I've only played one FPS+light gun game, don't remember the name, but it was a Resident evil game for the PS2. It was one of the worst games I've ever played, mostly because the controller scheme was clumpsy and infuriating. You need two analog joysticks to be able to move freely in an FPS, and guns usually only have a single d-pad which is too small and placed all wrong.
FPS+light gun is a pretty intuitive combination, but you'd need some really cool new type of lightgun/gamepad combo controller thingy to make it work. Incidentally, I hear the Revolution will have this really cool new type of lightgun/gamepad combo controller thingy. Time will tell if this actually works.
There is a big reason between releasing a perfect game and releasing a game that is bug-free enough you don't need to release a bug-fix patch a few weeks after initial release.
PHP has an even bigger market share, by your logic they should have bought Zend. Well designed systems that are harder to master, like Rails, JBoss and ASP.Net won't drive the trivially easy web languages like ASP and PHP out of business, but there's room for everyone.
So he is basically the ultimate troll, trying to always say stupid things that have just enough sense in them that it is barely belivable that he didn't write them only to generate flames? Could be.
I agree. I guess what I really meant to say is that backwards compatibility is the reason why MS feel they have to do what they are doing. There _are_ other options, just as you say.
Microsoft is a company with a lot of talent, if they wanted to write a good new OS, they could do it. The problem is that they need to support DOS, 16-bit Windows apps and all the different incarnations of win32.
I doubt they will make a $300 loss on the first batch of hardware, but it is possible. On the other hand, it should only ake a few months to ramp up and streamline production, start implementing cost-cutting design changes (The cost of making Blu-ray drives will be next to nothing before long, exactly as it happened with DVD-readers and CD-readers before) and move production to locations with cheap labour, lowering the production costs a few hundred dollars. Some of these cost decreases will trickle down to the consumer, but most of it will be swallowed by Sony to keep their hardware losses managable. Don't expect that the average loss on the PS3:s produced during the first year after release to go above the $100-$150 range. If every consumer buys a controller or two (Sony will probably double the price of controllers because they are wireless, just like Microsoft does), and three or four games, they should be able to break even on the year of the lanch.
That would explain the crashes, but not the glacial speed. Perhaps they are written in C64 assembly and emulated? That makes sense, because if their products ever get released for the C64, they will be all set.
That 'Flip-flops'-story seems like a real non-starter for me. Pretty much every single one of those 'changes of hearts' from Applle seem like something else to me. Some where caused by major changes to the entire computing industry (IE vs. Safari, Portables), some where caused be different people being in control of the company from one decade to another (Newton, Apple II), some where situations where Apple caved in to expecations of the outside world, but the original prediction was correct (Video iPods, Digital convergence). Reading the list of Apple 'Flip flops' tells me that Apple seems to have an excellent feel for the pulse of the IT world, and that when they've made mistakes in the past, they've usually tried to move past them.
Yeah, not to mention the constant sound hiccups, the fact that audio goes dead occasionally, the crashes and the fact that the character movement animations sometimes dies, leaving your Jedi 'floating through space' when you walk.
And I was so looking forward to play Jade Empire in 720p.:-(
I agree with the main point of your post, but the part about MD and Beta seems off to me. Beta came out about the same time as VHS, so it was anyones guess which one would win, and MiniDisc was a pretty good replacement for tapes in walkmans until they where pushed out of the market by MP3-players.
If my memory serves me correctly, Xen needs either special virtualization support from the guest OS (meaning you can pretty much only run Linux as the guest OS) or special virtualization support from the CPU (On the way from both Intel and AMD, I belive), so you'll probably have to wait a bit before you can use Xen and Windows.
You can probably compile GCC4 and Classpath yourself to get the same Java support FC5 has for NetBSD. On the other hand, you can use DSL or some other lightweight Linux distribution that runs like a champ on a Pentium 233 MHz.
A lot of the time, the moderatation on Slashdot make you scratch your head and ask yourself what universe the moderator is from. You'll get used to it.
Distributions don't change the license of the programs they contain. So if the kernel remains GPL2, then the kernel shipped with Fedora will also be GPL2. Basically all Linux distributions ship with programs using a whole bunch of different licenses. The parts of a distribution that are mostly distribution specific can use any license. I seem to remember that Yast, the Suse setup tool used to be closed source.
No, all you need to do is get the CDs or DVD and boot from them - you will be presented with the alternatives of overwriting the current install or upgrading it to FC5. It is a very good idea to backup your data just to be sure, but I've never had any problems going from one RedHat/Fedora version to a newer one.
No, Microsoft doesn't make products, they make 'solutions'. Just look at Origami. The pre-announcement hype was about a PSP-killer/iPod-killer/whatever-killer and in the end, it turns out to be a slightly smaller formfactor for tablet PCs, obviously inspired by the Nokia 770. There isn't even a product; the only thing Microsoft will release WRT Origami is yet another stripped version of Windows, to fill the imagined gap between CE and Media center.
I belive the Beagle project (i.e. the 'spotlight ripoff') was started before Apple announced Spotlight. Lucene, the Java based text indexer that Beagle is based on, is definitely older. So Gnome did not rip off Spotlight. Instead, they both ripped of BeOS that had this type of indexing years ago.
But that's beside the point - all GUIs are ripping off each other. There has been innovation in the Apple camp, in Redmond, in the proprietary Unix world _and_ in the open source world, and pretty much every single innovation is a modification of previos ideas, often ideas taken from one of the other camps.
My interpretation of the huge interest in the DS Lite is that the claims about how the size of the Xbox and Xbox 360 are a major factor in the horrible sales of those systems in Japan are true. If people really go this crazy over a smaller version of an old system - twice - then size really must be critical over there. I guess it might not be a question of xenophobia after all...
I don't care for CSS3. CSS is fundamentally not enough. You have to stretch CSS to the seams to do the equivalent of a table based layout using a few sidebars and forms, which happens to be one of the most common layout on the web. At the very least CSS needs to be extended so that you can have floats within floats and mutiple sets of floats.
And of course they can extend javascript. Just call it JavaScript2 and go ahead and drop the braindamaged parts, implement some new and cool stuff and be happy.
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I've only played one FPS+light gun game, don't remember the name, but it was a Resident evil game for the PS2. It was one of the worst games I've ever played, mostly because the controller scheme was clumpsy and infuriating. You need two analog joysticks to be able to move freely in an FPS, and guns usually only have a single d-pad which is too small and placed all wrong.
FPS+light gun is a pretty intuitive combination, but you'd need some really cool new type of lightgun/gamepad combo controller thingy to make it work. Incidentally, I hear the Revolution will have this really cool new type of lightgun/gamepad combo controller thingy. Time will tell if this actually works.
There is a big reason between releasing a perfect game and releasing a game that is bug-free enough you don't need to release a bug-fix patch a few weeks after initial release.
I specifically gave up PC gaming and wen't over to consoles to avoid this. Seems like time has caught up with me.
PHP has an even bigger market share, by your logic they should have bought Zend. Well designed systems that are harder to master, like Rails, JBoss and ASP.Net won't drive the trivially easy web languages like ASP and PHP out of business, but there's room for everyone.
So he is basically the ultimate troll, trying to always say stupid things that have just enough sense in them that it is barely belivable that he didn't write them only to generate flames? Could be.
I agree. I guess what I really meant to say is that backwards compatibility is the reason why MS feel they have to do what they are doing. There _are_ other options, just as you say.
Microsoft is a company with a lot of talent, if they wanted to write a good new OS, they could do it. The problem is that they need to support DOS, 16-bit Windows apps and all the different incarnations of win32.
I doubt they will make a $300 loss on the first batch of hardware, but it is possible. On the other hand, it should only ake a few months to ramp up and streamline production, start implementing cost-cutting design changes (The cost of making Blu-ray drives will be next to nothing before long, exactly as it happened with DVD-readers and CD-readers before) and move production to locations with cheap labour, lowering the production costs a few hundred dollars. Some of these cost decreases will trickle down to the consumer, but most of it will be swallowed by Sony to keep their hardware losses managable. Don't expect that the average loss on the PS3:s produced during the first year after release to go above the $100-$150 range. If every consumer buys a controller or two (Sony will probably double the price of controllers because they are wireless, just like Microsoft does), and three or four games, they should be able to break even on the year of the lanch.
I'll tell you who installs Linspire. ESR. Or at least he should.
That would explain the crashes, but not the glacial speed. Perhaps they are written in C64 assembly and emulated? That makes sense, because if their products ever get released for the C64, they will be all set.
So when has any large-scale government effort not been handled incompetently when looking over a longer period of time?
That 'Flip-flops'-story seems like a real non-starter for me. Pretty much every single one of those 'changes of hearts' from Applle seem like something else to me. Some where caused by major changes to the entire computing industry (IE vs. Safari, Portables), some where caused be different people being in control of the company from one decade to another (Newton, Apple II), some where situations where Apple caved in to expecations of the outside world, but the original prediction was correct (Video iPods, Digital convergence). Reading the list of Apple 'Flip flops' tells me that Apple seems to have an excellent feel for the pulse of the IT world, and that when they've made mistakes in the past, they've usually tried to move past them.
Yeah, not to mention the constant sound hiccups, the fact that audio goes dead occasionally, the crashes and the fact that the character movement animations sometimes dies, leaving your Jedi 'floating through space' when you walk.
:-(
And I was so looking forward to play Jade Empire in 720p.
I agree with the main point of your post, but the part about MD and Beta seems off to me. Beta came out about the same time as VHS, so it was anyones guess which one would win, and MiniDisc was a pretty good replacement for tapes in walkmans until they where pushed out of the market by MP3-players.
If my memory serves me correctly, Xen needs either special virtualization support from the guest OS (meaning you can pretty much only run Linux as the guest OS) or special virtualization support from the CPU (On the way from both Intel and AMD, I belive), so you'll probably have to wait a bit before you can use Xen and Windows.
You can probably compile GCC4 and Classpath yourself to get the same Java support FC5 has for NetBSD. On the other hand, you can use DSL or some other lightweight Linux distribution that runs like a champ on a Pentium 233 MHz.
A lot of the time, the moderatation on Slashdot make you scratch your head and ask yourself what universe the moderator is from. You'll get used to it.
Distributions don't change the license of the programs they contain. So if the kernel remains GPL2, then the kernel shipped with Fedora will also be GPL2. Basically all Linux distributions ship with programs using a whole bunch of different licenses. The parts of a distribution that are mostly distribution specific can use any license. I seem to remember that Yast, the Suse setup tool used to be closed source.
No, all you need to do is get the CDs or DVD and boot from them - you will be presented with the alternatives of overwriting the current install or upgrading it to FC5. It is a very good idea to backup your data just to be sure, but I've never had any problems going from one RedHat/Fedora version to a newer one.
Please don't. If you do, then no one will be able to talk about what Marvel and DC are doing.
No, Microsoft doesn't make products, they make 'solutions'. Just look at Origami. The pre-announcement hype was about a PSP-killer/iPod-killer/whatever-killer and in the end, it turns out to be a slightly smaller formfactor for tablet PCs, obviously inspired by the Nokia 770. There isn't even a product; the only thing Microsoft will release WRT Origami is yet another stripped version of Windows, to fill the imagined gap between CE and Media center.
I belive the Beagle project (i.e. the 'spotlight ripoff') was started before Apple announced Spotlight. Lucene, the Java based text indexer that Beagle is based on, is definitely older. So Gnome did not rip off Spotlight. Instead, they both ripped of BeOS that had this type of indexing years ago.
But that's beside the point - all GUIs are ripping off each other. There has been innovation in the Apple camp, in Redmond, in the proprietary Unix world _and_ in the open source world, and pretty much every single innovation is a modification of previos ideas, often ideas taken from one of the other camps.
The name is not Breezy Badger, it's Ubuntu 5.10. Breezy is simply a codename. Get over it.
My interpretation of the huge interest in the DS Lite is that the claims about how the size of the Xbox and Xbox 360 are a major factor in the horrible sales of those systems in Japan are true. If people really go this crazy over a smaller version of an old system - twice - then size really must be critical over there. I guess it might not be a question of xenophobia after all...
I don't care for CSS3. CSS is fundamentally not enough. You have to stretch CSS to the seams to do the equivalent of a table based layout using a few sidebars and forms, which happens to be one of the most common layout on the web. At the very least CSS needs to be extended so that you can have floats within floats and mutiple sets of floats.
And of course they can extend javascript. Just call it JavaScript2 and go ahead and drop the braindamaged parts, implement some new and cool stuff and be happy.