Seriously, WTF? An average rating of 56.9% for the PC. The 360 version looks slightly more promising with an average rating of 78%. I may just pick it up as a rental.
Actually vista RTM seems much faster than rc1/2, even faster than my 1 month old xp install. However, I reverted back to XP, because creative and nvidia still havn't written decent drivers (especially the lack of 5.1 sound for the audigy SE).
1. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess 95.5% 2. Trauma Center: Second Opinion 84.5% 3. Madden NFL 07 83.7% 4. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 80.4% 5. Rayman Raving Rabbids 78.8% 6. Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2 78.5% 7. Wii Sports WII Nintendo 77.4% 8. Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam WII 75.8% 9. Excite Truck WII Nintendo 74.7% 10. Call of Duty 3 WII Activision 74.3% 11. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz WII 73.5% 12. Red Steel WII Ubisoft 23 65.9%
from gamerankings.com (a meta-review site)
If by excellent you mean average at best, then sure. (I perhaps discounted trauma center unfairly, as I'm still pissed it doesn't support 480p, and madden and marvel are cross platform games).
Well, according to gamerankings and metacritic, GoW is better than any recent PC FPS release, so if you want a recent FPS there is no reason to not pick up GoW for the multiplayer, as the controls work well for a console. Viva Pinata is a great game, even though it looks childish it is alot of fun. Dead Rising is pretty good as well.
So, 3 excellent games, a few great ones (there are other FPS games+racing games), and a ton of o.k. games.
So we compare consoles at this point, the wii and ps3 have 1 excellent game, and mostly shovelware.
All 3 consoles are going to have a ton of great games next year.
Looking at the software my family uses (mom, dad, grandparents, brother, inlaws) all of them could probably switch to linux except for my brother (games). Most of the software they need seem to be: 1) Browser (covered by linux) 2) Email (variety of options on linux) 3) Office (open office or something similar) 4) IM client (is there a good linux IM client that interacts with windows messenger?) 5) Greeting card software (anything good on the linux end?) 6) Family tree software (same question)
Except linux on the OLPC doesn't have any official support either. Win 98 support just expired June of this year. I don't know much about how windows 98 compares to XP for vulnerabilities, but it seems the biggest problem is that MS will want to stick IE on there, and the latest IE can only be installed on XP and possibly 2000, meaning either they are stuck with firefox (unlikely) or IE6 (which is riddled with bugs).
If they can get the OLPC running with windows 98 and a firewall and not have it be an instant zombie-spam machine, then I say let them. Hopefully MS will dump a few million into the OLPC and start getting these kids some laptops, regardless of the OS (I can understand the desire for open source, but getting any technology and educational materials to these kids will be beneficial).
The article seems to be speculating that they are trying to run XP. However, there are no quotes regarding this.
Heck, is there any reason they couldn't run windows 98se on this thing? Does windows 98 have support for wireless internet? They could just rename it Windows OLPC and install a lightweight firewall.
You can still change the windows theme to classic and it will run as fast as 2000 or xp. Only in aero mode does it require for some reason tons of ram and cpu power. Turning off the widgets helps too. Basically anything from the past 4 years should be able to run vista at least classic mode.
The one benefit of Vista will be to stop manufacturers from putting crappy integrated graphics into laptops (even apple does this on the non-pro line).
...is lack of anti-alaising. I would have no problems with sticking with the ps2 generation and only paying $10 for games, but I've gotten so used to anti-alaising that it is distracting when games don't have it.
Take final fantasy XII for example. A beautiful game, but so detailed that practically everything in the environment is wavy or jagged. I try not to be such a graphics snob, but when something is distracting enough for me to remove immersion, it begins to be a problem.
Heck, I would even shell out $700 for a PS3 if I could play final fantasy XII with AA, but I doubt Sony goes through the trouble of enhancing last-gen games on the ps3.
I wish apple would do something like that now, a convertible tablet mac. That is the only thing holding me back from buying a macbook pro, as I would miss the tablet features of my fujitsu.
Your wrist? DIP or PIP joints (fingers)? Do you have of a problem with typing compared to using a mouse?
I would say consoles are pretty much out of the question, with perhaps the exception being the wii, unless you are having wrist pain.
In addition, you can visit meta ranking sites such as gamerankings.com
Top 30 games (not counting old-school games) meta-rated (from the above site): 1. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time N64 2. Soul Calibur DC 3. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess WII 4. Metroid Prime GC 5. Tekken 3 PS 6. Metal Gear Solid GBC 7. GoldenEye 007 N64 8. Resident Evil 4 GC 9. Super Mario 64 N64 10. Halo: Combat Evolved XBOX 11. Resident Evil 4 PS2 12. Half-Life 2 PC 13. Chrono Trigger SNES 14. NFL 2K1 DC 15. Grand Theft Auto III 16. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker GC 17. Championship Manager 4 PC 18. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas PS2 19. Gran Turismo PS 20. Halo 2 XBOX 21. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty PS2 22. The Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition GC 23. Half-Life PC 24. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 DC 25. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City PC 26. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 PS 27. Perfect Dark N64 28. Gears of War X360 29. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic XBOX 30. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn PC
If the main problem is your fingers, then you can get mouse intensive games, such as baldur's gate I/II, neverwinter nights 1 or 2, and most strategy games such as the civilization series and galactic civilizations II. You probably want to avoid most MMORPGs.
I also recommend playing games outside your favorite genre. Pick a great racing, sim, RPG, strategy, sports, FPS, etc game. You'll probably get more enjoyment doing this than playing through all 12 final fantasies or x amount of zeldas.
Except amazon users voted which special they wanted. Sure, the other offers were crap, and didn't have much chance of getting voted for, but then you're suggesting MS paid amazon to have a "potential" sale, which may never happen. Sounds way too tin foil for my tastes.
And I doubt amazon even lost much money. Supposedly MS are now making $70 profit for the premium system, and likely much more for the core system. Seeing how some retailers are dropping $60-$100 off the premium package already (dell.com for instance, once you put it in the shopping cart) I would expect a retail price drop in 3-6 months, probably $360 for the premium (what dell is currently selling it for) and $260 for the core.
Yep, I got twilight princess, component cables, and a classic controller on backorder, for which the ETA is early December.
I could have waited in line 12 hours for a Wii, but no-one had component cables, so it was essentially moot. Now all I have to do is pick one up by mid December and I wont have to worry about getting Zelda or component cables.
Only a couple things disappoint me about the Wii (some games lack 480p, no dolby digital), while my xbox with xbox media center is somewhat more functional than a 360, and the ps3 is out of my price range right now. And the only thing exciting me about the ps3 is linux, even though I have no idea how to run it, the prospect of running some linux games and faster emulators looks promising.
I may pick a 360 core up for $100 on thanksgiving from amazon.com if I'm one of the lucky 1000. It's a crappy core unit, but $100 (well $200 after adding on a hard drive and component cables) is a great deal.
Oddly enough I like my Microsoft Internet keyboard. The keys don't feel as cheap as other keyboards I have used and when it gets dirty it seems to survive complete submersion in water. Although I admit I have not tried mac keyboards, so I don't know what I am missing.
It apparently didn't work for the season finale, which IMO sucked monkey balls. It felt unfinished, like they forgot the punchline, and was only funny in a "eh" sort of way.
I totally agree. I put about 30 hours into that thing and the entire time I just wanted to backstab the king. I got so bored I unplugged my ps2 and havn't touched it since (may pick up ffXii after winter).
Oddly enough the only thing wrong with my new home-built system was my Corsair memory.
I understand the feeling though. First I spent 8 hours wondering why the damn thing wouldn't boot (I didn't push hard enough on the intel core 2 duo heatsink pins, a much worse configuration than AMD, which is relatively easy). Then I do a memtest, everything is find, install the OS, then everything starts going haywire. I do another memtest and find out one of the sticks of RAM is bad.
The part that sucks is that the memory is matched, and I'm not going to waste time sending both sticks back (I want to actually use what I paid for), so I hope that it doesn't make a difference if the ram is matched or not.
Oddly enough, spam is a thing of the past for me. I use outlook and everything I don't want is shoved into the junk mail folder. Out of 100 emails a day I may get 1 spam message through, and I almost never have a false negative in the junk mail folder.
I have about 3 100gb drives, 1 300gb drive, and 1 200gb drive.
I recently dumped them all in favor of 2 fast and quiet 320 gb sata seagate drives. First, because of power and heat concerns (I figure 2 hard drives compared to 5 would have less heat concerns) and second because of noise (the maxtor and samsung drives seemed unusually loud, like they were about to fail).
For some reason my crappy sony DVD recorder didn't like sharing an IDE with a hard drive (yes, I tried all the different master slave and cable select options), and my new motherboard only has one IDE slot (I have no idea why), so I had to replace all my IDE drives with sata drives anyways.
I figure these will last me a good 5-6 years unless WD releases a 10,000rpm 3gb/s raptor drive that is both quiet and blows these drives out of the water (the raptors are faster, but not by much).
However, my main point is that if you are upgrading to Vista (yah, I know, this is slashdot), don't upgrade now if you are patient (I'm not). Samsung will be releasing a flash hybrid harddrive compatible with vista (and perhaps linux) in January that should speed up boot up and cache times.
The one reason I havn't gotten a mac yet is oddly enough, itunes for windows.
You would think I could burn a cd just by right clicking on an album and selecting "burn to cd", but no, right clicking doesn't do anything. I have to create a playlist. I have to do it their way. I figure if even a simple music player frustrates me, the OS would drive me crazy (and you cant really compare windows media player because pretty much everyone knows that is crap, itunes at least is supposed to be good software).
Unfortunately I have to use itunes due to my school.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, WTF? An average rating of 56.9% for the PC. The 360 version looks slightly more promising with an average rating of 78%. I may just pick it up as a rental.
Actually vista RTM seems much faster than rc1/2, even faster than my 1 month old xp install. However, I reverted back to XP, because creative and nvidia still havn't written decent drivers (especially the lack of 5.1 sound for the audigy SE).
Why don't you just use standby? Any modern laptop can enter standby for days, and the startup time is usually a few seconds.
1. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess 95.5%
2. Trauma Center: Second Opinion 84.5%
3. Madden NFL 07 83.7%
4. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 80.4%
5. Rayman Raving Rabbids 78.8%
6. Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2 78.5%
7. Wii Sports WII Nintendo 77.4%
8. Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam WII 75.8%
9. Excite Truck WII Nintendo 74.7%
10. Call of Duty 3 WII Activision 74.3%
11. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz WII 73.5%
12. Red Steel WII Ubisoft 23 65.9%
from gamerankings.com (a meta-review site)
If by excellent you mean average at best, then sure. (I perhaps discounted trauma center unfairly, as I'm still pissed it doesn't support 480p, and madden and marvel are cross platform games).
Well, according to gamerankings and metacritic, GoW is better than any recent PC FPS release, so if you want a recent FPS there is no reason to not pick up GoW for the multiplayer, as the controls work well for a console. Viva Pinata is a great game, even though it looks childish it is alot of fun. Dead Rising is pretty good as well.
So, 3 excellent games, a few great ones (there are other FPS games+racing games), and a ton of o.k. games.
So we compare consoles at this point, the wii and ps3 have 1 excellent game, and mostly shovelware.
All 3 consoles are going to have a ton of great games next year.
They probably rendered it with the game engine, and then CGed the entire thing (not that I know what I am talking about, but this seems plausible).
Looking at the software my family uses (mom, dad, grandparents, brother, inlaws) all of them could probably switch to linux except for my brother (games). Most of the software they need seem to be:
1) Browser (covered by linux)
2) Email (variety of options on linux)
3) Office (open office or something similar)
4) IM client (is there a good linux IM client that interacts with windows messenger?)
5) Greeting card software (anything good on the linux end?)
6) Family tree software (same question)
Except linux on the OLPC doesn't have any official support either. Win 98 support just expired June of this year. I don't know much about how windows 98 compares to XP for vulnerabilities, but it seems the biggest problem is that MS will want to stick IE on there, and the latest IE can only be installed on XP and possibly 2000, meaning either they are stuck with firefox (unlikely) or IE6 (which is riddled with bugs).
If they can get the OLPC running with windows 98 and a firewall and not have it be an instant zombie-spam machine, then I say let them. Hopefully MS will dump a few million into the OLPC and start getting these kids some laptops, regardless of the OS (I can understand the desire for open source, but getting any technology and educational materials to these kids will be beneficial).
The article seems to be speculating that they are trying to run XP. However, there are no quotes regarding this.
Heck, is there any reason they couldn't run windows 98se on this thing? Does windows 98 have support for wireless internet? They could just rename it Windows OLPC and install a lightweight firewall.
Just like they released 9.0 drivers that were only 1/2 compatible (not including 9.0c and T&L)?
You can still change the windows theme to classic and it will run as fast as 2000 or xp. Only in aero mode does it require for some reason tons of ram and cpu power. Turning off the widgets helps too. Basically anything from the past 4 years should be able to run vista at least classic mode.
The one benefit of Vista will be to stop manufacturers from putting crappy integrated graphics into laptops (even apple does this on the non-pro line).
...is lack of anti-alaising. I would have no problems with sticking with the ps2 generation and only paying $10 for games, but I've gotten so used to anti-alaising that it is distracting when games don't have it.
Take final fantasy XII for example. A beautiful game, but so detailed that practically everything in the environment is wavy or jagged. I try not to be such a graphics snob, but when something is distracting enough for me to remove immersion, it begins to be a problem.
Heck, I would even shell out $700 for a PS3 if I could play final fantasy XII with AA, but I doubt Sony goes through the trouble of enhancing last-gen games on the ps3.
I wish apple would do something like that now, a convertible tablet mac. That is the only thing holding me back from buying a macbook pro, as I would miss the tablet features of my fujitsu.
Your wrist? DIP or PIP joints (fingers)? Do you have of a problem with typing compared to using a mouse?
I would say consoles are pretty much out of the question, with perhaps the exception being the wii, unless you are having wrist pain.
In addition, you can visit meta ranking sites such as gamerankings.com
Top 30 games (not counting old-school games) meta-rated (from the above site):
1. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time N64
2. Soul Calibur DC
3. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess WII
4. Metroid Prime GC
5. Tekken 3 PS
6. Metal Gear Solid GBC
7. GoldenEye 007 N64
8. Resident Evil 4 GC
9. Super Mario 64 N64
10. Halo: Combat Evolved XBOX
11. Resident Evil 4 PS2
12. Half-Life 2 PC
13. Chrono Trigger SNES
14. NFL 2K1 DC
15. Grand Theft Auto III
16. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker GC
17. Championship Manager 4 PC
18. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas PS2
19. Gran Turismo PS
20. Halo 2 XBOX
21. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty PS2
22. The Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition GC
23. Half-Life PC
24. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 DC
25. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City PC
26. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 PS
27. Perfect Dark N64
28. Gears of War X360
29. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic XBOX
30. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn PC
If the main problem is your fingers, then you can get mouse intensive games, such as baldur's gate I/II, neverwinter nights 1 or 2, and most strategy games such as the civilization series and galactic civilizations II. You probably want to avoid most MMORPGs.
I also recommend playing games outside your favorite genre. Pick a great racing, sim, RPG, strategy, sports, FPS, etc game. You'll probably get more enjoyment doing this than playing through all 12 final fantasies or x amount of zeldas.
Except amazon users voted which special they wanted. Sure, the other offers were crap, and didn't have much chance of getting voted for, but then you're suggesting MS paid amazon to have a "potential" sale, which may never happen. Sounds way too tin foil for my tastes.
And I doubt amazon even lost much money. Supposedly MS are now making $70 profit for the premium system, and likely much more for the core system. Seeing how some retailers are dropping $60-$100 off the premium package already (dell.com for instance, once you put it in the shopping cart) I would expect a retail price drop in 3-6 months, probably $360 for the premium (what dell is currently selling it for) and $260 for the core.
Because the movie companies would not allow you to "keep" a $6 720p movie when they could sell the same (with slightly better resolution) for $25.
Yah, you would only be able to keep one movie, but the movie studies are too blind to see that this is a limitation.
alcohol most likely
Yep, I got twilight princess, component cables, and a classic controller on backorder, for which the ETA is early December.
I could have waited in line 12 hours for a Wii, but no-one had component cables, so it was essentially moot. Now all I have to do is pick one up by mid December and I wont have to worry about getting Zelda or component cables.
Only a couple things disappoint me about the Wii (some games lack 480p, no dolby digital), while my xbox with xbox media center is somewhat more functional than a 360, and the ps3 is out of my price range right now. And the only thing exciting me about the ps3 is linux, even though I have no idea how to run it, the prospect of running some linux games and faster emulators looks promising.
I may pick a 360 core up for $100 on thanksgiving from amazon.com if I'm one of the lucky 1000. It's a crappy core unit, but $100 (well $200 after adding on a hard drive and component cables) is a great deal.
Oddly enough I like my Microsoft Internet keyboard. The keys don't feel as cheap as other keyboards I have used and when it gets dirty it seems to survive complete submersion in water. Although I admit I have not tried mac keyboards, so I don't know what I am missing.
It apparently didn't work for the season finale, which IMO sucked monkey balls. It felt unfinished, like they forgot the punchline, and was only funny in a "eh" sort of way.
I totally agree. I put about 30 hours into that thing and the entire time I just wanted to backstab the king. I got so bored I unplugged my ps2 and havn't touched it since (may pick up ffXii after winter).
Oddly enough the only thing wrong with my new home-built system was my Corsair memory.
I understand the feeling though. First I spent 8 hours wondering why the damn thing wouldn't boot (I didn't push hard enough on the intel core 2 duo heatsink pins, a much worse configuration than AMD, which is relatively easy). Then I do a memtest, everything is find, install the OS, then everything starts going haywire. I do another memtest and find out one of the sticks of RAM is bad.
The part that sucks is that the memory is matched, and I'm not going to waste time sending both sticks back (I want to actually use what I paid for), so I hope that it doesn't make a difference if the ram is matched or not.
Oddly enough, spam is a thing of the past for me. I use outlook and everything I don't want is shoved into the junk mail folder. Out of 100 emails a day I may get 1 spam message through, and I almost never have a false negative in the junk mail folder.
I have about 3 100gb drives, 1 300gb drive, and 1 200gb drive.
I recently dumped them all in favor of 2 fast and quiet 320 gb sata seagate drives. First, because of power and heat concerns (I figure 2 hard drives compared to 5 would have less heat concerns) and second because of noise (the maxtor and samsung drives seemed unusually loud, like they were about to fail).
For some reason my crappy sony DVD recorder didn't like sharing an IDE with a hard drive (yes, I tried all the different master slave and cable select options), and my new motherboard only has one IDE slot (I have no idea why), so I had to replace all my IDE drives with sata drives anyways.
I figure these will last me a good 5-6 years unless WD releases a 10,000rpm 3gb/s raptor drive that is both quiet and blows these drives out of the water (the raptors are faster, but not by much).
However, my main point is that if you are upgrading to Vista (yah, I know, this is slashdot), don't upgrade now if you are patient (I'm not). Samsung will be releasing a flash hybrid harddrive compatible with vista (and perhaps linux) in January that should speed up boot up and cache times.
The one reason I havn't gotten a mac yet is oddly enough, itunes for windows.
You would think I could burn a cd just by right clicking on an album and selecting "burn to cd", but no, right clicking doesn't do anything. I have to create a playlist. I have to do it their way. I figure if even a simple music player frustrates me, the OS would drive me crazy (and you cant really compare windows media player because pretty much everyone knows that is crap, itunes at least is supposed to be good software).
Unfortunately I have to use itunes due to my school.