I've found this thread interesting because I've always been interesting in looking into home brewing; but I just wanted to interject that as an American living in Australia the prices for buying beer from a store here are drastically different (as in more expensive).
A slab -- or a case, or 24-pack -- of mainstream American beer (Budweiser, Coors, etc) can be bought for US$15, and even a microbrew might still only be $25 at somewhere like Costco. So 2 slabs would only be in the $30-50 range (rough estimate, it's been a while). And my German friends here, among others, have had the same reaction to the beer prices as they're used to having it be much cheaper as well.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with your math but that it would have to be a different calculation if you were using beer prices from somewhere else.
I completely agree. And just because I am normally pretty indifferent to the whole "OS war" (I'm happy with XP, although I'm happy to use someone else's Mac and I had Ubuntu running on my system at one point just for the hell of it) I figured I'd chime in with my own Vista story.
I've never griped about XP, it seems to run just fine for what I need, it supports the apps (and games) that I like, and with a nice fast system I have rarely run into any trouble, system crashes, etc. And with SP2, even some of the minor issues I was having seemed to go away (I mainly remember my wireless USB adapter working much more happily with SP2's wireless configuration). I saw beta versions of Vista, and had the immediate "hmm looks kinda like OS X" reaction as everyone else -- which wasn't a bad thing, I can be a sucker for things like pretty looking translucent windows; but in any case I figured I'd do the smart thing and wait the requisite year or two before upgrading.
So, when I replaced my computer with a new "Vista-ready" PC a few months ago, with the intent of swapping over my old XP install, it was to my surprise that they had left Vista installed on the machine. At this point, I had a hunch that told me I should ignore it and wipe the disk and install XP anyways, but my curiosity got the best of me. Plus, I thought, "hey, free upgrade!"
I'll spare you the details because everyone has made the same complaints before... but essentially, I had to constantly tweak application settings to get things to run properly, and certain things just took a long time to load, my 1 GB of ram felt like 256 MB, and on and on. A couple of specific things that really just irked me:
1. The default "windows picture viewer" took ages to load! As in, double-click a JPG... wait... wait... about 20 seconds later, it opened. Wonderful. 2. Flash 8 doesn't work with Aero so every time I opened it, Aero would turn off, giving me a black screen for about 5 seconds while the graphics settings refreshed... eventually I turned off Aero altogether because this got so annoying. Awesome.
Last week, I went and gave my PC an actual "upgrade" by wiping it and installing XP. I can't tell you how pleased I am with the decision. Everything runs so much more smoothly, it really is like having a brand new computer. Microsoft can plead all they want, but I'm going to be pleading right back to everyone I know NOT to install Vista, especially when I know they're going to be coming to me for their tech/computer help. I actually feel sorry for Microsoft (ok not really... maybe just the people who spent six years developing this POS).
I don't think so... even when you click the link from Google's banned books page it goes to the book by Jack London. James Baldwin is best known for "Go Tell it on the Mountain". Not sure if that was ever banned or not.
Ok, first of all, as many people have already pointed out (but few seem to notice), this article is from September, 2003.
In any case, their auctions are not replacing their current ticket selling system, it is just a way for them to make some extra money, and people to be able to score a few last minute tickets at prices that they would be paying scalpers anyways (so basically it is just a way for ticketmaster to make more money). For certain big-name concerts they apparently hold a few sets of tickets and auction them off after the rest of the tickets have sold out. I regularly get concert updates from ticketmaster and it seems like once every month or so there is one of these auctions (the last few I remember are Roger Waters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Madonna...), and they have rarely been of any interest to me... for one thing, these are the kinds of concerts which often have face value prices of $100+ to begin with.
I think most everyone here agrees that ticketmaster has way too much of a monopoly over ticket sales, and their fees are ridiculous. But this whole auction thing is nothing new, and it just moves some money from money-grubbing scalpers to money-grubbing ticketmaster executives, and hardly changes anything. The fact that nobody here seemed to notice that this auction thing has already been going on for some time pretty much proves my point.
I didn't say anything about it never happening... it's just the combination of Walmart, the face of American mass-market consumerism, and Linux that makes me chuckle. Not that I have anything against Linux gaining exposure, but my image of the average Walmart customer is someone who will be very confused upon seeing (and/or unknowingly purchasing) something like that Linspire laptop in the store.
From TFA:"Such components include central processing units -- the brain of the computer that powers its basic functions -- as well as monitors, keyboards and mice that customers can combine to create customized packages they can load in a shopping cart and take home right away."
Yeah, it sounds like you will be able to choose very basic things like processor--excuse me, computer brain--speed, which will probably be part of some pre-defined tower set up like a preconfigured Dell, Compaq, etc. The summary definitely has it wrong, OEM parts and Linux aren't going to factor into Walmart's version of "DIY".
According to the link, Return of the Jedi was the first. Of course, I never made it that far in the theater myself, I got scared by a Friday the 13th trailer and went to see another movie (this was the 1985 ROTJ re-release when I was almost 4 yrs old).
But I do distinctly remember the Jurassic Park DTS intro... it seems like around that time was when Dolby Digital, SDDS, etc, surround sound intros started becoming really prominent. I had always thought that the THX intro was a lot newer than 1983 myself, but what do I know.
Reminds me of this movie, a conservative fundamentalist view of "porn addiction" which was on Lifetime last year (that's right, I watched Lifetime... after I saw an ad for it I just knew it was an unintenional comedic masterpiece in the making). And it was pretty damn hilarious. The main character gets "addicted" to porn (and pr0n as shown on the Lifetime network consists of teenage girls dancing around in skimpy clothing), and his "addiction" makes him stay up all night watching it and drinking red bull (wtf), which means he doesn't get any sleep and becomes a poor student/athlete. He also leaves a burned CD labeled "Virgin Vaginas" in his drawer, which his little brother finds and it scars him for life. Those are only a few examples, you can check out the imdb comments for some other good ones.
Now, that's not to say that porn addiction is not possible, but there's definitely a realistic view of it, and a completely skewed conservative view like the above.
on topic only for those of you who follow./ as if it were "The Real World"... (perhaps as a drinking game?)
that was pretty amazing that geekee managed to find the opportunity to turn Overly Critical Guy's fuckwit club joke back on him only a few posts later. This reminds me of George Costanza's "Well the jerk store called... and they're all out of you!"
And not that it excuses him from anything, but his name is Overly Critical Guy.
I agree, especially about the "first ping-pong game to have decent graphics" part and "first ping-pong game in years"... neither of these things lead to any indication of being a "hit" even if they happened to be true. Even if this was the first ping-pong videogame since Pong, nobody would be rushing to buy it just on principle. The only way this will be remotely a hit is if it captures the simple fun of a game like Virtua Tennis and makes for a good 2P game... that combined with Rockstar's name could potentially sell some copies. But I don't see it being much of a hit.
Nonsense. A 3 minute call placed through Microsoft's activation phone support and your done. I work in a shop where motherboards are replaced every other day on all kinds of PCs.
Yeah that is true with XP, but the rumor (fact? not sure) is that with Vista they're not going to allow you to do that.
I would have been quick to agree with you had it not been for some college buddies a few years ago who still kept an N64 around for the sole purpose of playing New Tetris (I could have sworn it had a different name, but oh well). As far as I could tell, it was the only Tetris to feature the challenge of creating 4x4 blocks, as explained here, which completely changed the strategy of the game.
The screenshot in the wikipedia article is perfect at demonstrating the block laying strategy, trying to create 4x4 blocks instead of just lines. There were a couple of other features that popped up in other tetris games (having a "reserve" piece that you could swap out with the trigger buttons), but otherwise the gameplay is unlike any other tetris game I know of. I never did get very good at it myself but my friends were totally into it.
Anyways, I agree that this or any other simple Tetris clone could easily just be made into a revolution game (or compilation), but in terms of picking out obscure N64 games that people would want to play today, I have to say that New Tetris was a good choice. There is something about that added gameplay element that makes it way more fun than regular tetris.
Update: 02/12 21:07 GMT by Z : Headline changed for accuracy.
Slashdotters are equally guilty of complaining about imaginary problems as they are quick to point out each other's mistakes. Such is the circle of life.
I don't see why you are so quick to dismiss the game... did you even click on the link? It doesn't look like the most advanced game (it is, after all, free), but it could be pretty fun in the vein of one of those simple quick action games like Diner Dash or others that can be found on the web. I, for one, was interested in trying it out, but I am at work -- a slashdot reading haven, of course, but downloading/playing games is a stretch.
Why would it make money?
AFAIK, it isn't meant to make money... the company apparently makes their money creating these so-called "advergames" themselves (for Jeep, PT Cruiser, Coldstone Creamery, etc, according to their website) and any self-respecting game developer probably has certain qualms about being pigeonholed in such a market, and this is their way of doing something fun and creative as an escape and a parody of the average "advergame" (my take on the situation, anyhow). Although by making minor headlines I suppose they've probably achieved their goal, which could lead to "making money" in the sense of attracting more business for future projects.
Why is this news?
Personally, I thought it was kind of funny and interesting. These advergames are everywhere and it is cool that someone out there would take the time to experiment with a game that tries to "enact dissatisfaction and criticism against corporations" rather than a positive advertising message. I play these stupid little games with advertising tie-ins all the time when people email them to me (a Pringles King Kong game comes to mind) and they're good for a few minutes of fun, but they do beat you over the head with the advertising.
Anyways, I thought I would stand up for these guys because it seemed like a pretty original idea, and from the responses I've seen here it seems like everyone is scoffing at it. What's the big deal? I found it more interesting than IE 7 leaks or "Google is still super awesome" articles. Though Google still is super awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
I've found this thread interesting because I've always been interesting in looking into home brewing; but I just wanted to interject that as an American living in Australia the prices for buying beer from a store here are drastically different (as in more expensive).
A slab -- or a case, or 24-pack -- of mainstream American beer (Budweiser, Coors, etc) can be bought for US$15, and even a microbrew might still only be $25 at somewhere like Costco. So 2 slabs would only be in the $30-50 range (rough estimate, it's been a while). And my German friends here, among others, have had the same reaction to the beer prices as they're used to having it be much cheaper as well.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with your math but that it would have to be a different calculation if you were using beer prices from somewhere else.
I, for one....
I completely agree. And just because I am normally pretty indifferent to the whole "OS war" (I'm happy with XP, although I'm happy to use someone else's Mac and I had Ubuntu running on my system at one point just for the hell of it) I figured I'd chime in with my own Vista story.
I've never griped about XP, it seems to run just fine for what I need, it supports the apps (and games) that I like, and with a nice fast system I have rarely run into any trouble, system crashes, etc. And with SP2, even some of the minor issues I was having seemed to go away (I mainly remember my wireless USB adapter working much more happily with SP2's wireless configuration). I saw beta versions of Vista, and had the immediate "hmm looks kinda like OS X" reaction as everyone else -- which wasn't a bad thing, I can be a sucker for things like pretty looking translucent windows; but in any case I figured I'd do the smart thing and wait the requisite year or two before upgrading.
So, when I replaced my computer with a new "Vista-ready" PC a few months ago, with the intent of swapping over my old XP install, it was to my surprise that they had left Vista installed on the machine. At this point, I had a hunch that told me I should ignore it and wipe the disk and install XP anyways, but my curiosity got the best of me. Plus, I thought, "hey, free upgrade!"
I'll spare you the details because everyone has made the same complaints before... but essentially, I had to constantly tweak application settings to get things to run properly, and certain things just took a long time to load, my 1 GB of ram felt like 256 MB, and on and on. A couple of specific things that really just irked me:
1. The default "windows picture viewer" took ages to load! As in, double-click a JPG... wait... wait... about 20 seconds later, it opened. Wonderful.
2. Flash 8 doesn't work with Aero so every time I opened it, Aero would turn off, giving me a black screen for about 5 seconds while the graphics settings refreshed... eventually I turned off Aero altogether because this got so annoying. Awesome.
Last week, I went and gave my PC an actual "upgrade" by wiping it and installing XP. I can't tell you how pleased I am with the decision. Everything runs so much more smoothly, it really is like having a brand new computer. Microsoft can plead all they want, but I'm going to be pleading right back to everyone I know NOT to install Vista, especially when I know they're going to be coming to me for their tech/computer help. I actually feel sorry for Microsoft (ok not really... maybe just the people who spent six years developing this POS).
So you're the guy that's always preventing cool products from being released in the US! That's discrimination, I am so going to sue your ass!
I don't think so... even when you click the link from Google's banned books page it goes to the book by Jack London. James Baldwin is best known for "Go Tell it on the Mountain". Not sure if that was ever banned or not.
Same reaction here. Apparently you win by collecting all 32 treasures. If only we had known about this map!
This news is rather mind-blowing, I could have sworn that all Atari games went on forever and had no point.
21. Brand new Aero Glass translucent* BSOD!
*requirements:
DirectX 9 capable GPU with Hardware Pixel Shader v2.0 and WDDM Driver support
1 GB RAM
700 MB of HD space
Anyone else find it interesting that Torrentspy.com has a parent company (Valence Media)?
Ok, first of all, as many people have already pointed out (but few seem to notice), this article is from September, 2003.
In any case, their auctions are not replacing their current ticket selling system, it is just a way for them to make some extra money, and people to be able to score a few last minute tickets at prices that they would be paying scalpers anyways (so basically it is just a way for ticketmaster to make more money). For certain big-name concerts they apparently hold a few sets of tickets and auction them off after the rest of the tickets have sold out. I regularly get concert updates from ticketmaster and it seems like once every month or so there is one of these auctions (the last few I remember are Roger Waters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Madonna...), and they have rarely been of any interest to me... for one thing, these are the kinds of concerts which often have face value prices of $100+ to begin with.
I think most everyone here agrees that ticketmaster has way too much of a monopoly over ticket sales, and their fees are ridiculous. But this whole auction thing is nothing new, and it just moves some money from money-grubbing scalpers to money-grubbing ticketmaster executives, and hardly changes anything. The fact that nobody here seemed to notice that this auction thing has already been going on for some time pretty much proves my point.
I didn't say anything about it never happening... it's just the combination of Walmart, the face of American mass-market consumerism, and Linux that makes me chuckle. Not that I have anything against Linux gaining exposure, but my image of the average Walmart customer is someone who will be very confused upon seeing (and/or unknowingly purchasing) something like that Linspire laptop in the store.
From TFA:"Such components include central processing units -- the brain of the computer that powers its basic functions -- as well as monitors, keyboards and mice that customers can combine to create customized packages they can load in a shopping cart and take home right away."
Yeah, it sounds like you will be able to choose very basic things like processor--excuse me, computer brain--speed, which will probably be part of some pre-defined tower set up like a preconfigured Dell, Compaq, etc. The summary definitely has it wrong, OEM parts and Linux aren't going to factor into Walmart's version of "DIY".
Plus, Walmart + Linux = lol.
somewhere there is a moderator pondering a +1 informative, but his pride is holding him back.
Well, that's why you get sites like Revver, which is basically a YouTube clone with some sort of a business model.
According to the link, Return of the Jedi was the first. Of course, I never made it that far in the theater myself, I got scared by a Friday the 13th trailer and went to see another movie (this was the 1985 ROTJ re-release when I was almost 4 yrs old).
But I do distinctly remember the Jurassic Park DTS intro... it seems like around that time was when Dolby Digital, SDDS, etc, surround sound intros started becoming really prominent. I had always thought that the THX intro was a lot newer than 1983 myself, but what do I know.
RedBerry 5 is aliiiive!
Well that's how I pictured it, anyhow.
Reminds me of this movie, a conservative fundamentalist view of "porn addiction" which was on Lifetime last year (that's right, I watched Lifetime... after I saw an ad for it I just knew it was an unintenional comedic masterpiece in the making). And it was pretty damn hilarious. The main character gets "addicted" to porn (and pr0n as shown on the Lifetime network consists of teenage girls dancing around in skimpy clothing), and his "addiction" makes him stay up all night watching it and drinking red bull (wtf), which means he doesn't get any sleep and becomes a poor student/athlete. He also leaves a burned CD labeled "Virgin Vaginas" in his drawer, which his little brother finds and it scars him for life. Those are only a few examples, you can check out the imdb comments for some other good ones.
Now, that's not to say that porn addiction is not possible, but there's definitely a realistic view of it, and a completely skewed conservative view like the above.
if you die in this game, does that mean you die in real life too?
on topic only for those of you who follow ./ as if it were "The Real World"... (perhaps as a drinking game?)
that was pretty amazing that geekee managed to find the opportunity to turn Overly Critical Guy's fuckwit club joke back on him only a few posts later. This reminds me of George Costanza's "Well the jerk store called... and they're all out of you!"
And not that it excuses him from anything, but his name is Overly Critical Guy.
I can't wait for next week's episode!
I agree, especially about the "first ping-pong game to have decent graphics" part and "first ping-pong game in years"... neither of these things lead to any indication of being a "hit" even if they happened to be true. Even if this was the first ping-pong videogame since Pong, nobody would be rushing to buy it just on principle. The only way this will be remotely a hit is if it captures the simple fun of a game like Virtua Tennis and makes for a good 2P game... that combined with Rockstar's name could potentially sell some copies. But I don't see it being much of a hit.
there was an entire South Park episode that centered around one of those things.
Nonsense. A 3 minute call placed through Microsoft's activation phone support and your done. I work in a shop where motherboards are replaced every other day on all kinds of PCs.
Yeah that is true with XP, but the rumor (fact? not sure) is that with Vista they're not going to allow you to do that.
I would have been quick to agree with you had it not been for some college buddies a few years ago who still kept an N64 around for the sole purpose of playing New Tetris (I could have sworn it had a different name, but oh well). As far as I could tell, it was the only Tetris to feature the challenge of creating 4x4 blocks, as explained here, which completely changed the strategy of the game.
The screenshot in the wikipedia article is perfect at demonstrating the block laying strategy, trying to create 4x4 blocks instead of just lines. There were a couple of other features that popped up in other tetris games (having a "reserve" piece that you could swap out with the trigger buttons), but otherwise the gameplay is unlike any other tetris game I know of. I never did get very good at it myself but my friends were totally into it.
Anyways, I agree that this or any other simple Tetris clone could easily just be made into a revolution game (or compilation), but in terms of picking out obscure N64 games that people would want to play today, I have to say that New Tetris was a good choice. There is something about that added gameplay element that makes it way more fun than regular tetris.
Of course, it still wasn't as badass as Super Puzzle Fighter II.
Update: 02/12 21:07 GMT by Z : Headline changed for accuracy.
Slashdotters are equally guilty of complaining about imaginary problems as they are quick to point out each other's mistakes. Such is the circle of life.
I don't see why you are so quick to dismiss the game... did you even click on the link? It doesn't look like the most advanced game (it is, after all, free), but it could be pretty fun in the vein of one of those simple quick action games like Diner Dash or others that can be found on the web. I, for one, was interested in trying it out, but I am at work -- a slashdot reading haven, of course, but downloading/playing games is a stretch.
Why would it make money?
AFAIK, it isn't meant to make money... the company apparently makes their money creating these so-called "advergames" themselves (for Jeep, PT Cruiser, Coldstone Creamery, etc, according to their website) and any self-respecting game developer probably has certain qualms about being pigeonholed in such a market, and this is their way of doing something fun and creative as an escape and a parody of the average "advergame" (my take on the situation, anyhow). Although by making minor headlines I suppose they've probably achieved their goal, which could lead to "making money" in the sense of attracting more business for future projects.
Why is this news?
Personally, I thought it was kind of funny and interesting. These advergames are everywhere and it is cool that someone out there would take the time to experiment with a game that tries to "enact dissatisfaction and criticism against corporations" rather than a positive advertising message. I play these stupid little games with advertising tie-ins all the time when people email them to me (a Pringles King Kong game comes to mind) and they're good for a few minutes of fun, but they do beat you over the head with the advertising.
Anyways, I thought I would stand up for these guys because it seemed like a pretty original idea, and from the responses I've seen here it seems like everyone is scoffing at it. What's the big deal? I found it more interesting than IE 7 leaks or "Google is still super awesome" articles. Though Google still is super awesome.
I heard that's sort of similar to what Bill Gates did when he invented the Xbox so he could get into E3.