This is about the tenth time someone has mentioned this mistake in the article. I'd just like to point out that really it was Atari themselves that killed the Lynx and Jaguar. They were unable to get a critical mass of games support for these systems, the marketing was bad and Atari themselves were in the final stages of a decline that began in the mid-1980s. Competition from Nintendo, Sega and later, Sony simply compounded a problem that Atari had from the beginning.
It seems to me that people have forgotten something about the MS console:
It is made by an American company. A quick check of the past history of video games will show that almost without exception, the successful consoles have come from Japanese games companies.
Why?
Because PC's are not as popular in Japan than in the rest of the world. This is one reason why the Dreamcast has internet facilities and a keyboard. Even the NES had an expansion pack that added a floppy drive and keyboard, which was only sold in Japan.
For the MS console to succeed, it will have to have support from the big Japanese companies such as Namco, Squaresoft and Konami. It will be obvious to anyone that all of these companies are capable of producing games that sell systems. Namco's SoulCalibur is reason alone to own a Dreamcast IMHO, and the Japanese will go mad for any of Squaresoft's Final Fantasy series.
A quick check of my knowledge about MS games is that 1: They are not the sort of games that the Japanese market would really be interested in buying and 2: They generally suck (some exceptions apply here)
I have been watching the games industry since the second wave (NES, SMS) in the late 1980's and whenever an american company (Atari, 3DO) has released a games system, it has failed. I know Atari had success in the first wave of systems, but nothing of theirs was successful post-1990.
and on the Dreamcast... is it just me or do other people think that Sega have made a big mistake, just as they did with the Saturn and Genesis systems, neither of which were successful in when faced with serious competition... i'm getting flashbacks to the MegaCD add-on and the Megadrive 2 systems as well as the saturn... oh well, SoulCalibur rocks anyway...
According to Apple a supercomputer is defined by the US Military as any computer capable of performing over 1 gigaflop or 1 billion floating point operations per second. This is a far more accurate measure of speed than clock cycles/second (Mhz)
It's being directed by Chris Cunningham, the man behind those cool Aphex Twin filmclips and the recent Bjork filmclip for 'All is Full Of Love' among other things.
Just for accuracy's sake, Dinosaurs are not actually lizards. Scientific proof exists to say that they were warm blooded, and it is believed (by evolutionists) that they evolved into birds.
it's funny, since i started reading through this article, Bill Hicks was the first thing that occurred to me. I suggest that any creationist/christian/atheist/whatever sit down and listen to this man. He is the start of a new religion: Hicksism...
and of course, they should teach the story of Ainulindale, the opening chapter of Tolkien's Silmarillion, which is also a creation myth. Equal time for that too...
I spent a large chunk of my morning playing with a demo version of macromedia flash 4. Everything i know about computers is self taught, and it only took me half an hour to come up with a nice simple animation. This is because I was able to experiment with the program, I was not limited by what people had taught me about computers.
In fact, i know people who are learning computers in school (this is in Australia, btw) who don't even know what Windows95 is. They simply assume that it is what all computers are like, and they don't know anything different. If you put one of these people onto a computer system that they are unfamiliar with (ie a Macintosh), then they can't use it, as they don't understand the basic concepts behind it.
This can be applied to other areas as well, such as the way students are taught to write in high school. The teachers don't encourage students to be imaginative, or to come up with new ideas. I consistently got low marks in high school, not because i was stupid, but because the learning environment did not suit me.
I remember seeing somewhere on the internet that IE5 (dunno about other versions) has an interesting bug.
Basically what happens is that IE5 allows you to create a custom icon for your website when a user bookmarks it. *but*, it doesn't actually check to see whether the file (which has a specific name, something like bookmark.ico or something) is actually a windows icon file. Theoretically (according to the site) it would be possible to put some executable code (backorifice anyone?) in the file and IE would execute it.
with a flaw like this, it surprises me that no one I know has ever heard of it, but then again, it could just be a minor problem.
(I did know where I saw this article, here, but it appears to have disappeared.) If anyone knows more about this, then I'd be much obliged.
Actually, there is an excellent reason to not so much *move* MacOS to IA64 as to port it to that platform, the same way that Linux is ported to different platforms
If Apple brought the MacOS to IA64, and did it before, say, Microsoft brought out Windows for that platform, then it would have a lot of people seriously considering whether Windows is worth the effort on IA64.
It would be very interesting to see the OS battle that would be waged between the two sides if this happened. Unfortunately, given its success in the past with this type of thing, I fear that Microsoft would win. Oh Well.
With Both IBM and Motorola moving into producing embedded PowerPC chips, What does this mean for Apple, who rely especially on Motorola for the CPUs in the current generation of PowerMacs?
Or will Apple just move to the IA-64 architecture?
Apple have actually put IDE in older Macintoshes as well, the Centris/Quadra 630 has an internal IDE bus.
Also, my Centris 660av does take advantage of all the SCSI stuff without the OS getting in the way, This has something to do with a different SCSI controller to previous Macs, as well as a built in DSP chip.
Both these machines are pre-PowerMac (PowerPC) Macintoshes, based on the MC68040 processor. It just goes to show how Apple can put good technology to waste. If they had've kept going with these machines instead of jumping to PowerPC systems, who knows what we might be using today. Anyone remember PinkOS?
I *have* seen a random isolated BSOD in NT Workstation. Our TAFE College uses Novell Netware and WinNT, and on some computers, occasionally the system will drop to an NT BSOD. It may have something to do with the hardware (P166/32MB), but the point is that the error occurs randomly, and is not reproduceable.
And what about all the nukes that are *supposedly* in the hands of people like the Russian mafia etc. I'm sure the U.S. Government would really want to keep check of those. Or maybe I watch too many movies...
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This is about the tenth time someone has mentioned this mistake in the article. I'd just like to point out that really it was Atari themselves that killed the Lynx and Jaguar. They were unable to get a critical mass of games support for these systems, the marketing was bad and Atari themselves were in the final stages of a decline that began in the mid-1980s.
Competition from Nintendo, Sega and later, Sony simply compounded a problem that Atari had from the beginning.
It seems to me that people have forgotten something about the MS console:
It is made by an American company. A quick check of the past history of video games will show that almost without exception, the successful consoles have come from Japanese games companies.
Why?
Because PC's are not as popular in Japan than in the rest of the world. This is one reason why the Dreamcast has internet facilities and a keyboard. Even the NES had an expansion pack that added a floppy drive and keyboard, which was only sold in Japan.
For the MS console to succeed, it will have to have support from the big Japanese companies such as Namco, Squaresoft and Konami. It will be obvious to anyone that all of these companies are capable of producing games that sell systems. Namco's SoulCalibur is reason alone to own a Dreamcast IMHO, and the Japanese will go mad for any of Squaresoft's Final Fantasy series.
A quick check of my knowledge about MS games is that 1: They are not the sort of games that the Japanese market would really be interested in buying and 2: They generally suck (some exceptions apply here)
I have been watching the games industry since the second wave (NES, SMS) in the late 1980's and whenever an american company (Atari, 3DO) has released a games system, it has failed. I know Atari had success in the first wave of systems, but nothing of theirs was successful post-1990.
and on the Dreamcast... is it just me or do other people think that Sega have made a big mistake, just as they did with the Saturn and Genesis systems, neither of which were successful in when faced with serious competition... i'm getting flashbacks to the MegaCD add-on and the Megadrive 2 systems as well as the saturn... oh well, SoulCalibur rocks anyway...
According to Apple a supercomputer is defined by the US Military as any computer capable of performing over 1 gigaflop or 1 billion floating point operations per second. This is a far more accurate measure of speed than clock cycles/second (Mhz)
If anyone's interested...
here is the website for the Neuromancer film.
It's being directed by Chris Cunningham, the man behind those cool Aphex Twin filmclips and the recent Bjork filmclip for 'All is Full Of Love' among other things.
Just for accuracy's sake, Dinosaurs are not actually lizards. Scientific proof exists to say that they were warm blooded, and it is believed (by evolutionists) that they evolved into birds.
it's funny, since i started reading through this article, Bill Hicks was the first thing that occurred to me. I suggest that any creationist/christian/atheist/whatever sit down and listen to this man. He is the start of a new religion: Hicksism...
and of course, they should teach the story of Ainulindale, the opening chapter of Tolkien's Silmarillion, which is also a creation myth. Equal time for that too...
thanx for the info, it has had me worried. Nice to know it was fixed.
Vulnerability? that's another MS term for bug, right?
Right on.
I spent a large chunk of my morning playing with a demo version of macromedia flash 4. Everything i know about computers is self taught, and it only took me half an hour to come up with a nice simple animation. This is because I was able to experiment with the program, I was not limited by what people had taught me about computers.
In fact, i know people who are learning computers in school (this is in Australia, btw) who don't even know what Windows95 is. They simply assume that it is what all computers are like, and they don't know anything different. If you put one of these people onto a computer system that they are unfamiliar with (ie a Macintosh), then they can't use it, as they don't understand the basic concepts behind it.
This can be applied to other areas as well, such as the way students are taught to write in high school. The teachers don't encourage students to be imaginative, or to come up with new ideas. I consistently got low marks in high school, not because i was stupid, but because the learning environment did not suit me.
This might be a little offtopic, but...
I remember seeing somewhere on the internet that IE5 (dunno about other versions) has an interesting bug.
Basically what happens is that IE5 allows you to create a custom icon for your website when a user bookmarks it. *but*, it doesn't actually check to see whether the file (which has a specific name, something like bookmark.ico or something) is actually a windows icon file. Theoretically (according to the site) it would be possible to put some executable code (backorifice anyone?) in the file and IE would execute it.
with a flaw like this, it surprises me that no one I know has ever heard of it, but then again, it could just be a minor problem.
(I did know where I saw this article, here, but it appears to have disappeared.) If anyone knows more about this, then I'd be much obliged.
Actually, there is an excellent reason to not so much *move* MacOS to IA64 as to port it to that platform, the same way that Linux is ported to different platforms
If Apple brought the MacOS to IA64, and did it before, say, Microsoft brought out Windows for that platform, then it would have a lot of people seriously considering whether Windows is worth the effort on IA64.
It would be very interesting to see the OS battle that would be waged between the two sides if this happened. Unfortunately, given its success in the past with this type of thing, I fear that Microsoft would win. Oh Well.
With Both IBM and Motorola moving into producing embedded PowerPC chips, What does this mean for Apple, who rely especially on Motorola for the CPUs in the current generation of PowerMacs?
Or will Apple just move to the IA-64 architecture?
But neither of these are *provided* by the OS, therefore scripting is optional.
MacOS X also has a built in scripting language:
AppleScript.
AFAIK, WinNT doesn't have a scripting language on the scope or scale of either this or the scripting system in Unix/Linux.
Apple have actually put IDE in older Macintoshes as well, the Centris/Quadra 630 has an internal IDE bus.
Also, my Centris 660av does take advantage of all the SCSI stuff without the OS getting in the way, This has something to do with a different SCSI controller to previous Macs, as well as a built in DSP chip.
Both these machines are pre-PowerMac (PowerPC) Macintoshes, based on the MC68040 processor. It just goes to show how Apple can put good technology to waste. If they had've kept going with these machines instead of jumping to PowerPC systems, who knows what we might be using today. Anyone remember PinkOS?
I *have* seen a random isolated BSOD in NT Workstation. Our TAFE College uses Novell Netware and WinNT, and on some computers, occasionally the system will drop to an NT BSOD. It may have something to do with the hardware (P166/32MB), but the point is that the error occurs randomly, and is not reproduceable.
And what about all the nukes that are *supposedly* in the hands of people like the Russian mafia etc. I'm sure the U.S. Government would really want to keep check of those. Or maybe I watch too many movies...