (I believe it has some Python hooks or somesuch). Anyways, it hasn't been mentioned here so I thought I'd drop its name.
Actually, I work at the NYS Attorney General's Office. While I can't speak for Mr. Spitzer, I can say that the Legal Technology office that runs the Attorney General's Office network keeps its computers locked tighter than any place I've ever seen.
They use Wake-On-LAN to even control when a computer is booted. Even better, most of their tech support happens without them leaving their office (which is 20 minutes drive away from the actual capitol, I might add). They are definitely an excellent marketing case for Novell and their ZEN Network products. Everything is locked down remotely. I can't install software on my own PC, I can't even see the hard drive or find a DOS prompt. Even better, they lock down the file share so tight you have to fill out 3 forms just to get write access to a shared folder.
It's tougher than hell to get spyware on your computer. And when it does happen, their first reaction is to wipe the computer. That's right, they give you a five-second chance to remove anything from your desktop (you don't even have access to My Documents in Windows; they're reasoning is that you should use the file share instead) and then they just launch the reformat and reimage remotely and in an hour, you have a fresh new install.
Even Internet Explorer and Netscape are managed through Zen so you can't have access to anything until the network is done authenticating. For a bureacracy as large and NY State, I was very surprised to see how well run this place is.
So how do they tell the user that it's going to take like 3 days to do a stage 1 install?
Graphics are nice (I'm all for it) but at least the Gentoo handbook warns you and says..."Go get something to eat because this might take a while." Personally, I don't think new users are going to necessarily use Gentoo if the install time is measured in hours and days rather than minutes.
And before people start posting your install times, I'm talking about going from stage 1 to a working, X.org, KDE/GNOME/whatever desktop with possibly Open Office (which literally took 6 hours for me to emerge on my Centrino laptop the other day).
Slashdot Mirror
Planetside is a game that is very team-based. If you're involved in a good Outfit that likes to play in an organized style, and their style is fun, then you're probably going to enjoy yourself.
If you just run around in a tank and blow stuff up without a care in the world, the game is definitely going to get boring after a while.
Fortunately, the game has enough of a dedicated following to sustain it for the time being. An obvious indication of this is the in-game advertising. SOE obviously has enough of an audience to entice advertisers and also has enough faith in the game's fan base to spend the money and effort to do so. Hopefully the added revenue will lengthen the life of the game long enough to hold me over till the next great MMOFPS comes along.
You must live in Iowa. Here in upstate NY it's about $9.75 for a ticket, $5.50 for a small popcorn, and $5 for a small soda. That's about $20 for one person. Close enough to $30 for my taste.
/.), that ticket price automatically puts you at $20 without the food for 2 people. So basically his estimate of $30 is pretty realistic.
Of course, since no one goes alone (unless you're from
Well said. I personally think that the only people buying the DS right now are the groupies and parents for their children. The PSP guarantees that the DS will not penetrate the adult market very much. The minute you show your friend that you have a web browser, movie player, and video game console all in one, they're going to want one. Immediately. Add to it the possibility of sharing photos and listening to music and it instantly becomes a great deal for $250. The DS, on the other hand, was built exclusively for games. While many will argue the games for the DS are better right now, I'll point out that the games coming out for the PSP are targeted right to adults. I don't want to play some dumb Yoshi or Wario game. I want my shooters , my GTA, and my RPGs. You can have your puzzle games that use the "groundbreaking" mechanic of a stylus. I just want to blow shit up.
Currently the PSP has zero UMD Video titles rated G.
I have a feeling that Sony isn't marketing the PSP to those who would rent a G rated movie. Obviously the DS is marketed to those people. I mean, even Ape Escape has monkeys with Uzis in it. I don't think you buy the PSP with the idea that you'll watch Beauty and the Beast on it.
So you're going to walk around with your MP3 player, your DVD player, and your DS all in your pocket? That, my friend, is the lure of the PSP. And I know what someone is going to say - you can't walk around with the PSP in your pocket cause the screen will scratch. That's why I bought me a nice screen cover from Pelican.
Regarding the DVD release, all I know is what my friends told me. Apparently they're wrong.
As I said above, the smaller game library is because the DS has been around for a while. Give the PSP till Christmas and its library will definitely be better. As for the battery life, I can get about 6-8 hours when playing a game such as Dynasty Warriors or Mercury. That's more than enough time for any roadtrip anyone will be taking their machine on. And finally, I've used the touchscreen on the DS. Sure, it's a new feature for handhelds, but is it really something that I like? Personally, no. The touchscreen is going to be a feature that some will like and others will find useless. I would rather have the contiguous screen of the PSP and have it divided up by the game then have the split screen of the DS and have an interface forced upon me because the developer has no other choice. The split screen is by far the stupidest feature of the system. Some might counter, "Two people can play on one system at once!" That's nice if you want to play Pong. I prefer to use my modern game device to play modern games.
The problem with that statement is that the PSP when released in the US had a patch on it that prevented homebrewed apps from working. The homebrew apps only work on firmware 1.50 and lower. Currently PSPs sold in the US start out with version 1.51. I bought mine about a month ago with version 1.51 installed already, so I've never been able to run homebrewed apps on my PSP.
Personally I feel like the PSP really is going to change the face of portable gaming. Its power is downright amazing for a handheld. I don't mind that most of the games are ports from PS2 because I didn't own a PS2. I love the fact that I'm able to play (some) games wirelessly over the internet against other players. I love the fact that I can rent movies to take with me on trips. I'm not a huge music addict so the 1GB memory stick is more than enough space for me. And finally, the games that are coming out for it are more to my taste. I don't like most of what Nintendo offers in its lineup and I definitely like more mature games like GTA or Coded Arms versus Donkey Kong or Wario.
I realize that sales of the PSP are dismal at the moment. I think it's probably the price and game selection that's really hurting it. However, it's only been 4 months since the release. DS has been out a while longer and has many more games for a much lower hardware price. That's what's helping the DS at the moment. I think three things are going to help the PSP in sales. The web browser and the upcoming game launch of GTA Liberty City Stories hopefully will help it out. My personal favorite is also the fact that the Final Fantasy movie is being released exclusively on UMD. My Nintendo loving friends have asked to borrow my PSP just so they can watch the movie. This Christmas I believe something around another 20 games are being released at least. Don't put a nail in the coffin of the PSP just yet.
The reason why he could only get $50,000 dollars was because he could only get $500 per each count of the law that Richter violated. Richter settled with Spitzer for 80 counts of violating GBL Section 350-d, the False Advertising Statute. That amounts to $40k plus an extra $10k for legal expenses of the state of New York.
I'd check your facts before you bash Spitzer. The legislature makes the laws and the Attorney General enforces them. The paltry $500 is the fault of the legislature in this case. You can check out this link on Spitzer's anti-spyware case for more info on the $500 per count. The law itself is printed here. The PDF of Richter's settlement is here.
Actually my thought on this article was:
/. for research ideas. /. article.
1) Read
2) Publish paper based on
3) ???
4) Profit!!!
I know most geeks like the PSP but the DS has fantastic games for it (Kirby)
I think that this is kind of the statement I'm hearing all around from anyone who follows these two devices. I actually own a PSP myself but most of my gaming friends are fans of the DS. I think that the DS offers a really good dorm-room environment - it has a lot of excellent games that are fun to play with your friends off of a single hot-spot. On the other hand, I think the PSP offers the user a better individual experience. Movies, music, video games, plus now the web browser all add up to a personal media player that serves my needs. The ipod is great for music nuts and a portable DVD player is great for movie nuts, but what if you're kind of a fan of both but really a game nut? We've all heard about the all-in-one cell phones but the PSP is really the first step towards this. I don't think I'll ever use a device like the PSP as a cell phone (I'd rather it be much smaller) but I definitely will use it as a multimedia device. It's perfect for that use.
I agree with you on many points that you mentioned. I think that Sony definitely needs to release a developer kit for homebrewed software. This thing would sell like hotcakes then. The current game offerings are pretty lackluster but I don't mind Dynasty Warriors or Fifa Soccer. Even Mercury is good for some quality entertainment.
However, I'll also point out that buying a $300 portable so you can play your Game Boy games is kind of back asswards. Just get a Game Boy Advanced and go nuts.
I'll be psyched for the movies once places like Blockbuster start renting them. I'm also looking forward to games like GTA and Lemmings. I like the MP3 playback that I don't get with a DS and I think I think an actual excellent idea would be to sell UMD's with music videos on them (like those NOW! CD's you see in Walmart).
I'm updating mine as soon as the network update is available. The ability to browse the web without popping open a laptop anywhere just to check the news or Slashdot is too irresistible.
Of course, potential is only so powerful.
Recently I took a course at my university on network programming. Our professor gave us the choice for our Unix OS between programming on Solaris and programming on FreeBSD. I had never programmed on FreeBSD before but had done most of my undergraduate work on Solaris, so I voted for FreeBSD, along with the rest of the class.
That was the last time I will ever choose FreeBSD over Solaris. FreeBSD support for shared resources between processes is non-existant. You have but one option - file locking. File locking?!?!? I read through everything I could find to get semaphores and mutexes working but most of system calls I used all gave me error EACCES, a permissions error. I eventually gave up in frustration. If I can't figure it out in 8 hours for a program that should only take 20 hours maximum to write, it's not worth my time to figure out.
This is the only real complaint I have against FreeBSD. Recently, however, the CS department replaced all of its Solaris machines with FreeBSD machines in the lab, so I guess I'm going to be seeing more of the OS than I thought I would.
I used to work in a Tuxedo Rental store when I was a teenager. All of the merchandise had those UPC style barcodes that allowed us to track when a customer returned them and such. We had the hand-held wireless readers that let you scan a bit away from the desk. They would beep whenever you scanned. At night when the mall closed we'd strap on some rental vests inside-out and play laser tag with the readers. It was great fun and didn't get us in trouble because nine times out of ten the stupid wireless scanner never actually connected to the charger set anyways and you had to have the application open to get the scan processed, otherwise it was ignored.
My regional manager (tag was the store manager's idea) could never figure out why our batteries were constantly dying in the readers though.
I heard about it and immediately thought it might be the IRA - the fact that it was London and Scotland in the news recently would have made sense.
I also find it strange that most of the people they've interviewed on CNN, ABC, and NBC here in the states have said that they've never heard of this orginaztion before. It is possible that this is not tied to AQ or as the grandparent suggests there never was an AQ.
As for why they did this today and not yesterday, I'm pretty sure that they wanted the contrast that they are hearing on the news now. Everyone mentions in one breath the attack and the Olympics/G8. Not to mention that even if they did attack yesterday there was no guarantee that A) London would have won the bid (remember this was during morning rush hour - the same time as the Olympic announcement) and B) they wanted to stop the bid. These guys don't expect to be successful, they expect to scare the bejeezus out of everybody.
warcraft ran fine on the same machine without any opengl acceleration at all. I believe the Parent was referring to Warcraft 3, which was referred to in the post. I'm pretty sure WC3 required a 3D accelerator.
I actually did a presentation on Coral for a class I took in Grad School. Coral's DHT (which they refer to as a Distributed Sloppy Hash Table) is really cool in that it is abstract from the underlying network protocol. That is, you can run Coral on top of any P2P protocol in existence including Chord, Pastry, Tapestry, and the other non-Chord protocols as well.
It really is bad when my 19" monitor weighs almost as much as my server chassis fully loaded with all components, 3 HDs and 3 CD/DVD Disc Drives and a 550W Power Supply. However, until those LCDs really can improve their refresh rate to the point where you can reliably play video games on them without any weird visual effects, I'm stuck with the CRT myself.
Andrew Tenenbaum, is that you?
Actually, I remember seeing something about him on the Donny Brasco DVD. He is actually quite interesting. He talked about actually meeting mobsters as part of his research for the film. Combined with the fact that he also directed Mona Lisa's Smile (which I'm willing to admit I liked), I actually am kind of looking forward to his work on this film.
The search for Mars Polar Lander was hampered by inexperience: the team didn't know what a parachute should look like or how the ground would be disturbed by the landing rockets.
...and my favorite Calvin and Hobbes of all time was the strip when the went to Mars.
NASA Janitor 1:
NASA Janitor 2: You mean when they see Voyager and take their wagon to meet a new alien?
NASA Janitor 1: Yeah they just launch into outer space by riding their wagon down a hill and projecting into space!
NASA Intern passing by: Why didn't I think of that! How did they land?
I personally think ATI is horrible when it comes to support and especially when it comes to writing reliable drivers.
I decided about two years ago to purchase a Radeon 9800 with 256 MB when it first came out. I had to order it overseas it was so new. However, the graphics drivers suck. I see more artifacting than I ever have before. The same thing happens on my laptop which has a radeon 9600. It has to be ATI and not the games because the artifacting happens in every graphical application.
It's the last time I ever make the mistake of buying an ATI card over NVIDIA. I had a GeForce3 before the 9800 and it ran absolutely perfectly. The only reason I didn't go with NVIDIA this time was because their card took up 2 slots in my PC. I'm not supporting that either. If your card can't take up only one slot, what good is it?
And don't get me started on linux support from ATI. There was a period of about 1-2 months in the fall where the ati proprietary drivers caused X.org 6.8 to crash. 2 months to fix a major bug? Screw them.
I was talking to Jesse Schell, the chairperson of the IGDA, about two weeks ago at the RPI GameFest about the work he's been doing at CMU. We were using Torque for our game development but he actually told me he was using Panda3D for their work. Not surprising when you consider that he's a former employee of Disney but apparently it has great qualities including editing, compiling, and modifying the engine while it's running (I believe it has some Python hooks or somesuch). Anyways, it hasn't been mentioned here so I thought I'd drop its name.
you do NOT want this in your computer.
Maybe not my computer, but what about a nice birthday present for a soon-to-be-enemy?
Actually, I work at the NYS Attorney General's Office. While I can't speak for Mr. Spitzer, I can say that the Legal Technology office that runs the Attorney General's Office network keeps its computers locked tighter than any place I've ever seen.
They use Wake-On-LAN to even control when a computer is booted. Even better, most of their tech support happens without them leaving their office (which is 20 minutes drive away from the actual capitol, I might add). They are definitely an excellent marketing case for Novell and their ZEN Network products. Everything is locked down remotely. I can't install software on my own PC, I can't even see the hard drive or find a DOS prompt. Even better, they lock down the file share so tight you have to fill out 3 forms just to get write access to a shared folder.
It's tougher than hell to get spyware on your computer. And when it does happen, their first reaction is to wipe the computer. That's right, they give you a five-second chance to remove anything from your desktop (you don't even have access to My Documents in Windows; they're reasoning is that you should use the file share instead) and then they just launch the reformat and reimage remotely and in an hour, you have a fresh new install.
Even Internet Explorer and Netscape are managed through Zen so you can't have access to anything until the network is done authenticating. For a bureacracy as large and NY State, I was very surprised to see how well run this place is.
So how do they tell the user that it's going to take like 3 days to do a stage 1 install?
Graphics are nice (I'm all for it) but at least the Gentoo handbook warns you and says..."Go get something to eat because this might take a while." Personally, I don't think new users are going to necessarily use Gentoo if the install time is measured in hours and days rather than minutes.
And before people start posting your install times, I'm talking about going from stage 1 to a working, X.org, KDE/GNOME/whatever desktop with possibly Open Office (which literally took 6 hours for me to emerge on my Centrino laptop the other day).