The most ridiculous thing isn't the fact that we have 3gb/month limits, but the fact that to upgrade to a 5gb/month plan, you have to pay almost as much as two 3gb connections!
It's completely ludicrous, driven mainly by the fact that our technology minister is a luddite who went on the record to say that broadband internet is only useful for porn and games.
If you look now, they just dropped all their prices - the 12" is now $3099, $900AUD less than before, and the other books seem to have dropped that much also.
I can understand your laziness in not just copying the music onto your work computer, but there are those of us who are stuck in countries that have 3gb/month transfer limits on their broadband.
I mean, really, is it that hard to just copy the MP3's to your work computer? Or even buy an iPod? Hell, that's not an option for us Aussies, since we'd be able to afford an iPod just in the fees we pay for excess bandwidth in a month of streaming MP3's to another computer.
Yep, the wahmbulance is enroute to my house as I speak.
Personally, I don't see what all the bad movement against Microsoft is - I guess it's just everyone on Slashdot going with the flow. Personally, I'd be flushed to use one of these, after all, it saves bringing solid [reading] matter into the toilet to pass the time. I'd rather check my logs and 'take the piss' out of my friend Johnson via MSN Messenger than just sit around doing crap all.
It hasn't been/.'ed, you've just been put into the patented GameSpy/FilePlanet queue system. Your web page will be served to you in
87
minutes. When you are at the front of the queue, you will have 60 seconds to click the link to view the webpage, otherwise you will have to re-enter the queue.
Can anyone outside of the US who's got one of these things comment on whether the QCast disc is region locked or not?
For those of us outside the US who don't have the luxury of using something like a Tivo to store all of our digital media to watch on the TV without a PC nearby (let alone record!), this sounds like a perfect option.
I've heard people from EB say that the Xbox runs Windows out of the box, developers aren't supporting the PS2, and that Duke Nukem Forever was a 'definite' for Christmas 2000. Notice a pattern?
Somehow, I doubt that an anonymous EB employee knows any more about Nintendo's future GB plans than anyone else outside of Nintendo - it's just pure speculation.
I used a *very* modified diet based loosely on the Hackers Diet.
Don't eat more than 40gms of fat
I lost 40kgs (80lbs) doing this. Also, weigh yourself every day, and chart it in your spreadsheet of choice. You get a psychological benefit of seeing your weight drop over time, and the small spikes that can occur over time don't derail you.
I thought the whole point of a "Media PC" was that it acted like a PVR and recorded video content. If I want to play DVD's/MP3's/VCD's, I'll just buy a $150 DVD player!
Everyone knows that the Venezuelan government wouldn't be in this kind of problem if Zack hadn't become jealous over Slater's running of the power plant. This slow clock thing is just something to make Slater look silly so that Kelly will fall back into Zack's arms!
That's just stupid. If a BIOS manufacturer can't load the entire contents of a BIOS update into memory before they start flashing, they shouldn't be a BIOS manufacturer.
I mean, seriously! Name me a BIOS manufacturer who streams data off a floppy drive while flashing a BIOS, so I can avoid them next time I upgrade...
Yep, this is definitely true. A major story like Nintendo getting 10% of past sales from the PlayStation brand would definitely be only reported on an unreputable site like ConsoleTalk, and not on, say, Yahoo News, CNN, or Reuters.
And as for no news from Nintendo and Sony about this? That's just because they're slow in getting the press release out. Right.
This isn't true. How about doing some small amount of research next time before publishing the article.
This is related to the "Megaton" announcement from Nintendo coming soon. Some sites say it's Capcom being bought by Nintendo, some sites say it's Sony paying Nintendo money for the PS brand, some sites have equally ridiculous stories. All sites are rumours and aren't true (so far), as no announcement has been made.
My Year 11/12 computing teacher was a RISC-PC fan. He was such a fan, that he always had to have each computer room have half Windows PC's, half Acorns. Every now and then, he'd sing the praises of Sibellius(sp?) and some crappy 'multimedia' program, but we all despised using them because they were slow and horrible, and had no application support.
He was such a fan, that back in 1996 my teacher would say that RISC OS was going to take over the world and displace MS because it ran on the StrongARM. Deluded and fanatical doesn't even begin to describe it.
If it could run games, and the hardware was cheaper, I'd nab an OSX-based notebook.
If it could run games, run decent graphics and 3D apps like Photoshop & 3DS Max, play all of my movies in a decent movie player without having sound fail because the codec wasn't supported, had a for-dummies set up of hibernation all ready to go, and had a consistent interface between apps, I'd choose Linux.
I recently tried RH8, and I probably would have stuck with everything that annoyed me about it if all the apps supported antialiasing, rather than just the shell and two or three other apps. I tried the GTK2 fix thing or whatever it's called, but it just nailed my system. It sounds like a small thing, but it's the small things that eventually drive you mad.
Man, trolls/first posts are really sinking these days.
Given that your gimmick was to swap the second and third letters, your title would then be "First enpis post".
Not only was it the usual waste of time -1 post that it could only be, but you didn't even get the gimmick right so that the 10 or 15 people who could appreciate your subtle humour would praise you as a god amongst second-third letter rotation men.
If you can't even rotate six letters around without stuffing up, then the Terrorists have already won.
"a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions"
Agh! Marketing Splooge, attacking from 3 o'clock!
Dual "GPU" configurations have been around since early '98, when the Voodoo2 came out. Sure, 3Dfx called it SLI, but it was essentially two 3D cards working as one - and someone (Quantum3D?) made single cards with dual Voodoo2's on them. Not to mention the Voodoo5 which had 4 GPUs on it.
I remember seeing someone (could have been Quantum3D again) who was promising a 16-GPU version of the Voodoo5 for mass $$$.
Multiple GPU's is nothing new, and it's definitely not going to "shake the gaming industry to it's core only on PAY PER VIEEEEEEEEEW....."
Well, there are more, but that's 18 games right there that didn't bankrupt their creators by allowing people to run servers at a LAN party.
Well, actually, Dynamix *did* go bankrupt, partly due to the fact that virtually no-one actually bought Tribes 1. Why? Because people didn't need CD checks to play online, so they just warez'd it and played.
I remember talking to one of the ex-Dynamix staff, and they were saying that the figures for pirated people playing through their master server vs legal copies was something like 15-to-1.
Also, quite a few titles in that list *do* have centralised key auth'ing systems. Half-Life has WONID's based off serials, Tribes 2 did, Quake 3 did, and MoH:AA did. I don't think you can seriously count Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, since they were pre-internet gaming.
So before you go "Hey, it's not going to bankrupt them", it does.
(and as a side note: I'm going against the flow and supporting Blizzard here. It doesn't matter if bnetd heals a dying swan and fixes every bug in the game, it still gets around CD protection.
While that might be fine for the "Any use of the DMCA is evil, even if it means shooting off our feet"/. crowd, I don't think Blizzard is too happy about losing 90% of their sales (assuming WC3 gets pirated at 2/3'rds the rate of the Dynamix figures) so that Joe Slashdot can meet up with his friends in an empty room rather than in Battle.Net.)
Re:Let me get this... (PC vs Consoles)
on
E3 Wrapup
·
· Score: 2
If you'd been to E3, you would have seen the effect of this.
The South Hall, which was traditionally a PC game hall, was filled with more consoles than PC's. While I can name a dozen or more impressive console titles off the top of my head, I can only think of about two, maybe three interesting PC titles. PC gaming, compared to a few years ago, is more stagnant and smaller. That's not completely piracys fault, but it is a factor in Publishers and Developers shifting focus (what? I can sell 5-10x more copies by releasing on a console? sure!)
Piracy isn't driving any of the console players out of business, since only the uberhardcore have the patience to mod their consoles and swap discs everytime they want to play pirated games. The only console that was affected was the Dreamcast, since all you had to do was download and burn a disc.
It is driving PC sales down, since all someone has to do is download (P2P-Client-of-the-month) and click on "l33t-gta3.iso", and presto - instant game.
So no, it's not some OMG HOT HOT RIAA-esque conspiracy where they're selling more and fudging figures to claim piracy, it's because PC gaming is being heavily affected by it, while console gaming isn't.
Well, if you look at the amount of time between the article being posted and this comment, that's how long it takes to transfer 3gb of data from a/.'ed site:)
That might not be as ludicrous as it sounds. The only state in Australia where hardcore porn and fireworks are allowed legally is the Australian Capital Territory - a state solely created for housing Parliment House, politicians and civil servants.
As someone living in a technology-deprived land, I weep everytime I hear about the Tivo. Are there any plans at all for it to work in regions besides the US and UK? I can't imagine it would take much to get it working in Australia, just the phone setup or whatever it needs to get program info.
The difference here is most DVD's in Australia cost $35AUD (about $15-17US). If the price *was* doubled, it would make DVD's for rental outlets only around $5 US more than what US people are paying for DVD's.
It doesn't make it good, but it puts in in perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
The most ridiculous thing isn't the fact that we have 3gb/month limits, but the fact that to upgrade to a 5gb/month plan, you have to pay almost as much as two 3gb connections!
It's completely ludicrous, driven mainly by the fact that our technology minister is a luddite who went on the record to say that broadband internet is only useful for porn and games.
If you look now, they just dropped all their prices - the 12" is now $3099, $900AUD less than before, and the other books seem to have dropped that much also.
I can understand your laziness in not just copying the music onto your work computer, but there are those of us who are stuck in countries that have 3gb/month transfer limits on their broadband.
I mean, really, is it that hard to just copy the MP3's to your work computer? Or even buy an iPod? Hell, that's not an option for us Aussies, since we'd be able to afford an iPod just in the fees we pay for excess bandwidth in a month of streaming MP3's to another computer.
Yep, the wahmbulance is enroute to my house as I speak.
Personally, I don't see what all the bad movement against Microsoft is - I guess it's just everyone on Slashdot going with the flow. Personally, I'd be flushed to use one of these, after all, it saves bringing solid [reading] matter into the toilet to pass the time. I'd rather check my logs and 'take the piss' out of my friend Johnson via MSN Messenger than just sit around doing crap all.
It hasn't been /.'ed, you've just been put into the patented GameSpy/FilePlanet queue system. Your web page will be served to you in
87
minutes. When you are at the front of the queue, you will have 60 seconds to click the link to view the webpage, otherwise you will have to re-enter the queue.
Can anyone outside of the US who's got one of these things comment on whether the QCast disc is region locked or not?
For those of us outside the US who don't have the luxury of using something like a Tivo to store all of our digital media to watch on the TV without a PC nearby (let alone record!), this sounds like a perfect option.
I've heard people from EB say that the Xbox runs Windows out of the box, developers aren't supporting the PS2, and that Duke Nukem Forever was a 'definite' for Christmas 2000. Notice a pattern?
Somehow, I doubt that an anonymous EB employee knows any more about Nintendo's future GB plans than anyone else outside of Nintendo - it's just pure speculation.
I used a *very* modified diet based loosely on the Hackers Diet.
Don't eat more than 40gms of fat
I lost 40kgs (80lbs) doing this. Also, weigh yourself every day, and chart it in your spreadsheet of choice. You get a psychological benefit of seeing your weight drop over time, and the small spikes that can occur over time don't derail you.
I thought the whole point of a "Media PC" was that it acted like a PVR and recorded video content. If I want to play DVD's/MP3's/VCD's, I'll just buy a $150 DVD player!
Everyone knows that the Venezuelan government wouldn't be in this kind of problem if Zack hadn't become jealous over Slater's running of the power plant. This slow clock thing is just something to make Slater look silly so that Kelly will fall back into Zack's arms!
That's just stupid. If a BIOS manufacturer can't load the entire contents of a BIOS update into memory before they start flashing, they shouldn't be a BIOS manufacturer.
I mean, seriously! Name me a BIOS manufacturer who streams data off a floppy drive while flashing a BIOS, so I can avoid them next time I upgrade...
Yep, this is definitely true. A major story like Nintendo getting 10% of past sales from the PlayStation brand would definitely be only reported on an unreputable site like ConsoleTalk, and not on, say, Yahoo News, CNN, or Reuters.
And as for no news from Nintendo and Sony about this? That's just because they're slow in getting the press release out. Right.
This isn't true. How about doing some small amount of research next time before publishing the article.
This is related to the "Megaton" announcement from Nintendo coming soon. Some sites say it's Capcom being bought by Nintendo, some sites say it's Sony paying Nintendo money for the PS brand, some sites have equally ridiculous stories. All sites are rumours and aren't true (so far), as no announcement has been made.
From what I hear, that would be because Romero decided not to turn up at the last minute.
I guess there's only so much shampoo over here, and we didn't have enough for his hair or something
Regardless, I believe Doug Church took over his spot, and I'd imagine any speech he gave would have been much better than Romero could have given.
This is, sadly, very true.
My Year 11/12 computing teacher was a RISC-PC fan. He was such a fan, that he always had to have each computer room have half Windows PC's, half Acorns. Every now and then, he'd sing the praises of Sibellius(sp?) and some crappy 'multimedia' program, but we all despised using them because they were slow and horrible, and had no application support.
He was such a fan, that back in 1996 my teacher would say that RISC OS was going to take over the world and displace MS because it ran on the StrongARM. Deluded and fanatical doesn't even begin to describe it.
I run WinXP on my laptop.
If it could run games, and the hardware was cheaper, I'd nab an OSX-based notebook.
If it could run games, run decent graphics and 3D apps like Photoshop & 3DS Max, play all of my movies in a decent movie player without having sound fail because the codec wasn't supported, had a for-dummies set up of hibernation all ready to go, and had a consistent interface between apps, I'd choose Linux.
I recently tried RH8, and I probably would have stuck with everything that annoyed me about it if all the apps supported antialiasing, rather than just the shell and two or three other apps. I tried the GTK2 fix thing or whatever it's called, but it just nailed my system. It sounds like a small thing, but it's the small things that eventually drive you mad.
Are you blind?!? Some of the one-person-developed games have gathered cult-followings!
Soldat
Porra Sturvat
Crimsonland
Not to mention mods like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, also...
Man, trolls/first posts are really sinking these days.
Given that your gimmick was to swap the second and third letters, your title would then be "First enpis post".
Not only was it the usual waste of time -1 post that it could only be, but you didn't even get the gimmick right so that the 10 or 15 people who could appreciate your subtle humour would praise you as a god amongst second-third letter rotation men.
If you can't even rotate six letters around without stuffing up, then the Terrorists have already won.
"a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions"
Agh! Marketing Splooge, attacking from 3 o'clock!
Dual "GPU" configurations have been around since early '98, when the Voodoo2 came out. Sure, 3Dfx called it SLI, but it was essentially two 3D cards working as one - and someone (Quantum3D?) made single cards with dual Voodoo2's on them. Not to mention the Voodoo5 which had 4 GPUs on it.
I remember seeing someone (could have been Quantum3D again) who was promising a 16-GPU version of the Voodoo5 for mass $$$.
Multiple GPU's is nothing new, and it's definitely not going to "shake the gaming industry to it's core only on PAY PER VIEEEEEEEEEW....."
Well, there are more, but that's 18 games right there that didn't bankrupt their creators by allowing people to run servers at a LAN party.
/. crowd, I don't think Blizzard is too happy about losing 90% of their sales (assuming WC3 gets pirated at 2/3'rds the rate of the Dynamix figures) so that Joe Slashdot can meet up with his friends in an empty room rather than in Battle.Net.)
Well, actually, Dynamix *did* go bankrupt, partly due to the fact that virtually no-one actually bought Tribes 1. Why? Because people didn't need CD checks to play online, so they just warez'd it and played.
I remember talking to one of the ex-Dynamix staff, and they were saying that the figures for pirated people playing through their master server vs legal copies was something like 15-to-1.
Also, quite a few titles in that list *do* have centralised key auth'ing systems. Half-Life has WONID's based off serials, Tribes 2 did, Quake 3 did, and MoH:AA did. I don't think you can seriously count Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, since they were pre-internet gaming.
So before you go "Hey, it's not going to bankrupt them", it does.
(and as a side note: I'm going against the flow and supporting Blizzard here. It doesn't matter if bnetd heals a dying swan and fixes every bug in the game, it still gets around CD protection.
While that might be fine for the "Any use of the DMCA is evil, even if it means shooting off our feet"
If you'd been to E3, you would have seen the effect of this.
The South Hall, which was traditionally a PC game hall, was filled with more consoles than PC's. While I can name a dozen or more impressive console titles off the top of my head, I can only think of about two, maybe three interesting PC titles. PC gaming, compared to a few years ago, is more stagnant and smaller. That's not completely piracys fault, but it is a factor in Publishers and Developers shifting focus (what? I can sell 5-10x more copies by releasing on a console? sure!)
Piracy isn't driving any of the console players out of business, since only the uberhardcore have the patience to mod their consoles and swap discs everytime they want to play pirated games. The only console that was affected was the Dreamcast, since all you had to do was download and burn a disc.
It is driving PC sales down, since all someone has to do is download (P2P-Client-of-the-month) and click on "l33t-gta3.iso", and presto - instant game.
So no, it's not some OMG HOT HOT RIAA-esque conspiracy where they're selling more and fudging figures to claim piracy, it's because PC gaming is being heavily affected by it, while console gaming isn't.
Now condensed, so everyone can understand it!
Jon Katz didn't like it? Wow, I've got to see this movie, it's got to be good!
Jon Katz likes it? Avoid like the plague.
Well, if you look at the amount of time between the article being posted and this comment, that's how long it takes to transfer 3gb of data from a /.'ed site :)
That might not be as ludicrous as it sounds. The only state in Australia where hardcore porn and fireworks are allowed legally is the Australian Capital Territory - a state solely created for housing Parliment House, politicians and civil servants.
As someone living in a technology-deprived land, I weep everytime I hear about the Tivo. Are there any plans at all for it to work in regions besides the US and UK? I can't imagine it would take much to get it working in Australia, just the phone setup or whatever it needs to get program info.
:\
Oh well...maybe we'll get it 5 years or so
The difference here is most DVD's in Australia cost $35AUD (about $15-17US). If the price *was* doubled, it would make DVD's for rental outlets only around $5 US more than what US people are paying for DVD's.
It doesn't make it good, but it puts in in perspective.