It's worse than just needing a bigger userbase. Linux needs a userbase of people willing to pay money for their software before developers will even give a damn about Linux. Loki Software tried to make a living proting games to Linux and lost their shirt in a big way.
I play Half-Life all the time. The only game I've played more than Half-Life is the original DOOM. I play Opposing Force and Blue Shift as well. I have never played Team Fortress, Counter Strike, DoD, NS or any of the other multi-player only mods. I don't really care for them.
What I do care for is the single-player game that Half-Life brought to the table. In an era of deathmatch glut it was refreshing to return to the single-player game world. And they did a bang-up job of it, too.
If spam can't be stopped then the Internet's Killer App will be in serious jeopardy. Email is becomming a useless means of communication for far too many people. The ever-increasing mountains of spam are simply swamping email servers and clients, making it almost impossible to find the few valid emails in an ever-deepening sea of raw sewage.
The sick thing about spam is that most of it isn't about selling you anything. Most of it is about creating huge lists of email addresses and selling those lists to the next layer of stupid suckers trying to make money the Don LaPre way.
It's not a matter of gender roles. It's a matter of biology. Women and men have slightly different brains and different skill sets. It is not a matter of gender roles that a woman can watch TV and hold a conversation while a man cannot. (And remember that we are talking about populations, as we all know that there exist indeviduals who do not conform to the norms of their parent population.)
What we need to understand is that the sexes are different but equal.
IS it better than, or on par with, Spirited Away? I just picked that up this weekend and I think it's one of the best films I've ever seen. But then I have a soft spot for Studio Ghibli films.
Now if I could only find my copy of Zombie Deathmatch...
Actually, yes. The power of the XBox, and any console for that matter, is not really the specs of the hardware (that only gets you your baseline) but the fact that the console is only doing one thing at a time and is a fixed platform. This means that programmers can write "to the metal" rather than to a hardware abstraction. They know that every XBox has the same GPU, smae amount of RAM, same sound card, same NIC, etc... There are no drivers to speak of. Everything can be handled (or has to be) manually. This gives the programmer the ability to squeeze every cycle out of the unit without having to worry about making different compatibility levels in the renderer, without having to worry about sharing the system's resources with memory managers, anti-virus software, buggy drivers, etc...
I doubt very much that a 700MHz Pentium 3 system could run Halo half as well as the Xbox can.
And look at how powerful of a system you need to run GTA3 compaired to the power that the PS2 can bring to bear.
My father-in-law goes to high-end stereo shops to pump the guys for information and then buys his stereo equipment at Best Buy. He doesn't understand why I get so annoyed with him about this.
GW will find out the hard way that people will not buy what they can not access. There are no GW shops where I live and probably never will be. The only options I have is to either buy on-line or have a friend shop for me, provided I have a friend near a GW shop.
Unless you got really lucky and found one a while back, you will not be getting ethernet on your Dreamcast. While the DC might be cheap, the broadband adapter is as reare as hen's teeth.
64 MB of shared RAM, that can not be upgraded. Ever.
8/10GB drives are so cheap they aren't funny. Hell, most people I know are giving away, or lacking any takers, throwing away 10GB drives. No one cares about drives that small.
Decent 3D video that can't be fully exploited, and uses system RAM.
And $200.00? You forget about the cost of the mod chip, and the cost of having it put in, unless you want to do it youself. And then there is the complete lack of a warranty in case the thing goes belly-up.
Yes, but you need to mod your XBox to do this. The 007 method lets you access the files on your XBox without picking up a soldering iron, accidently soldering the wrong trace, accidently leaving you mod chip on and getting your system banned from XBox-Live!, or any of many other possible problems.
Via Mini-ITX case in a small box with 64MB of RAM and an old hard drive. Fully functional MP3/OGG/etc... living room PC for almost nothing. Install any OS you like. Built in TV-Out, sound, NIC, video, etc... Hell, if it finds a TV connected to the Video-out and no monitor it will boot with the TV as the primary display, even in "DOS Mode".
No need to solder anything. No voiding of the warranty. No giving MS any more of your money.
Actually, there is one use that most XBox users might see as useful: With Linux running on your XBox you can FTP files in and out of it, letting you hack savegame files, or load hacked savegame files.
Consumers don't want a bazillion choices. They want something that works and works just like everyone else's system.
The worst support issues I ever had was with an office with three different versions of MS Windows, Win95, Win98, and WinNT. The minor differences in each OS caused immense ammounts of headaches and problems. Things didn't get any better until we nuked every hard drive in the building and put everyone on Windows 2000. And it wasn't Win2K that actually fixed the problem. It was that every system was using the same version of the same platform.
Rampaging multiple choice is good for hobbiests and geeks, but nor for Joe Sixpack computer users.
"Doze"! Golly, you're really sticking it to tha Man with that one!
You don't make Linux look any better when you spell Windows "Windoze", or any dirivative, nor when you spell MicroSoft or Bill Gates with a "$", nor when you call Bill "Billgatus". All you do is make Linux users look like 13-year old nerds sitting in their parents basements impotently thrashing in rage that MicroSoft still owns the desktop.
Advertising is a fact of life. Everyone does it. It's not the cost of the ad that is ultimately important, it's the impact. This ad has generated more buz than any car ad in years. More people have already activly watched this ad than will bother to look at the average car ad. Will this increase sales? Hard to say. Will it get your attention? Very definitely.
Advertising rarely makes up a significant part of the price of any consumer item anymore. Taxes, especially England's high VAT, makes up a much larger percentage of the cost than advertising ever could.
I expect a reviewer to be honest. I know that's like expecting a three-year old not to eat the donut the minute you leave the room, but that's how I feel.
The "War on Terrorism" is a power play, just like the "War on Drugs" is. Each is used as an excuse to furter erode our rights and freedoms. Each is used to increase the powers of the Executiv Branch at the expense of the others. Each is used to grant even greater powers to law enforcement agencies. Each is used to remove judicial oversight from the actions of law enforcement.
The War on Drugs is a dismal failure. Drug use has not abated. The War or Terror(ism) will also be a failure. It will not make the world a safer place. But neither of these "wars" was meant to do what they told us they were for.
What about the guy who thinks it's cute to log on through the local library and send death threats to whitehouse.gov? When the Secret Service shows up at the library and the records are shredded, who do they bust? The librarian.
Send threats? How? Mayby by email? Libraries don't give out email addresses. The person in question would have to use a webmail system like HotMail or some such. Those email addresses are registered. He would leave a nice evidence trail there. You don't need to know which computer the guy was using if you have the threat coming from his email address.
Or what about the creep who uses the library's Internet connection to download pr0n, then goes into the men's room to masturbate? What do you say to the 8-year-old who walks into the men's room and discovers him? What do you say to the kid's mother when little Johnny tells her about it?
You do what my local library does: you call the police and have the bastard arrested.
There are ways to protect the public and deal with law-breakers that do not require the violation of inocent people's privacy.
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It's worse than just needing a bigger userbase. Linux needs a userbase of people willing to pay money for their software before developers will even give a damn about Linux. Loki Software tried to make a living proting games to Linux and lost their shirt in a big way.
I play Half-Life all the time. The only game I've played more than Half-Life is the original DOOM. I play Opposing Force and Blue Shift as well. I have never played Team Fortress, Counter Strike, DoD, NS or any of the other multi-player only mods. I don't really care for them.
What I do care for is the single-player game that Half-Life brought to the table. In an era of deathmatch glut it was refreshing to return to the single-player game world. And they did a bang-up job of it, too.
If spam can't be stopped then the Internet's Killer App will be in serious jeopardy. Email is becomming a useless means of communication for far too many people. The ever-increasing mountains of spam are simply swamping email servers and clients, making it almost impossible to find the few valid emails in an ever-deepening sea of raw sewage.
The sick thing about spam is that most of it isn't about selling you anything. Most of it is about creating huge lists of email addresses and selling those lists to the next layer of stupid suckers trying to make money the Don LaPre way.
It's not a matter of gender roles. It's a matter of biology. Women and men have slightly different brains and different skill sets. It is not a matter of gender roles that a woman can watch TV and hold a conversation while a man cannot. (And remember that we are talking about populations, as we all know that there exist indeviduals who do not conform to the norms of their parent population.)
What we need to understand is that the sexes are different but equal.
IS it better than, or on par with, Spirited Away? I just picked that up this weekend and I think it's one of the best films I've ever seen. But then I have a soft spot for Studio Ghibli films.
Now if I could only find my copy of Zombie Deathmatch...
Bah! How about a phone? Just more useless crap to drive the price up and make people trade up for the newest model.
I played a FPS version of PacMan back on an old IBM XT when XT's were still the top of the line. It was a CGA/Monochrome game.
Actually, yes. The power of the XBox, and any console for that matter, is not really the specs of the hardware (that only gets you your baseline) but the fact that the console is only doing one thing at a time and is a fixed platform. This means that programmers can write "to the metal" rather than to a hardware abstraction. They know that every XBox has the same GPU, smae amount of RAM, same sound card, same NIC, etc... There are no drivers to speak of. Everything can be handled (or has to be) manually. This gives the programmer the ability to squeeze every cycle out of the unit without having to worry about making different compatibility levels in the renderer, without having to worry about sharing the system's resources with memory managers, anti-virus software, buggy drivers, etc...
I doubt very much that a 700MHz Pentium 3 system could run Halo half as well as the Xbox can.
And look at how powerful of a system you need to run GTA3 compaired to the power that the PS2 can bring to bear.
Actually, the XBox delay angle has been reported on several places, including very pro-MS/pro-XBox sites.
My father-in-law goes to high-end stereo shops to pump the guys for information and then buys his stereo equipment at Best Buy. He doesn't understand why I get so annoyed with him about this.
And Richard Nixon made Elvis a special narcotics officer. Gave him a badge, too.
GW will find out the hard way that people will not buy what they can not access. There are no GW shops where I live and probably never will be. The only options I have is to either buy on-line or have a friend shop for me, provided I have a friend near a GW shop.
Nothing says "loving" like a box of dryer lint with no return address.
Unless you got really lucky and found one a while back, you will not be getting ethernet on your Dreamcast. While the DC might be cheap, the broadband adapter is as reare as hen's teeth.
- 64 MB of shared RAM, that can not be upgraded. Ever.
- 8/10GB drives are so cheap they aren't funny. Hell, most people I know are giving away, or lacking any takers, throwing away 10GB drives. No one cares about drives that small.
- Decent 3D video that can't be fully exploited, and uses system RAM.
And $200.00? You forget about the cost of the mod chip, and the cost of having it put in, unless you want to do it youself. And then there is the complete lack of a warranty in case the thing goes belly-up.But it's your money tp throw away.
Yes, but you need to mod your XBox to do this. The 007 method lets you access the files on your XBox without picking up a soldering iron, accidently soldering the wrong trace, accidently leaving you mod chip on and getting your system banned from XBox-Live!, or any of many other possible problems.
Via Mini-ITX case in a small box with 64MB of RAM and an old hard drive. Fully functional MP3/OGG/etc... living room PC for almost nothing. Install any OS you like. Built in TV-Out, sound, NIC, video, etc... Hell, if it finds a TV connected to the Video-out and no monitor it will boot with the TV as the primary display, even in "DOS Mode".
No need to solder anything. No voiding of the warranty. No giving MS any more of your money.
Actually, there is one use that most XBox users might see as useful: With Linux running on your XBox you can FTP files in and out of it, letting you hack savegame files, or load hacked savegame files.
Consumers don't want a bazillion choices. They want something that works and works just like everyone else's system.
The worst support issues I ever had was with an office with three different versions of MS Windows, Win95, Win98, and WinNT. The minor differences in each OS caused immense ammounts of headaches and problems. Things didn't get any better until we nuked every hard drive in the building and put everyone on Windows 2000. And it wasn't Win2K that actually fixed the problem. It was that every system was using the same version of the same platform.
Rampaging multiple choice is good for hobbiests and geeks, but nor for Joe Sixpack computer users.
"Doze"! Golly, you're really sticking it to tha Man with that one!
You don't make Linux look any better when you spell Windows "Windoze", or any dirivative, nor when you spell MicroSoft or Bill Gates with a "$", nor when you call Bill "Billgatus". All you do is make Linux users look like 13-year old nerds sitting in their parents basements impotently thrashing in rage that MicroSoft still owns the desktop.
Advertising is a fact of life. Everyone does it. It's not the cost of the ad that is ultimately important, it's the impact. This ad has generated more buz than any car ad in years. More people have already activly watched this ad than will bother to look at the average car ad. Will this increase sales? Hard to say. Will it get your attention? Very definitely.
Advertising rarely makes up a significant part of the price of any consumer item anymore. Taxes, especially England's high VAT, makes up a much larger percentage of the cost than advertising ever could.
I expect a reviewer to be honest. I know that's like expecting a three-year old not to eat the donut the minute you leave the room, but that's how I feel.
I always love reviews of games that haven't shipped yet. Just a pile of regurgitated press releases and a few "golly-gee-whiz!"'s thrown in.
The "War on Terrorism" is a power play, just like the "War on Drugs" is. Each is used as an excuse to furter erode our rights and freedoms. Each is used to increase the powers of the Executiv Branch at the expense of the others. Each is used to grant even greater powers to law enforcement agencies. Each is used to remove judicial oversight from the actions of law enforcement.
The War on Drugs is a dismal failure. Drug use has not abated. The War or Terror(ism) will also be a failure. It will not make the world a safer place. But neither of these "wars" was meant to do what they told us they were for.
Send threats? How? Mayby by email? Libraries don't give out email addresses. The person in question would have to use a webmail system like HotMail or some such. Those email addresses are registered. He would leave a nice evidence trail there. You don't need to know which computer the guy was using if you have the threat coming from his email address.
Or what about the creep who uses the library's Internet connection to download pr0n, then goes into the men's room to masturbate? What do you say to the 8-year-old who walks into the men's room and discovers him? What do you say to the kid's mother when little Johnny tells her about it?
You do what my local library does: you call the police and have the bastard arrested.
There are ways to protect the public and deal with law-breakers that do not require the violation of inocent people's privacy.