Unlike Microsoft and Fox Interactive, Epic Games embraces its Mod community wholeheartedly. They encourage them rather than discourage them and have never ever requested that any project be stopped. In fact, Epic includes a majority of the tools mod developers need with every copy of Unreal Tournament, UT2k3 and most recently UT2k4. UT2k7 will be no exception to this whatsoever. Epic and Nvidia even hold annual mod developer competitions with millions of dollars in price money and computer equipement to be awarded to the winning project.
Valve is pretty much the same way, and in fact they allow mod developers to actually SELL their mods via Steam. Microsoft and others need to get with the program.
The answer is "no" but this is a start in the right direction. Once the labels begin to learn this is the wave of the future for music then they'll all finally get off their high-horse and change with the times.
Eventually we should see CD Burning added to this service. You can do it in iTunes so why not.
Around December of 2005 gil sellers were killing prices on the Auction Houses of Final Fantasy XI. Prices were outrageously high. Not long after SquareEnix banned several hundred players and removed several billion gil from the game. After that prices returned to normal. A few months later I noticed some characters with funky names running around a zone farming mobs. They were moving like a highly trained squad. This was not typical player behavior. Their names were something like "BK1A, BK1B, BK1C" and so on and so forth. I asked around on my Linkshell about it and they told me they were gil sellers.
Around that time wierd things started to happen in the AHs. Prices on items that players would normally put up there in order to make money were dropping rapidly. Someone was undercutting prices like crazy, and outrageous amounts of items were flooding the AH also. Take Fire Crystals for instance. Crystals are the basis of the crafting system of FFXI, without them you cannot craft at all. A stack of 12 Fire Crystals would normally sell for 8,000 gil were undercut to 1,000 to 2,000, and you'd see 60+ stacks on the AH. You'd think that a drop in price for these items would be a great thing, but for players who sell crystals on the AH to make money its a bad things. It makes it harder for players to make money needed for upgrading armor and weapons, and otherwise being able to buy other crafting materials. The overall economy suffered as a result and is just now starting to recover.
To combat gil sellers SE implimented a number of countermeasures. The servers, all 32 of them, have packet sniffers which watch for bot programs that snif packets watching for NMs to pop. Now, there is a delay between the initial packet sent from the server to the client announcing the pop of the NM so that bot programs can't claim it first before the players can.
Another countermeasure they did was to put an EX (Exclusive) flag on certain items dropped by NMs associated with popular quests. EX items cannot be sold on the AH or traded. Characters can only have one RARE flagged item in their inventory. This includes personal inventory, MogSafe, and Mog House storage. You can store then in the delivery box by sending them to yourself. Many quest items dropped by mobs and NMs have both the RARE and EX flags.
Lastly, the amount of gil that can be sent to any character via the delivery boxes is limited to 1 million gil. All of this is common knowledge.
Now that Chocobo Raising has been implimented and Chocobo Racing is just around the corner now comes the issue of rampant gambling. Gambling has been in FFXI for a long time thanks to the/random command. It lets you do a dice roll. Typically gil sellers aren't involved the in this form of gambling because Chinese gil sellers don't like drawing too much attention to themselves. However, gambling on Chocobo Races could easily be exploited by gil sellers. SE must decide to impliment a game-supported gambling system for the races or risk having gil sellers run even more rampent than they already are.
Its an accepted theory that the Moon originated from the Earth.
Sometime in Earth's early history, before the formation of life, a large Mars-sized object probably collided with the Earth throwing off a massive amount of material.
For a time its believed the Earth might have had a Saturn-like ring system until tidal/gravitational forces caused the material to begin clumping together into what would one day be the moon. Its also likely that some material rained back down on the Earth. Supporting this theory is the well known fact the Earth has a very faint, barely detectable, ring.
My regular email address gets them from time to time but its my Final Fantasy XI PlayOnline email address that gets them the most.
They are emails with gibberish for subject lines and gibberish for contents. They are sentences which make no sense what so ever, random words put together that have little meaning at all. There's no ad, no link, and the addresses they are sent from are bogus (I know, I tried finding them). A few of these emails have originating address of @ds1.yahoo.com or @server1.paypal.com or @ddl.amazon.com and so on and so forth. The actual address itself is made up of random letters and numbers.
My theory, like those suggested aboove, is that these emails are sent by "Botnets" to random email addresses in order to see which ones don't bounce. This can be in preparation for sending ad-like spam or a prelude to a virus infestation. Or, like someone else suggested it could be a form of coded communication which is widely broadcasted in order to prevent the authorities from find out its true intended destination.
Springfield Mall in Fairfax County (not far from the Franconia/Springfield Metro Station), Virginia has a cyber cafe which also offers gaming on PCs and game consoles and its doing really well. They also have WiFi for people who bring in their own laptops. I'd say go for it!
Text to Voice support in Windows XP is dismal to say the least. The built-in text-to-speech softrware is a joke. It works yes, but only in Microsoft applications.
There is a 3rd party software package called "JAWS" which costs around $400 - $500, is locked down with DRM so if you have to reinstall your system or upgrade you have to reactivate it. Also, the software is very picky as to what kind of video card and sound card you have, and its prome to crashing. The software had also been none to deactivate itself for no reason, thus requiring you to reinstall it and reactivate it.
I looked at VoiceOver in Mac OS X and I was very impressed. Someone with no vision at all (I have some, I just need an extra large monitor) would have little trouble navigating the system using it. I know a few people with no vision at all and they were also extremely impressed with Voice Over, and I know at least one person who will benefit from Mac OS X Leopard's support for Braille displays. Also, the APIs and tools needed to make Mac OS X apps work with Voice Over are freely available to developers so any Mac app can be made Voice Over compatible with minimal effort. For JAWS its much harder.
Whether Apple likes it or not Games Drive the PC Market. Microsoft knows this, which is why they developed Direct X so long ago after Windows 95 was released. Game developers had serious problems with the performance of their games on 95 amd Microsoft had no choice but to answer their call or risk it all. No operating system or computer platform has survived for very long without games. There are notable excepts to this, i.e. Linux, but if you look back at all of the alternative operating systems that failed (i.e. OS/2, BeOS) and non-PC computer platforms that failed you will see one thing they all have in common. And that is... a lack of a game library. Linux is still around because its good for doing things Windows isn't like running large scale, mission critical business applications (i.e. massive databases, web servers, email servers, network servers... uh just about everything actually). There is Wine which does a decent enough job running Windows games. For Apple to really break into the PC arena and start grabbing huge chunks of marketshare real estate they need to focus on getting more game developers to port their titles to the Intel-Macs. A 2.0 GHz MacBook Pro and a 2.0 GHz Intel-based iMac using BootCamp to run Windows XP can run The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion "better" than the XBox 360 can! So don't tell me it doesn't have the power to run good games, because right now Oblivion is one of those next-gen PC games which pushes the hardware to its limits and the Intel Macs can handle it without breaking a sweat.
There is NO EXCUSE why more developers don't make games for the Apple Mac platform. They cannot give a good enough why they don't port their games to that platform. There is nothing they can say which will make the reasons for this sound rational. I'm sorry, but it is done gone past time for develoopers to start supporting Apple. THERE IS NO EXCUSE ANYMORE!
Re:It's Because they Banned Booth Babes
on
The End of E3?
·
· Score: 1
What really needs to be done is to open the show to the public. That is what needs to be done. Right now its just for industry insiders, that has to change in order for E3 to grow.
All that common off-the-shelf stuff is now Nintendo has been able to keep prices low for the Wii. Granted, a confirmed price tag hasn't been released yet but a lot of analysists are saying it will be under $300...maybe $299 or $250. Still that's much lower than the 360 and the PS3.
I look forward to the launch of the Wii. Both Sony and Microsoft was underestimating the system. I think they'll both be very surprised when this Christmas season comes around.
Its isn't likely this would ever happen. In fact its far more likely Satan would be handing out parkas in Hell before this were to happen.
Microsoft should do what Sony did. Sony is making ALL games region free, meaning that import games will work in the PS3 without needing a Modchip or hacked BIOS. This does two things, it keeps people from mucking with the PS3's internal hardware and its pretty much kills any possible demand for pirated PS3 games, or at least minimizes it.
Its an MMORPG that is challenging, has more more content than you could go through in an entire year, and after the updates coming in August it will have Chocobo Breeding and Racing. FFXI also has lots of content for players who reach level 75. Unlikw WoW which leaves level 75 players with little or nothing at all to do FFXI has lots of content for high level players, and when you make out your experience points you can still improve your character by earning merit points. The ability to add and upgrade job abilities is being added with the August updates.
"I cry whenever I think of all the years Blizzard wasted developing World of Worldcraft when they could have been developing a Starcraft sequel like they should have."
Yipes, I mean World of Warcraft AKA the easiest and shortest MMORPG in existence.
If you want a MMORPG that is NOT a cake walk, has so much content you could never do all of the quests and missions in a year, and has loads of contend for players who reach level 75 then you want to play Final Fantasy XI. The most challenging and the most game-content rich MMORPGs ever made. WoW is like playing Sodukon when compared to the content available in FFXI. The latest expansion "Treasures of Aht Urghan" have added ever more stuff and later this month SquareEnix is adding Chocobo Breeding and Chocobo Racing to the game. Chocobo Breeding is accessible to any players reguardless of level, fame and/or rank. There is so much content in FFXI that some of the Japanese players who were in the game from the beginning have never been able to finish all of the quests and missions yet. I personally don't know anyone who has actually finished the main storyline of the game.
I cry whenever I think of all the years Blizzard wasted developing World of Worldcraft when they could have been developing a Starcraft sequel like they should have.
What is your frick'n problem Blizzard!!!??? Make a Starcraft 2 already!!!!!
Yes, for its time B5 raised the bar on Sci-Fi the way Battlestar Galactica does now. The stories were well written, often interwoven with one another, and the characters were very complex. Even the villains are more than just "one dimensional" pure evil that needed to be destroyed (I beliece someone else also expressed this point).
What hurt shows like ST: Voyager, Enterprise and so many others is that they let the exec interfere with the creative process. Fox wanted more sex on Voyager so they brought in Seven-of-Nine, though Jeri Ryan proved that she was more than just a nice set of boobs and was actually a very good actress. Oh, and don't get me started with T'Pal on Enterprise. She was a good actress also but she was cast for the role because she was top heavy. I'm not saying sex in Sci-Fi isn't bad, but its when the focus of the show is to show off some babe in a skin tight body suit I'd rather watch the Playboy channel. I want my sci-fi shows to have depth, and I'm not alone in this. Sadly, too many media execs think they know what we want even then we tell them what we want. Case in point; the fans demanded for a series featuring Sulu as the captain of the Excellceor, but they gave everyone Enterprise because that is what the execs thought was what was best for the fans rather than listening to what the fans asked for. They're doing it again with the new Star Trek movie. Yes, they are going ahead with the Starfleet Academy things where a young Kirk meets Spock at the academy.
I also agress that Dr. Who was a great series. It is on record, with Guiness, as the longest running Sci-Fi TV series in history. Despite have an almost non-existant budget the producers of the series were still able to tell provocative stories which were sometimes totally unheard of in TV Sci-Fi. The new series does follow a similar formula though I'm disappointed a little by the fact that they dumped the serialization of the episodes.
Microsoft is obsessed with success. They can't stant it when anyone else is a success in a certain market that they aren't a part of, so what do they do? They dive head first into that market without any care for the consequences (eg. XBox, Origami, Windows LIVE, etc).
They are a software company, Google is a search engine/web advertising company. What does Microsoft do? They get into the search engine/web advertising business and directly target Google. They jumped into the game console business because Sony was success at it, and now they are taking on the iPod. I see a disturbing trend here. Microsoft is spreading itself thin here "like too little butter spread over too much bread" quoting Bilbo from LOTR. They gotten into to many different markets and now they are getting into the MP3 player/online music store business. Not to mention they are going up against a seemingly unstoppable powerhouse; iPod+iTunes.
The company is faultering, they are under severe preassure from the EU over anti-trust violations, Windows Vista will now be 2 years late and will not have all of the features they promised, they are loosing millions on the XBox 360 project, and they are swiftly loosing users of their staple software ei; MS Office and Internet Explorer to the likes of Open Office, Firefox and Opera.
Microsoft needs to go back to what they once were, a software company and stop trying to be a do it all business. No one corporation can be in all markets at once, Microsoft is trying, but it will ultimately be their undoing.
Re:Once it's out it's out
on
More Wii-mote Info
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
According to the impressions of E3 attendees who tried out the Wii-Mote it will be much more than just a gimick. It will change the way we play videogames.
Unlike Windows an agreement was made that allows other developers to make their own versions of DOS that are compatible with MS-DOS. There have been several different varients of DOS in the past including DR-DOS, PC-DOS (by IBM) and the DOS OS used in DosBox.
I can see FreeDOS used with things like Parallels for Mac OS X so people can run old DOS software if they want.
Starcraft has a following that much bigger than anyone might expect and it would be a serious error on Blizzard's part to abandon the franchise altogether. Starcraft is the one game, the only game, that they have made that hasn't had a sequel. Its had an expansion but not a sequel, and its a game that has a massive user base which rival's that of Warcraft III!
This move could result in them loosing more than 3/4 of their user base whom happen to be "Second Life" users. I've heard from a lot users inside Second Life that they are moving to Snapzilla (http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/) and abandoning their old Flickr accounts. Some of these people make money at the events their screenshots promote, and this policy could impact their business which is a very bad things for Flickr.
Flickr has to learn something about offering services on the web, the hard way. If you burn your user base they'll leave and there is nothing you can do to make them come back because once burned they'll never trust you again. During the first Internet Bubble I can't even begin to count the number of sites that died because of stuff like this.
Bye bye Flickr, its been nice knowing you but it appears you are bound and determined to "policy" yourself out of business. Oh well, looks like Snapzilla will be replacing you soon.
You don't have to worry about that security issue because Windows has more than enough to go around and you don't really need to add another on top of it.:-)
I'm getting one of the new 20" screen CoreDual 2GHz iMacs. They run really fast, they can use Bootcamp with XP for games, and the Mac OS X side has all the great productivity stuff I need and the stability to Windows can't give me.
I'm sorry, but when enough people go on and on and on about how bad Windows is maybe you should consider something rather amazing. Maybe they're right! Wow! What a novel idea, thousands of computer users griping about Windows having all of these problems are right! That's amazing!
So, those of you who try to downplay the whole "evil empire" thing can go get Vista and DRM the hell out of yourself while we Mac users get respect from the company we buy our products from. You don't see Apple treating us as potential criminals require activation codes and Genuine Windows Verfication crap.
Well, Sony will never go away, but they won't enjoy the top spot anymore in the market with the huge price tag of the PS3. The XBox 360 was rushed and its starting to really show. The overheating issues with the system and the lack of HD Movie support at launch is evidence of that. There's been a lot of interest in the Wii and its new controller. Red Steel and the new Metroid games look to be fantastic games with the wiimote controller, and I love the retro dual-analog SNES-ish controller for the games you can download through The Big N's online service.
I think we'll see the 360 and Wii clamoring for the #1 spot for a while with the PS3 trailing along behind in 3rd place until its price finally starts to come down. If the video of FFXIII anf MGS4 are any indication of what the system can do in realtime it will be one hell of a machine, but the Wii shouldn't be underestimated either.
To believe that we are the only intellegent species living on this planet is supreme stupidity. Its been known that Dolphins are very intellegent creatures and we are just now beginning to learn the truth that they could be our intellectual equals.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike Microsoft and Fox Interactive, Epic Games embraces its Mod community wholeheartedly. They encourage them rather than discourage them and have never ever requested that any project be stopped. In fact, Epic includes a majority of the tools mod developers need with every copy of Unreal Tournament, UT2k3 and most recently UT2k4. UT2k7 will be no exception to this whatsoever. Epic and Nvidia even hold annual mod developer competitions with millions of dollars in price money and computer equipement to be awarded to the winning project.
Valve is pretty much the same way, and in fact they allow mod developers to actually SELL their mods via Steam. Microsoft and others need to get with the program.
The answer is "no" but this is a start in the right direction. Once the labels begin to learn this is the wave of the future for music then they'll all finally get off their high-horse and change with the times.
Eventually we should see CD Burning added to this service. You can do it in iTunes so why not.
Around December of 2005 gil sellers were killing prices on the Auction Houses of Final Fantasy XI. Prices were outrageously high. Not long after SquareEnix banned several hundred players and removed several billion gil from the game. After that prices returned to normal. A few months later I noticed some characters with funky names running around a zone farming mobs. They were moving like a highly trained squad. This was not typical player behavior. Their names were something like "BK1A, BK1B, BK1C" and so on and so forth. I asked around on my Linkshell about it and they told me they were gil sellers.
/random command. It lets you do a dice roll. Typically gil sellers aren't involved the in this form of gambling because Chinese gil sellers don't like drawing too much attention to themselves. However, gambling on Chocobo Races could easily be exploited by gil sellers. SE must decide to impliment a game-supported gambling system for the races or risk having gil sellers run even more rampent than they already are.
Around that time wierd things started to happen in the AHs. Prices on items that players would normally put up there in order to make money were dropping rapidly. Someone was undercutting prices like crazy, and outrageous amounts of items were flooding the AH also. Take Fire Crystals for instance. Crystals are the basis of the crafting system of FFXI, without them you cannot craft at all. A stack of 12 Fire Crystals would normally sell for 8,000 gil were undercut to 1,000 to 2,000, and you'd see 60+ stacks on the AH. You'd think that a drop in price for these items would be a great thing, but for players who sell crystals on the AH to make money its a bad things. It makes it harder for players to make money needed for upgrading armor and weapons, and otherwise being able to buy other crafting materials. The overall economy suffered as a result and is just now starting to recover.
To combat gil sellers SE implimented a number of countermeasures. The servers, all 32 of them, have packet sniffers which watch for bot programs that snif packets watching for NMs to pop. Now, there is a delay between the initial packet sent from the server to the client announcing the pop of the NM so that bot programs can't claim it first before the players can.
Another countermeasure they did was to put an EX (Exclusive) flag on certain items dropped by NMs associated with popular quests. EX items cannot be sold on the AH or traded. Characters can only have one RARE flagged item in their inventory. This includes personal inventory, MogSafe, and Mog House storage. You can store then in the delivery box by sending them to yourself. Many quest items dropped by mobs and NMs have both the RARE and EX flags.
Lastly, the amount of gil that can be sent to any character via the delivery boxes is limited to 1 million gil. All of this is common knowledge.
Now that Chocobo Raising has been implimented and Chocobo Racing is just around the corner now comes the issue of rampant gambling. Gambling has been in FFXI for a long time thanks to the
Its an accepted theory that the Moon originated from the Earth.
Sometime in Earth's early history, before the formation of life, a large Mars-sized object probably collided with the Earth throwing off a massive amount of material.
For a time its believed the Earth might have had a Saturn-like ring system until tidal/gravitational forces caused the material to begin clumping together into what would one day be the moon. Its also likely that some material rained back down on the Earth. Supporting this theory is the well known fact the Earth has a very faint, barely detectable, ring.
My regular email address gets them from time to time but its my Final Fantasy XI PlayOnline email address that gets them the most.
They are emails with gibberish for subject lines and gibberish for contents. They are sentences which make no sense what so ever, random words put together that have little meaning at all. There's no ad, no link, and the addresses they are sent from are bogus (I know, I tried finding them). A few of these emails have originating address of @ds1.yahoo.com or @server1.paypal.com or @ddl.amazon.com and so on and so forth. The actual address itself is made up of random letters and numbers.
My theory, like those suggested aboove, is that these emails are sent by "Botnets" to random email addresses in order to see which ones don't bounce. This can be in preparation for sending ad-like spam or a prelude to a virus infestation. Or, like someone else suggested it could be a form of coded communication which is widely broadcasted in order to prevent the authorities from find out its true intended destination.
Springfield Mall in Fairfax County (not far from the Franconia/Springfield Metro Station), Virginia has a cyber cafe which also offers gaming on PCs and game consoles and its doing really well. They also have WiFi for people who bring in their own laptops. I'd say go for it!
Text to Voice support in Windows XP is dismal to say the least. The built-in text-to-speech softrware is a joke. It works yes, but only in Microsoft applications.
There is a 3rd party software package called "JAWS" which costs around $400 - $500, is locked down with DRM so if you have to reinstall your system or upgrade you have to reactivate it. Also, the software is very picky as to what kind of video card and sound card you have, and its prome to crashing. The software had also been none to deactivate itself for no reason, thus requiring you to reinstall it and reactivate it.
I looked at VoiceOver in Mac OS X and I was very impressed. Someone with no vision at all (I have some, I just need an extra large monitor) would have little trouble navigating the system using it. I know a few people with no vision at all and they were also extremely impressed with Voice Over, and I know at least one person who will benefit from Mac OS X Leopard's support for Braille displays. Also, the APIs and tools needed to make Mac OS X apps work with Voice Over are freely available to developers so any Mac app can be made Voice Over compatible with minimal effort. For JAWS its much harder.
Whether Apple likes it or not Games Drive the PC Market. Microsoft knows this, which is why they developed Direct X so long ago after Windows 95 was released. Game developers had serious problems with the performance of their games on 95 amd Microsoft had no choice but to answer their call or risk it all. No operating system or computer platform has survived for very long without games. There are notable excepts to this, i.e. Linux, but if you look back at all of the alternative operating systems that failed (i.e. OS/2, BeOS) and non-PC computer platforms that failed you will see one thing they all have in common. And that is ... a lack of a game library. Linux is still around because its good for doing things Windows isn't like running large scale, mission critical business applications (i.e. massive databases, web servers, email servers, network servers ... uh just about everything actually). There is Wine which does a decent enough job running Windows games. For Apple to really break into the PC arena and start grabbing huge chunks of marketshare real estate they need to focus on getting more game developers to port their titles to the Intel-Macs. A 2.0 GHz MacBook Pro and a 2.0 GHz Intel-based iMac using BootCamp to run Windows XP can run The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion "better" than the XBox 360 can! So don't tell me it doesn't have the power to run good games, because right now Oblivion is one of those next-gen PC games which pushes the hardware to its limits and the Intel Macs can handle it without breaking a sweat.
There is NO EXCUSE why more developers don't make games for the Apple Mac platform. They cannot give a good enough why they don't port their games to that platform. There is nothing they can say which will make the reasons for this sound rational. I'm sorry, but it is done gone past time for develoopers to start supporting Apple. THERE IS NO EXCUSE ANYMORE!
What really needs to be done is to open the show to the public. That is what needs to be done. Right now its just for industry insiders, that has to change in order for E3 to grow.
All that common off-the-shelf stuff is now Nintendo has been able to keep prices low for the Wii. Granted, a confirmed price tag hasn't been released yet but a lot of analysists are saying it will be under $300...maybe $299 or $250. Still that's much lower than the 360 and the PS3.
I look forward to the launch of the Wii. Both Sony and Microsoft was underestimating the system. I think they'll both be very surprised when this Christmas season comes around.
Its isn't likely this would ever happen. In fact its far more likely Satan would be handing out parkas in Hell before this were to happen.
Microsoft should do what Sony did. Sony is making ALL games region free, meaning that import games will work in the PS3 without needing a Modchip or hacked BIOS. This does two things, it keeps people from mucking with the PS3's internal hardware and its pretty much kills any possible demand for pirated PS3 games, or at least minimizes it.
Its an MMORPG that is challenging, has more more content than you could go through in an entire year, and after the updates coming in August it will have Chocobo Breeding and Racing. FFXI also has lots of content for players who reach level 75. Unlikw WoW which leaves level 75 players with little or nothing at all to do FFXI has lots of content for high level players, and when you make out your experience points you can still improve your character by earning merit points. The ability to add and upgrade job abilities is being added with the August updates.
"I cry whenever I think of all the years Blizzard wasted developing World of Worldcraft when they could have been developing a Starcraft sequel like they should have."
Yipes, I mean World of Warcraft AKA the easiest and shortest MMORPG in existence.
If you want a MMORPG that is NOT a cake walk, has so much content you could never do all of the quests and missions in a year, and has loads of contend for players who reach level 75 then you want to play Final Fantasy XI. The most challenging and the most game-content rich MMORPGs ever made. WoW is like playing Sodukon when compared to the content available in FFXI. The latest expansion "Treasures of Aht Urghan" have added ever more stuff and later this month SquareEnix is adding Chocobo Breeding and Chocobo Racing to the game. Chocobo Breeding is accessible to any players reguardless of level, fame and/or rank. There is so much content in FFXI that some of the Japanese players who were in the game from the beginning have never been able to finish all of the quests and missions yet. I personally don't know anyone who has actually finished the main storyline of the game.
I cry whenever I think of all the years Blizzard wasted developing World of Worldcraft when they could have been developing a Starcraft sequel like they should have.
What is your frick'n problem Blizzard!!!??? Make a Starcraft 2 already!!!!!
Yes, for its time B5 raised the bar on Sci-Fi the way Battlestar Galactica does now. The stories were well written, often interwoven with one another, and the characters were very complex. Even the villains are more than just "one dimensional" pure evil that needed to be destroyed (I beliece someone else also expressed this point).
What hurt shows like ST: Voyager, Enterprise and so many others is that they let the exec interfere with the creative process. Fox wanted more sex on Voyager so they brought in Seven-of-Nine, though Jeri Ryan proved that she was more than just a nice set of boobs and was actually a very good actress. Oh, and don't get me started with T'Pal on Enterprise. She was a good actress also but she was cast for the role because she was top heavy. I'm not saying sex in Sci-Fi isn't bad, but its when the focus of the show is to show off some babe in a skin tight body suit I'd rather watch the Playboy channel. I want my sci-fi shows to have depth, and I'm not alone in this. Sadly, too many media execs think they know what we want even then we tell them what we want. Case in point; the fans demanded for a series featuring Sulu as the captain of the Excellceor, but they gave everyone Enterprise because that is what the execs thought was what was best for the fans rather than listening to what the fans asked for. They're doing it again with the new Star Trek movie. Yes, they are going ahead with the Starfleet Academy things where a young Kirk meets Spock at the academy.
I also agress that Dr. Who was a great series. It is on record, with Guiness, as the longest running Sci-Fi TV series in history. Despite have an almost non-existant budget the producers of the series were still able to tell provocative stories which were sometimes totally unheard of in TV Sci-Fi. The new series does follow a similar formula though I'm disappointed a little by the fact that they dumped the serialization of the episodes.
Microsoft is obsessed with success. They can't stant it when anyone else is a success in a certain market that they aren't a part of, so what do they do? They dive head first into that market without any care for the consequences (eg. XBox, Origami, Windows LIVE, etc).
They are a software company, Google is a search engine/web advertising company. What does Microsoft do? They get into the search engine/web advertising business and directly target Google. They jumped into the game console business because Sony was success at it, and now they are taking on the iPod. I see a disturbing trend here. Microsoft is spreading itself thin here "like too little butter spread over too much bread" quoting Bilbo from LOTR. They gotten into to many different markets and now they are getting into the MP3 player/online music store business. Not to mention they are going up against a seemingly unstoppable powerhouse; iPod+iTunes.
The company is faultering, they are under severe preassure from the EU over anti-trust violations, Windows Vista will now be 2 years late and will not have all of the features they promised, they are loosing millions on the XBox 360 project, and they are swiftly loosing users of their staple software ei; MS Office and Internet Explorer to the likes of Open Office, Firefox and Opera.
Microsoft needs to go back to what they once were, a software company and stop trying to be a do it all business. No one corporation can be in all markets at once, Microsoft is trying, but it will ultimately be their undoing.
According to the impressions of E3 attendees who tried out the Wii-Mote it will be much more than just a gimick. It will change the way we play videogames.
Stop spreading FUD.
Unlike Windows an agreement was made that allows other developers to make their own versions of DOS that are compatible with MS-DOS. There have been several different varients of DOS in the past including DR-DOS, PC-DOS (by IBM) and the DOS OS used in DosBox.
I can see FreeDOS used with things like Parallels for Mac OS X so people can run old DOS software if they want.
Starcraft has a following that much bigger than anyone might expect and it would be a serious error on Blizzard's part to abandon the franchise altogether. Starcraft is the one game, the only game, that they have made that hasn't had a sequel. Its had an expansion but not a sequel, and its a game that has a massive user base which rival's that of Warcraft III!
This move could result in them loosing more than 3/4 of their user base whom happen to be "Second Life" users. I've heard from a lot users inside Second Life that they are moving to Snapzilla (http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/) and abandoning their old Flickr accounts. Some of these people make money at the events their screenshots promote, and this policy could impact their business which is a very bad things for Flickr.
Flickr has to learn something about offering services on the web, the hard way. If you burn your user base they'll leave and there is nothing you can do to make them come back because once burned they'll never trust you again. During the first Internet Bubble I can't even begin to count the number of sites that died because of stuff like this.
Bye bye Flickr, its been nice knowing you but it appears you are bound and determined to "policy" yourself out of business. Oh well, looks like Snapzilla will be replacing you soon.
You don't have to worry about that security issue because Windows has more than enough to go around and you don't really need to add another on top of it. :-)
You can play a number of titles that are right now some of the hotest in the PC market on the Mac.
Unreal Tournament 2004
Battlefield 2
World of Warcraft (You can't get any bigger tban tbat)
and many more.
Goto the Mac section of your local CompUSA story if you are in the US and you'll see them.
I'm getting one of the new 20" screen CoreDual 2GHz iMacs. They run really fast, they can use Bootcamp with XP for games, and the Mac OS X side has all the great productivity stuff I need and the stability to Windows can't give me.
I'm sorry, but when enough people go on and on and on about how bad Windows is maybe you should consider something rather amazing. Maybe they're right! Wow! What a novel idea, thousands of computer users griping about Windows having all of these problems are right! That's amazing!
So, those of you who try to downplay the whole "evil empire" thing can go get Vista and DRM the hell out of yourself while we Mac users get respect from the company we buy our products from. You don't see Apple treating us as potential criminals require activation codes and Genuine Windows Verfication crap.
Well, Sony will never go away, but they won't enjoy the top spot anymore in the market with the huge price tag of the PS3. The XBox 360 was rushed and its starting to really show. The overheating issues with the system and the lack of HD Movie support at launch is evidence of that. There's been a lot of interest in the Wii and its new controller. Red Steel and the new Metroid games look to be fantastic games with the wiimote controller, and I love the retro dual-analog SNES-ish controller for the games you can download through The Big N's online service.
I think we'll see the 360 and Wii clamoring for the #1 spot for a while with the PS3 trailing along behind in 3rd place until its price finally starts to come down. If the video of FFXIII anf MGS4 are any indication of what the system can do in realtime it will be one hell of a machine, but the Wii shouldn't be underestimated either.
To believe that we are the only intellegent species living on this planet is supreme stupidity. Its been known that Dolphins are very intellegent creatures and we are just now beginning to learn the truth that they could be our intellectual equals.