"Which is not to say that Mac owners can't watch DVDs -- if they are dual-booting, at least."
I thought that the whole point of running a Mac was NOT having to deal with crap like that. You know, having a PC that just works right out of the box? I guess Apple is finally giving up and falling in line with the rest of the industry when it comes to shipping a screwed up OS with missing features.
If I could play all of my games on Linux I would never use Windows. Problem is, using my games on Linux is a hassle. Distributions are just getting to the point of having working 3D and any decent sound support out of the box. This means that chances are more likely than not that using a game will require extensive driver upgrades. That can often mean updating libraries. Which can mean a compiler upgrade. Or even kernel updates (Granted many users do that one anyway.).
This kind of effort is too much trouble for Linux gamers. Because games keep up with technology that advances at an insane rate, new drivers are often needed, so doing the previously mentioned driver mess gets old really fast. In Windows I can toss video and sound drivers around like crazy, to the point of using different drivers for different games. Changing the drivers is thirty seconds of effort and a minute of reboot. Beats the hell out of the Linux options.
All of this also makes support a nightmare for games companies. Epic only released Unreal Tournament for Linux online, because supporting Linux for that would have been too costly.
What we really need to fix this is a standard distro games are geared to, with a good apt-get method for up/downgrading drivers with up to date drivers to work with. Make support simple. Make setting it up simple. Give the game companies something else to support, and they will come in great numbers.
So how the hell do they test this thing? Zap lab rats? Dogs? Pigs? The homeless?
And what happens when it comes to field tests? Will they just try it out on humans by using it the first chance they can, and hoping that the people being blasted don't all end up with crispy intestines? Or eyeballs that overheat and pop?
What happens when the Marines want a lethal version for battle use? Will we see villiages cluster-bombed with microwave zappers? Imagine dropping a hundred little things that shoot out mass doses of this in every direction. It would be great for flushing out guerrillas (Sort of like Agent Orange and Napalm in Vietnam.).
IMHO, it seems like we would be far better off spending this money pushing the world toward non-violent means of peace, rather than finding newer and "better" ways to harm others.
"I mean seriously -- can a computer consulting company (for example) force you not to work in the industry simply because you used to work for them? Or perhaps you work for a competitor that does business with the same clients?"
It depends on where you are. If you are in a right to work state (Most commonwealths are.) non-compete clauses usually will not hold up. I live/work in Virginia, when non-competes are known for being blasted away by conservative judges who will protect a person's right to work where he chooses.
In more liberal states, non-competes are often enforced by the judges there, who tend to side with the corporations.
And what law would that be? I was not aware that corporations requesting that Napster ban users for offering copyrighted music requires absolute proof. Perhaps you are, in fact, referring to laws that restrict the govenment of the united states, and not the corporations found within.
This is not harassment, it is a legitimate application of Napster's terms of service.
"obviously they didn't listen to one million mp3 files to make sure they were actually such-and-such a song"
And why should they? Is there any evidence that Napster users commonly give files that are meant to be freely redistributed on the net new names?
Napster users sharing copyrighted music not meant for free online redistribution are violating the Napster terms of service. I guarantee you that if Microsoft was accused of violating the GPL, the Slashdot crew would certainly be throwing fits about that!
If the Slashdot editors do not like the way that the record companies are handling online music, they should be working to promote change. They could, for instance post about Prince's online music distribution, the NPG Music Club, or point out Amazon's new mp3 distribution site.
Instead they just bitch and groan about the big evil record companies trying to shut down Napster, and people trying to ban the Napster users who are stealing from musicians.
No wonder the record companies are the ones winning this war.
The cost of the catridges was an issue yes, but what really kept developers away was the attitude of CEO Yamauchi, who insisted that the system be geared toward children. Aside Quake I/II and Perfect Dark, the system and games were always marketed toward the 9-17 year old boy market.
At the same time the Playstation was booming with its adult (17+, such as intense RPGs, strategy/wargames, sports titles.) business. Adults have more money for games, and games for adults can more easily be ported to the PC for easy profit. Therefore it made little sense to produce N64 titles.
After all, cartridge prices were jacked up to make up the difference, and N64 games still sold quite well.
Actually, the N64 handles sound quite well, at CD quality. It was just unable to store long tracks, and instead used sythesized sounds for music. Because most N64 games were geared toward children, great music was not a priority.
Check out the music in Castlevania 64 or Wipeout 64 for some great examples of incredible game music.
The PSX handles sprites quite well, and the later games show it (Guilty Gear, SFA3, Mega Man X4/5.). The big problem with sprites on the PSX was that many of the early sprite based games were poorly optimized and suffered from terrible slowdown (Castlevania, SoTN), which was usually corrected in the Satrun versions, as they tended to ship months or even years later.
The Saturn's real advantage over the PSX with sprites was the RAM add-on, which allowed the Saturn to handle all of the animations in arcade ports. The PSX had to drop a lot of extra stuff, which killed games like MvC.
"Saturn DID NOT use the NV1 though and didn't produce quads"
Yes it did. The Saturn was an all quads machine. Go pick up a used Saturn and some 3D Saturn games, they are all quads with a few exceptions that used rendering tricks to produce triangle rather inefficiently.
"The fact is that there is no PS1 game that cannot be equaled visually by the N64, given the storage"
Go compare Quake II for the N64 with Quake II for the Playstation. Both ports were done by the same people, and the playstation version blows the N64 version away, because of the detail. Effects might be nice, but not if all of the models look like crap because there are not enoigh polygons.
"Even though the saturn and N64 had better hardware."
Ummmmm... no.
The Sega Saturn hardware was grossly inferior to the Playstation. The Saturn was designed only to support quadrilateral polygons, which are absolutely terrible (And extremely unpopular.) for video game use. Beyond that, it had a dual CPU architecture that only allowed one CPU to access memory at a time, which made programming for the machine a huge pain in the ass.
As for the N64, the hardware really only looked great on paper. In practice it processes far fewer polygons than the Playstation, making 3D games a pain. It also has far too little memory (Later fixed with an add-on card.) which made it very, very hard to make textures look decent on the system.
"True the N64 crippled itself by being a cartrige based system.."
That only crippled the N64 in regards to full motion video, which does little to actually enhance a game. Plenty of games went over quite well on the Playstation without video clips.
"So, all you're really paying for with vendor-supplied RAM is the assurance it will work from the vendor, right?"
Yes. Never buy RAM from Sun. Sun RAM is outrageously overpriced. For mission critical stuff, use RAM from Dataram, as it will not void a service contract, otherwise just find some cheap stuff that will work.
Micropayments will never work, for the following reasons:
- Abuse. People would find a million and one ways to abuse it, from micropayment pop-ups that go off incessantly, to sites that constantly refresh to get payments.
- Content. Am I really going to make a micropayment to CNN every time I check it for a quick update and nothing has changed in the last four hours?
- Too much surfing! Unless the micropayments were almost meaningless, serious websurfers would be broke all the time.
The real problem here is not that companies can not get employees to move to these places, but that they would even expect employees to. I have better places to live than puritanical, midwestern backwaters.
My last company moved our datacenter to Indiana, and wanted me to go along. I promptly quit. I currently live a half hour from hundreds of bars, clubs, and concert halls. I can walk from my house in the suburbs to an Irish pub in fifteen minutes. I would never even consider moving to a state like Utah.
What processor are you using? Some friends and I had originally thought that the problems you mention were due to lag, and later found that they are actually caused by a "slow" CPU, slow being anything less than a P-III 500 or any Athlon. It seems to have something to do with the way Windows swaps data.
The querent is obviously in a state of near-total ignorance when it comes to modem gaming and the work companies do for it.
Quake II and III were both immensly popular, almost entirely because of the networking code. John Carmack and Co. poured many, many hours doing nothing but reworking the game code to compensate for modem latency.
The same goes for many other online games. Starsiege Tribes has incredible code for modem gaming, to the point that a 64 player game can be almost perfectly playable with a modem. The same can be said for Unreal Tournament (Although not for its predecessor.). Quake III and UT also had great AI bots to play against in case a modem player was not in the mood for lag.
And this does not simply apply to shooters. StarCraft has excellent modem code, as does Diablo II. EverQuest has incredible modem compensation, but they cannot add bandwidth to the servers fast enough for all of the customers.
In short, do not complain about the developers. They do all they can, modems just can not do the job. What you really need to do is keep bugging your telco for DSL. Call them every day. Get all of your friends to call. Show them all the money they can make selling to you.
Trivial my ass! I play pool at work for at least an hour a day. Here in the Herndon/Reston Virginia area, tech job fairs are regularly held at the local pool halls. For us, pool is far from trivial.
It seems like the government finds new ways to waste money every day. Spending it attacking the personal liberties of the citizens funding the government had got to be the lamest waste of all.
Is there some way to sure the feds for flushing money down the toilet on stupid stuff like this?
"Would it be that surprising to find Windows soon available "for non-commericial use"?"
Yes. Solaris, BeOS, and QNX are free for non-commercial use because almost nobody uses them non-commercially anyway. As Win 2000 eats away more of the workstation market from UNIX, the other OS vendors risk losing market share to enthusiasts running Winblows at home. So for them it makes sense to make personal use free.
Microsoft making Winblows free would be idiotic. They still have a monopoly on the desktop market, and will continue to be the most popular desktop OS for at least a few more years. They have no reason to give it away. If anything, they have reason to start charging MORE for it.
Selling all of those Corel shares at a loss is probably hundreds of millions (If not billions.) of dollars cheaper than dealing with another antitrust suit. At least M$ is finally learning how to deal with DOJ investigations- Not insulting the prosecuters, government, american people, ignoring DOJ orders, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
"Which is not to say that Mac owners can't watch DVDs -- if they are dual-booting, at least."
I thought that the whole point of running a Mac was NOT having to deal with crap like that. You know, having a PC that just works right out of the box? I guess Apple is finally giving up and falling in line with the rest of the industry when it comes to shipping a screwed up OS with missing features.
What a shame.
If I could play all of my games on Linux I would never use Windows. Problem is, using my games on Linux is a hassle. Distributions are just getting to the point of having working 3D and any decent sound support out of the box. This means that chances are more likely than not that using a game will require extensive driver upgrades. That can often mean updating libraries. Which can mean a compiler upgrade. Or even kernel updates (Granted many users do that one anyway.).
This kind of effort is too much trouble for Linux gamers. Because games keep up with technology that advances at an insane rate, new drivers are often needed, so doing the previously mentioned driver mess gets old really fast. In Windows I can toss video and sound drivers around like crazy, to the point of using different drivers for different games. Changing the drivers is thirty seconds of effort and a minute of reboot. Beats the hell out of the Linux options.
All of this also makes support a nightmare for games companies. Epic only released Unreal Tournament for Linux online, because supporting Linux for that would have been too costly.
What we really need to fix this is a standard distro games are geared to, with a good apt-get method for up/downgrading drivers with up to date drivers to work with. Make support simple. Make setting it up simple. Give the game companies something else to support, and they will come in great numbers.
So how the hell do they test this thing? Zap lab rats? Dogs? Pigs? The homeless?
And what happens when it comes to field tests? Will they just try it out on humans by using it the first chance they can, and hoping that the people being blasted don't all end up with crispy intestines? Or eyeballs that overheat and pop?
What happens when the Marines want a lethal version for battle use? Will we see villiages cluster-bombed with microwave zappers? Imagine dropping a hundred little things that shoot out mass doses of this in every direction. It would be great for flushing out guerrillas (Sort of like Agent Orange and Napalm in Vietnam.).
IMHO, it seems like we would be far better off spending this money pushing the world toward non-violent means of peace, rather than finding newer and "better" ways to harm others.
"I mean seriously -- can a computer consulting company (for example) force you not to work in the industry simply because you used to work for them? Or perhaps you work for a competitor that does business with the same clients?"
It depends on where you are. If you are in a right to work state (Most commonwealths are.) non-compete clauses usually will not hold up. I live/work in Virginia, when non-competes are known for being blasted away by conservative judges who will protect a person's right to work where he chooses.
In more liberal states, non-competes are often enforced by the judges there, who tend to side with the corporations.
"BECAUSE IT'S THE LAW"
And what law would that be? I was not aware that corporations requesting that Napster ban users for offering copyrighted music requires absolute proof. Perhaps you are, in fact, referring to laws that restrict the govenment of the united states, and not the corporations found within.
This is not harassment, it is a legitimate application of Napster's terms of service.
Very good point! Perhaps Napster should spell that out in their TOS with details and sue. Damned if that wouldn't be hilarious!
"Or do you mean the adult games had another large market in PCs?"
Exactly. Any console game can easily be ported to the PC, but the large adult market makes it easy to sell more copies.
"obviously they didn't listen to one million mp3 files to make sure they were actually such-and-such a song"
And why should they? Is there any evidence that Napster users commonly give files that are meant to be freely redistributed on the net new names?
Napster users sharing copyrighted music not meant for free online redistribution are violating the Napster terms of service. I guarantee you that if Microsoft was accused of violating the GPL, the Slashdot crew would certainly be throwing fits about that!
If the Slashdot editors do not like the way that the record companies are handling online music, they should be working to promote change. They could, for instance post about Prince's online music distribution, the NPG Music Club, or point out Amazon's new mp3 distribution site.
Instead they just bitch and groan about the big evil record companies trying to shut down Napster, and people trying to ban the Napster users who are stealing from musicians.
No wonder the record companies are the ones winning this war.
The cost of the catridges was an issue yes, but what really kept developers away was the attitude of CEO Yamauchi, who insisted that the system be geared toward children. Aside Quake I/II and Perfect Dark, the system and games were always marketed toward the 9-17 year old boy market.
At the same time the Playstation was booming with its adult (17+, such as intense RPGs, strategy/wargames, sports titles.) business. Adults have more money for games, and games for adults can more easily be ported to the PC for easy profit. Therefore it made little sense to produce N64 titles.
After all, cartridge prices were jacked up to make up the difference, and N64 games still sold quite well.
Actually, the N64 handles sound quite well, at CD quality. It was just unable to store long tracks, and instead used sythesized sounds for music. Because most N64 games were geared toward children, great music was not a priority.
Check out the music in Castlevania 64 or Wipeout 64 for some great examples of incredible game music.
The PSX handles sprites quite well, and the later games show it (Guilty Gear, SFA3, Mega Man X4/5.). The big problem with sprites on the PSX was that many of the early sprite based games were poorly optimized and suffered from terrible slowdown (Castlevania, SoTN), which was usually corrected in the Satrun versions, as they tended to ship months or even years later.
The Saturn's real advantage over the PSX with sprites was the RAM add-on, which allowed the Saturn to handle all of the animations in arcade ports. The PSX had to drop a lot of extra stuff, which killed games like MvC.
"Saturn DID NOT use the NV1 though and didn't produce quads"
Yes it did. The Saturn was an all quads machine. Go pick up a used Saturn and some 3D Saturn games, they are all quads with a few exceptions that used rendering tricks to produce triangle rather inefficiently.
"The fact is that there is no PS1 game that cannot be equaled visually by the N64, given the storage"
Go compare Quake II for the N64 with Quake II for the Playstation. Both ports were done by the same people, and the playstation version blows the N64 version away, because of the detail. Effects might be nice, but not if all of the models look like crap because there are not enoigh polygons.
Why don't they just use the NSA's secure Linux?
"Even though the saturn and N64 had better hardware."
Ummmmm... no.
The Sega Saturn hardware was grossly inferior to the Playstation. The Saturn was designed only to support quadrilateral polygons, which are absolutely terrible (And extremely unpopular.) for video game use. Beyond that, it had a dual CPU architecture that only allowed one CPU to access memory at a time, which made programming for the machine a huge pain in the ass.
As for the N64, the hardware really only looked great on paper. In practice it processes far fewer polygons than the Playstation, making 3D games a pain. It also has far too little memory (Later fixed with an add-on card.) which made it very, very hard to make textures look decent on the system.
"True the N64 crippled itself by being a cartrige based system.."
That only crippled the N64 in regards to full motion video, which does little to actually enhance a game. Plenty of games went over quite well on the Playstation without video clips.
Perhaps Lambourghini should sue Blizzard for stealing the name of their car for a video game. After all, they were obviously using the name first...
Not even that would be needed. Two Dell Linux servers with a support contract would do.
"So, all you're really paying for with vendor-supplied RAM is the assurance it will work from the vendor, right?" Yes. Never buy RAM from Sun. Sun RAM is outrageously overpriced. For mission critical stuff, use RAM from Dataram, as it will not void a service contract, otherwise just find some cheap stuff that will work.
Micropayments will never work, for the following reasons:
- Abuse. People would find a million and one ways to abuse it, from micropayment pop-ups that go off incessantly, to sites that constantly refresh to get payments.
- Content. Am I really going to make a micropayment to CNN every time I check it for a quick update and nothing has changed in the last four hours?
- Too much surfing! Unless the micropayments were almost meaningless, serious websurfers would be broke all the time.
The real problem here is not that companies can not get employees to move to these places, but that they would even expect employees to. I have better places to live than puritanical, midwestern backwaters.
My last company moved our datacenter to Indiana, and wanted me to go along. I promptly quit. I currently live a half hour from hundreds of bars, clubs, and concert halls. I can walk from my house in the suburbs to an Irish pub in fifteen minutes. I would never even consider moving to a state like Utah.
What processor are you using? Some friends and I had originally thought that the problems you mention were due to lag, and later found that they are actually caused by a "slow" CPU, slow being anything less than a P-III 500 or any Athlon. It seems to have something to do with the way Windows swaps data.
The querent is obviously in a state of near-total ignorance when it comes to modem gaming and the work companies do for it.
Quake II and III were both immensly popular, almost entirely because of the networking code. John Carmack and Co. poured many, many hours doing nothing but reworking the game code to compensate for modem latency.
The same goes for many other online games. Starsiege Tribes has incredible code for modem gaming, to the point that a 64 player game can be almost perfectly playable with a modem. The same can be said for Unreal Tournament (Although not for its predecessor.). Quake III and UT also had great AI bots to play against in case a modem player was not in the mood for lag.
And this does not simply apply to shooters. StarCraft has excellent modem code, as does Diablo II. EverQuest has incredible modem compensation, but they cannot add bandwidth to the servers fast enough for all of the customers.
In short, do not complain about the developers. They do all they can, modems just can not do the job. What you really need to do is keep bugging your telco for DSL. Call them every day. Get all of your friends to call. Show them all the money they can make selling to you.
"a trivial but informative subject."
Trivial my ass! I play pool at work for at least an hour a day. Here in the Herndon/Reston Virginia area, tech job fairs are regularly held at the local pool halls. For us, pool is far from trivial.
It seems like the government finds new ways to waste money every day. Spending it attacking the personal liberties of the citizens funding the government had got to be the lamest waste of all.
Is there some way to sure the feds for flushing money down the toilet on stupid stuff like this?
"Would it be that surprising to find Windows soon available "for non-commericial use"?"
Yes. Solaris, BeOS, and QNX are free for non-commercial use because almost nobody uses them non-commercially anyway. As Win 2000 eats away more of the workstation market from UNIX, the other OS vendors risk losing market share to enthusiasts running Winblows at home. So for them it makes sense to make personal use free.
Microsoft making Winblows free would be idiotic. They still have a monopoly on the desktop market, and will continue to be the most popular desktop OS for at least a few more years. They have no reason to give it away. If anything, they have reason to start charging MORE for it.
Selling all of those Corel shares at a loss is probably hundreds of millions (If not billions.) of dollars cheaper than dealing with another antitrust suit. At least M$ is finally learning how to deal with DOJ investigations- Not insulting the prosecuters, government, american people, ignoring DOJ orders, etc.