Licensing fees. Sega may have discontinued the Dreamcast as hardware, but the platform is still very much alive. New games are still coming out for the DC because Sega is still licensing out to game developers.
Rumors also pointed to a Dreamcast PCI card and/or set-top-box that had recording features as well as Dreamcast Features. (RUMORS. Don't take this as fact!)
You're better off developing games under Linux and porting them to LinuxDC.
Okay, is social behavior THAT strange a task that we need an Ask Slashdot article about it? I'm still not clear on what the question is, but it seems to boil down to this:
"Am I allowed to be friends with everyone at work?"
You know, most people you work with do enjoy having fun. And most people you work with usually have fun with their friends. Now, if you're a friend of theirs, chances are they'll want to have fun and invite you along. Why? Because you're their friend. That is how friendships work.
I didn't realize this was such a complicated subject. People who are compatible will gravitate toward one another, regardless of the venue.
I find PayPal pretty annoying today - a lot of the anti-fraud, privacy-invasive measures which this article applauds make Paypal much less enticing to me than it used to be.
Michael. Do you look for reasons to bitch? I swear to God, wannabe privacy advocates piss me off. How do you expect PayPal to do business such as it does (WITH ACCESS TO YOUR CREDIT CARD) without a modicum of personal information, hm? Do you think it would make good business sense for PayPal to say "You know, we don't need any of your personal information. Just give us your credit card number, and we'll base our business on the honor system."
Yeah. Right.
I strongly recommend you have a look at Paypal's Privacy Policy. Since you're obviously doing some blind, ignorant whining about subject matter with which you have absolutely no clue, I guarantee you've never even clicked on the privacy policy. PayPal does their best to explain what information is gathered, why it's gathered, and how it's used. If you don't like it, don't use the service. But don't complain.
Michael's comment absolutely reeks of "I'm with Stupid", "follow everyone else's opinion" mentality. "Wow. The community is really for individual privacy! It's time for me to attempt to gain acceptance with my (cough) peers by complaining about privacy-invading goons!"
Yes. Privacy is important. However, when you choose to conduct business over the internet with a credit card, bitching about a company doing its best to protect yours and their asses only serves to make you look like (more of) an idiot.
Personally, I've had nothing but excellent service with PayPal. It's nice to be able to accept credit cards, or use credit cards to pay for something without a whole shitload of messy paperwork. I've got to give PayPal a lot of credit. They've become a very successful online transaction service, and pretty much the standard auction payment system on eBay. (Ah, no need to worry about sending checks or money orders through the mail. Instant payment rocks.)
Transmeta intended to create a superior product that would quickly capture a small, but profitable, segment of the market--much in the way Apple Computer has survived with less than 5 percent of the operating system market.
Comparing Transmeta to Apple is stupid.
Transmeta develops and manufactures a single product - the Crusoe. Transmeta relies on this single product to drive their revenue. Apple, on the other hand, makes desktops, laptops, monitors, networking peripherals, and MacOS. They're not relying on a single product to stay afloat. So yes, Apple is still alive while only holding 5% of the OS market. Why? Because 100% of Apple's operating system installations run on Apple's own hardware. (Not counting the five or six Apple clones out there.)
If Apple made their living by only selling MacOS, then the comparison could apply. Not here.
if he has to leave at a certain time because of the scheduling of interstellar travel, then why is he leaving exactly five earth years after he arrived? Does everyone in the universe schedule their travel based on earth time?
So let me ask you a question. You live in New York and you go to China. While you're in China, are you going to plan your entire trip around United States Eastern Standard time? Of course not. You say "I'm going to leave China next Wednesday at 2AM." You say 2AM, but you mean 2AM locally - in China.
New Review
on
Review: K-PAX
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I hate to beat up a Katz review...(well, no, not really.), but I have to wonder what qualifies him as a movie reviewer? Bad grammar, inaccuracies, and the like seem to say "Hey, don't take this seriously."
Spacey's Prot, a visitor from the planet K-PAX, is a healing alien.
No, he's not. He even states that every being in the universe is capable of healing itself.
Picked up by the police after a mugging in New York City
...a mugging in which he did not participate...
He tells the skeptical Bridges (Dr. Mark Powers)
This is probably over-analyzing semantics, but prot doesn't tell Bridges jack shit. The actor's real name belongs in the parenthesis, while the character's name - in this case, Dr. Mark Powell is the person with whom prot is conversing.
...and begins healing deranged patients who've been confined for years.
Again, he doesn't heal them. He merely shows them the path to heal themselves.
Powers brings Prot to his house, with curious results that set the shrink off on a not very believable mission to New Mexico that he hopes will tell him who Prot really is.
I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to mean.
This is one of those very rare endings that a dozen people can see and draw completely different conclusions from.
That just proves that the Katz writing style is sophomoric at best.
Anyway, K-PAX is a great movie. prot (Kevin Spacey) is taken to a Psychiatric institute after having told New York police officers how bright the light is on Earth. Early in the movie, prot is introduced to Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges) who takes an immediate interest in his case. Eventually, prot has Powell, the staff of the institute, fellow patients, and top astrologers totally puzzled as to his true identity.
K-PAX is said to lie about a thousand light-years from Earth (within the constellation Lira), and is where prot calls home. This story is obviously met with a certain amount of skepticism from the people of Earth, and the point of the movie is to work through that skepticism. By the end, the audience will draw vastly different conclusions regarding the story's ending, and it is these conclusions that give insight into each person's individuality.
(Oh, and "prot" isn't supposed to be capitalized. That's how it works on K-PAX.:)
Those wooden boxes are going to be some serious heat insulators. (This is why PC Cases are metal - they can disperse the heat away from the components rather well.)
I don't know how well a wooden box is going to work...and if it does work, how long will it be before some components fail because of overheating? Then will they blame the hardware?
I carried the parts in two suitcases. Most of them were 486 DX2 models and some Pentium I models, with Window [sic] 95 and Microsoft Office 97.
Are they legit? I seriously doubt the people who donated this hardware also donated the licenses to Office and Windows. What happens if a few of these things need a reinstall? Are they just plunking these computers on to a network "As-Is"? Is that a smart idea?
I mean, don't get me wrong. It's fantastic what this dude is doing. Problem is, he needs to make sure he does it the right way so he doesn't get screwed over later on. (Be it a license issue, a hardware issue, or some rogue virus/worm on one of the boxen that is found "the hard way".)
Rather than upgrade to a new model from a different, or even the same, manufacturer, people will hang on to their current model for longer than before.
And why is this bad? Are you in favor of planned obsolescence?
No thank you. I still love my Palm VIIx. I don't need to get rid of it just because something cool came out.
"...not every project has a 100 percent success rate."
Well, if their plan was to get people into Radio Shack to take home a CueCat, they succeeded admirably. I have eight of them in a box in my closet.
Of course, their marketing effort failed miserably, considering they're going to be looking for "Robert April", "Christopher Pike", or "William Riker".
Anyone remember those dumb-ass infomercials that Digital Convergence ran during the CueCat's inception days?
They were set in a classroom something like 200 years in the future. The teacher was telling the class about the wonderful beginnings of "convergence" - the era in human history (heh) that saw the merging of barcodes with the internet. It changed human existence forever, and made the world a happier place. The kids were asking questions like "What happened before 'convergence'?"
"Ha Ha, silly little student...They had to TYPE their URLs in...By HAND!"
The actual quote was something like "a long time ago, people had to get around on the Net by typing in each individual character of a Web address manually!"
Future's gonna be a bit different than expected, eh Jovan?
They had another infomercial with angels ranking the CueCat up there with the wheel and fire, but for the sake of good taste, I won't go there.
Users have not been able to download other browsers such as Netscape Communication's Navigator or Microsoft's Internet Explorer because users can only download game files and the size of the Dreamcast hard drive is limited.
Wow. I must of missed that feature when I bought my Dreamcast.
I wasn't aware the Dreamcast's HITACHI PROCESSOR wasn't a factor in running Netscape or Internet Explorer. Gee, the AMOUNT OF RAM doesn't seem to be an issue either. Or OPERATING SYSTEM support for that matter! The only issue blocking the use of these other browsers seems to be the lack of a sufficiently-large hard drive!
Well shit, if that's the case, I'm going to upgrade mine!
Everybody buy a copy of the CD. And then return it a few days later, complaining that it doesn't work on your computer or CD player.
I doubt that will work. Most stores will refuse a return on Audio CDs, Computer Games, or DVDs that have had their seal broken. For a return where you get your money back, the CD has to still be sealed. You can't exactly claim the CD doesn't work on your computer if you haven't opened it to try.
If you go into the store claiming your CD doesn't work and the seal HAS been broken, the best they will do is provide you with a replacement of the same item.
While Acer Desktops aren't exactly cream-of-the-crop, their laptops aren't bad at all. I personally own an Extensa 501T and it runs Slackware Linux. Everything works beautifully - Display, Sound, and there's even support for the Winmodem. I've enjoyed this laptop for the past four years, and I've only ever had trouble with the floppy drive.
In that event, Acer paid to have it returned to the factory, fixed it, and had it back to me the same week.
I would definitely recommend Acer laptops. I've had nothing but good things to say about mine.
Ramen? 1i0n? Adore? Sound familiar? It's far from the "realm of possibility" - they've already been done. And these worms haven't been eliminated, either. I work in network security, and I see SunRPC scans and DNS scans, and a whole slew of different kinds of scans on my network *several times an hour*. Yes folks, *hour*.
The fact is, people are running unpatched systems. And yes, a good majority of these systems are running Linux. The fact that the scans aren't letting up says that administrators:
A) Are too ignorant to know there's a problem
B) Too ignorant to fix the problem
C) Don't give a shit.
The thing is, the Open Source community is quick to act on these security problems and crank out a fix. In the case of Microsoft, the worms are usually a lot more destructive, thus, they receive more attention.
It's quite sad when people can't patch a two-month old exploit, however.
In my opinion (which is a synonym for FACT), Star Trek: The Next Generation is the very best Star Trek series ever produced. The fact that Q was able to bring the series full-circle, entwining the pilot with the finale was genius.
Voyager started out "okay", but got really weak late in the second season. I never really got into Deep Space Nine, but it wasn't horrible. (Past season 3, Voyager pretty much blew. The finale was a total rehash of TNG's finale as well, which (In my opinion) cheapened and insulted the TNG finale.)
I am not optimistic about Enterprise for many reasons. If it's supposed to take place ~100 years before Kirk, why does Archer's ship look so much more advanced than the original 1701? And I can't believe they're "reportedly" starting off the series with a Mirror Universe story.
First of all, this Enterprise ship doesn't fit inside the Canon timelines *anywhere*. Secondly, the original series explored the Mirror Universe once. DS9 did it an assload of times. Now the new show is going to feature it in the PILOT?
Things do not look good. I say it's time to either give Star Trek a 10+ year sabbatical, or let the franchise die an honorable death as soon as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
What have you got to lose?
Licensing fees. Sega may have discontinued the Dreamcast as hardware, but the platform is still very much alive. New games are still coming out for the DC because Sega is still licensing out to game developers.
Rumors also pointed to a Dreamcast PCI card and/or set-top-box that had recording features as well as Dreamcast Features. (RUMORS. Don't take this as fact!)
You're better off developing games under Linux and porting them to LinuxDC.
Okay, is social behavior THAT strange a task that we need an Ask Slashdot article about it? I'm still not clear on what the question is, but it seems to boil down to this:
"Am I allowed to be friends with everyone at work?"
You know, most people you work with do enjoy having fun. And most people you work with usually have fun with their friends. Now, if you're a friend of theirs, chances are they'll want to have fun and invite you along. Why? Because you're their friend. That is how friendships work.
I didn't realize this was such a complicated subject. People who are compatible will gravitate toward one another, regardless of the venue.
What do you need, written instructions?
Well, I just checked the dictionary, and it seems to disagree with you.
warlock
n.
A male witch, sorcerer, wizard, or demon.
Its roots seem to come from Middle English and Old English (warloghe and waerloga, respectively.)
I might be wrong, but I believe the term "Witch" is reserved for the female variety. I always thought "Warlock" was the male reference.
And if you configure your kernel wrong you end up in the Oops room with Colonel Panic.
Of course not.
You have removed all disk support. It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue...
> _
I find PayPal pretty annoying today - a lot of the anti-fraud, privacy-invasive measures which this article applauds make Paypal much less enticing to me than it used to be.
Michael. Do you look for reasons to bitch? I swear to God, wannabe privacy advocates piss me off. How do you expect PayPal to do business such as it does (WITH ACCESS TO YOUR CREDIT CARD) without a modicum of personal information, hm? Do you think it would make good business sense for PayPal to say "You know, we don't need any of your personal information. Just give us your credit card number, and we'll base our business on the honor system."
Yeah. Right.
I strongly recommend you have a look at Paypal's Privacy Policy. Since you're obviously doing some blind, ignorant whining about subject matter with which you have absolutely no clue, I guarantee you've never even clicked on the privacy policy. PayPal does their best to explain what information is gathered, why it's gathered, and how it's used. If you don't like it, don't use the service. But don't complain.
Michael's comment absolutely reeks of "I'm with Stupid", "follow everyone else's opinion" mentality. "Wow. The community is really for individual privacy! It's time for me to attempt to gain acceptance with my (cough) peers by complaining about privacy-invading goons!"
Yes. Privacy is important. However, when you choose to conduct business over the internet with a credit card, bitching about a company doing its best to protect yours and their asses only serves to make you look like (more of) an idiot.
Personally, I've had nothing but excellent service with PayPal. It's nice to be able to accept credit cards, or use credit cards to pay for something without a whole shitload of messy paperwork. I've got to give PayPal a lot of credit. They've become a very successful online transaction service, and pretty much the standard auction payment system on eBay. (Ah, no need to worry about sending checks or money orders through the mail. Instant payment rocks.)
Transmeta intended to create a superior product that would quickly capture a small, but profitable, segment of the market--much in the way Apple Computer has survived with less than 5 percent of the operating system market.
Comparing Transmeta to Apple is stupid.
Transmeta develops and manufactures a single product - the Crusoe. Transmeta relies on this single product to drive their revenue. Apple, on the other hand, makes desktops, laptops, monitors, networking peripherals, and MacOS. They're not relying on a single product to stay afloat. So yes, Apple is still alive while only holding 5% of the OS market. Why? Because 100% of Apple's operating system installations run on Apple's own hardware. (Not counting the five or six Apple clones out there.)
If Apple made their living by only selling MacOS, then the comparison could apply. Not here.
if he has to leave at a certain time because of the scheduling of interstellar travel, then why is he leaving exactly five earth years after he arrived? Does everyone in the universe schedule their travel based on earth time?
So let me ask you a question. You live in New York and you go to China. While you're in China, are you going to plan your entire trip around United States Eastern Standard time? Of course not. You say "I'm going to leave China next Wednesday at 2AM." You say 2AM, but you mean 2AM locally - in China.
I hate to beat up a Katz review...(well, no, not really.), but I have to wonder what qualifies him as a movie reviewer? Bad grammar, inaccuracies, and the like seem to say "Hey, don't take this seriously."
...and begins healing deranged patients who've been confined for years.
:)
Spacey's Prot, a visitor from the planet K-PAX, is a healing alien.
No, he's not. He even states that every being in the universe is capable of healing itself.
Picked up by the police after a mugging in New York City
...a mugging in which he did not participate...
He tells the skeptical Bridges (Dr. Mark Powers)
This is probably over-analyzing semantics, but prot doesn't tell Bridges jack shit. The actor's real name belongs in the parenthesis, while the character's name - in this case, Dr. Mark Powell is the person with whom prot is conversing.
Again, he doesn't heal them. He merely shows them the path to heal themselves.
Powers brings Prot to his house, with curious results that set the shrink off on a not very believable mission to New Mexico that he hopes will tell him who Prot really is.
I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to mean.
This is one of those very rare endings that a dozen people can see and draw completely different conclusions from.
That just proves that the Katz writing style is sophomoric at best.
Anyway, K-PAX is a great movie. prot (Kevin Spacey) is taken to a Psychiatric institute after having told New York police officers how bright the light is on Earth. Early in the movie, prot is introduced to Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges) who takes an immediate interest in his case. Eventually, prot has Powell, the staff of the institute, fellow patients, and top astrologers totally puzzled as to his true identity.
K-PAX is said to lie about a thousand light-years from Earth (within the constellation Lira), and is where prot calls home. This story is obviously met with a certain amount of skepticism from the people of Earth, and the point of the movie is to work through that skepticism. By the end, the audience will draw vastly different conclusions regarding the story's ending, and it is these conclusions that give insight into each person's individuality.
(Oh, and "prot" isn't supposed to be capitalized. That's how it works on K-PAX.
Really cold?
Those wooden boxes are going to be some serious heat insulators. (This is why PC Cases are metal - they can disperse the heat away from the components rather well.)
I don't know how well a wooden box is going to work...and if it does work, how long will it be before some components fail because of overheating? Then will they blame the hardware?
I carried the parts in two suitcases. Most of them were 486 DX2 models and some Pentium I models, with Window [sic] 95 and Microsoft Office 97.
Are they legit? I seriously doubt the people who donated this hardware also donated the licenses to Office and Windows. What happens if a few of these things need a reinstall? Are they just plunking these computers on to a network "As-Is"? Is that a smart idea?
I mean, don't get me wrong. It's fantastic what this dude is doing. Problem is, he needs to make sure he does it the right way so he doesn't get screwed over later on. (Be it a license issue, a hardware issue, or some rogue virus/worm on one of the boxen that is found "the hard way".)
Rather than upgrade to a new model from a different, or even the same, manufacturer, people will hang on to their current model for longer than before.
And why is this bad? Are you in favor of planned obsolescence?
No thank you. I still love my Palm VIIx. I don't need to get rid of it just because something cool came out.
"...not every project has a 100 percent success rate."
Well, if their plan was to get people into Radio Shack to take home a CueCat, they succeeded admirably. I have eight of them in a box in my closet.
Of course, their marketing effort failed miserably, considering they're going to be looking for "Robert April", "Christopher Pike", or "William Riker".
Anyone remember those dumb-ass infomercials that Digital Convergence ran during the CueCat's inception days?
They were set in a classroom something like 200 years in the future. The teacher was telling the class about the wonderful beginnings of "convergence" - the era in human history (heh) that saw the merging of barcodes with the internet. It changed human existence forever, and made the world a happier place. The kids were asking questions like "What happened before 'convergence'?"
"Ha Ha, silly little student...They had to TYPE their URLs in...By HAND!"
The actual quote was something like "a long time ago, people had to get around on the Net by typing in each individual character of a Web address manually!"
Future's gonna be a bit different than expected, eh Jovan?
They had another infomercial with angels ranking the CueCat up there with the wheel and fire, but for the sake of good taste, I won't go there.
I can almost guarantee they had no treadmill. From the way Marina Sirtis was flailing her arms, I'm betting they were running in place.
:)
Johnathan Frakes made it look the best, though. It actually looked like he was running.
Users have not been able to download other browsers such as Netscape Communication's Navigator or Microsoft's Internet Explorer because users can only download game files and the size of the Dreamcast hard drive is limited.
Wow. I must of missed that feature when I bought my Dreamcast.
I wasn't aware the Dreamcast's HITACHI PROCESSOR wasn't a factor in running Netscape or Internet Explorer. Gee, the AMOUNT OF RAM doesn't seem to be an issue either. Or OPERATING SYSTEM support for that matter! The only issue blocking the use of these other browsers seems to be the lack of a sufficiently-large hard drive!
Well shit, if that's the case, I'm going to upgrade mine!
*pops open Dreamcast*
Err...Where's the old one?
I was typing, but I figured out I can't type any letter past the letter J.
Damn.
Everybody buy a copy of the CD. And then return it a few days later, complaining that it doesn't work on your computer or CD player.
I doubt that will work. Most stores will refuse a return on Audio CDs, Computer Games, or DVDs that have had their seal broken. For a return where you get your money back, the CD has to still be sealed. You can't exactly claim the CD doesn't work on your computer if you haven't opened it to try.
If you go into the store claiming your CD doesn't work and the seal HAS been broken, the best they will do is provide you with a replacement of the same item.
I disagree.
While Acer Desktops aren't exactly cream-of-the-crop, their laptops aren't bad at all. I personally own an Extensa 501T and it runs Slackware Linux. Everything works beautifully - Display, Sound, and there's even support for the Winmodem. I've enjoyed this laptop for the past four years, and I've only ever had trouble with the floppy drive.
In that event, Acer paid to have it returned to the factory, fixed it, and had it back to me the same week.
I would definitely recommend Acer laptops. I've had nothing but good things to say about mine.
Right Here, Right Now. Enjoy.
What the hell is this stupid postercomment compression filter?
"Your comment must be THIS LONG to be posted to Slashdot."
"You must be THIS TALL to ride this rollercoaster."
Sheesh.
and maybe 10 dollars in RD...
WOW! So 5 developers receive a salary of two dollars for their trouble?
Recheck your facts there, chief. A lot more than five people go into the making of a game.
Ah, yeah. That'd be the Cheese Worm.
And apparently, this factual informative comment "violated the postercomment compression filter.", whatever the fuck that is.
Hello?
Ramen? 1i0n? Adore? Sound familiar? It's far from the "realm of possibility" - they've already been done. And these worms haven't been eliminated, either. I work in network security, and I see SunRPC scans and DNS scans, and a whole slew of different kinds of scans on my network *several times an hour*. Yes folks, *hour*.
The fact is, people are running unpatched systems. And yes, a good majority of these systems are running Linux. The fact that the scans aren't letting up says that administrators:
A) Are too ignorant to know there's a problem
B) Too ignorant to fix the problem
C) Don't give a shit.
The thing is, the Open Source community is quick to act on these security problems and crank out a fix. In the case of Microsoft, the worms are usually a lot more destructive, thus, they receive more attention.
It's quite sad when people can't patch a two-month old exploit, however.
...then complete your page with VI or EMACS, which are pieces of software released under a non-M$-centric license.
Have you ever tried opening a frontpage-generated HTML file in a text editor? Bleedin' Christ, it's a damned mess.
It would just be easier to dump the shitty WYSIWYG editors and just write the site in plain-jane HTML.
If you standardize it, they will come. (AND they will be able to read it!)
As I pointed out on Slashnet yesterday, PayPal has a similar service if you have a paypal account:
l ief-outside
http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/re
I agree.
In my opinion (which is a synonym for FACT), Star Trek: The Next Generation is the very best Star Trek series ever produced. The fact that Q was able to bring the series full-circle, entwining the pilot with the finale was genius.
Voyager started out "okay", but got really weak late in the second season. I never really got into Deep Space Nine, but it wasn't horrible. (Past season 3, Voyager pretty much blew. The finale was a total rehash of TNG's finale as well, which (In my opinion) cheapened and insulted the TNG finale.)
I am not optimistic about Enterprise for many reasons. If it's supposed to take place ~100 years before Kirk, why does Archer's ship look so much more advanced than the original 1701? And I can't believe they're "reportedly" starting off the series with a Mirror Universe story.
First of all, this Enterprise ship doesn't fit inside the Canon timelines *anywhere*. Secondly, the original series explored the Mirror Universe once. DS9 did it an assload of times. Now the new show is going to feature it in the PILOT?
Things do not look good. I say it's time to either give Star Trek a 10+ year sabbatical, or let the franchise die an honorable death as soon as possible.
Worf wouldn't have it any other way.