> Rare? Try finding the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2. The Stop wants $30 used for it.
I think I may still have my PS2 copy of it. I'll GIVE it to you if you want. I don't want it taking up space on my shelf. Better than DA1, but still an outstandingly awful game.
I got the Elite, mostly because I wanted HDMI outputs, and it has a reasonably big drive, so I don't have the problem, but I definitely hear ya. The hardware hack to take the drive out is pretty trivial, but apparently the 360 will refuse to format it at a higher capacity no matter what you put in. Sony on the other hand, lets you throw any SATA drive in, and it'll use it all. Funny thing that, I like the PS3 more than the 360 in every respect... except as a freakin game console.
This means they're pushing digital distribution of actual games. These aren't Microsoft titles, so they've actually gotten agreements with the publishers. Meaning there's really no necessary distinction between these titles and new ones. Finally, a chance to put a stake in the heart of GameStop and their skeezy incompetent chain of pawnshops. No, I would NOT like to preorder, bitch!
And is this why XBL fell over last night? I had to unplug the goddam network just to be able to sign in to my own profile.
Speech recognition and text-to-speech software must be working really well these days. I applaud the way it gives the pre-literate access to online fora.
> More recently, Sony initially refused to allow porn on the Blu-ray format
Urban legend. They won't press porn discs in their facilities. Neither will Disney. There's already plenty of blu-ray porn out there (me, I think a certain level of definition is just too much).
Blogs have moved to open proxy block lists. Then again, implementing that would entail slashdot's development actually accellerating beyond two new features per decade.
> Does Real give kickbacks to labels based on popularity of their titles?
They purchase titles, and they'd be less likely to if they weren't popular. I guess compared to the alternative of buying direct, it doesn't help Sony, but I'm not sure it really hurts 'em. Me, I guess I prefer stores like eMusic, even if I sometimes go a whole month without being able to decide on what I want.
As for the virus, you can always use loaded words like "spies" instead of "tracks", but yeah, at some point people just don't care.
Well sure, if Blu-ray loses Disney as an exclusive, it's game over. Or I should say game on, because the only thing that will ship on blu-ray after that will be ps3 games. However, Disney shows no signs of any inclination to switch. Aren't they a founding member of the blu-ray consortium?
Sony just doesn't let its own stamping facilities get used for adult titles. They are far from the only one to do so. They have no such restriction on the format itself.
> Also the MP3 v. AACS (or whatever nonsense their MP3 players used)
ATRAC. AACS is the key management system used on blu-ray and hd-dvd, and AAC is the format used by the iPod (and 3G, and one of the choices for mpeg-4)
I don't bother to tell my friends and family not to buy Sony products, because it's hard to explain ("What? What the hell is a rootkit?" has been the response)
It's not hard to explain: "Sony hacks your computer with a virus when you put in a sony CD". I mean they'll look at you like you're crazy when you say that, but you can tell 'em they actually got taken to court over it.
Of course they don't do it now, so the argument doesn't still have a lot of legs with average folks.
I still like my PS2, but I do curse a little every time I put in a Sony DVD to just play it on my PC (because my firefly PC remote is so much nicer) and wonder whether ARccOS is going to screw it up.
If you think you're somehow hurting Sony by listening to their labels over Rhapsody, your zealous hatred has basically lead you to self-delusion.
> You could get the VHS machines cheaper, and the tapes were cheaper.
You could also get longer tapes, which made a huge difference. And while technically Blu-Ray also has higher capacity, it's too huge to make a real difference to anyone, since they don't record their shows on blu-ray discs anyway.
Grok actually makes me interested in Zope 3 -- because ZCML makes J2EE's XML configuration look sane. It's perhaps a perfect example of how not to write a configuration language, and especially how to not write an XML configuration language.
I just wish I could find decent documentation on Zope3. The greatest fear of the Zope 3 development community seems to be that someone might someday actually be able to use it.
> The only difference I see is the annoying screen that always asks you what storage device you want to use when saving game state
This boggles the crap out of me, why I'm always getting that screen. I don't even have a memory card, I do have a hundred freakin gigs on the HDD. Maybe the 360 should try some really advanced AI and figure out that when there's only one available option, it might be a sensible default?
> Nowdays, kids just abandon their parents anyway.
Used to be that houses were inherited between generations instead of being sold off to pay for a retirement. When you boot 'em out at 18 and only want them back on Thanksgiving and Christmas, then don't be surprised if they grow a little bit distant.
> When Peter Molyneax left Bullfrog and EA made a valient attempt at Dungeon Keeper 2 and Populous whatever.
Dungeon Keeper 2 was more of a face lift, but was otherwise an excellent game and what DK1 should have been. Shame that it doesn't run on XP (for more than 5 minutes at a time anyway). Populous: The Beginning was a rather different game, but excellent on its own merits.
What did Molyneaux bestow on us in the meantime? Black and White, a virtual pet with a mediocre RTS tacked on and a control scheme that hates normal people. Fable, a story of great myth and superreal fantasy -- those adjectives are to describe the marketing, of what was otherwise a standard action/console RPG with no really coherent plot.
I miss Bullfrog too, but it's clear that Bullfrog was not Molyneaux alone.
I find his disparagement of POLA (Principle Of Least Authority, which is what it's usually called) somewhat puzzling, considering that his whole notion of reducing the TCB and all the unix syscalls he goes through to sandbox a process are pretty much the same thing.
It seems to me that DJB has been in academia too long, since he seems completely ignorant of modern OS facilities like mandatory access control, random number generation, and even the fact that directory access isn't O(n) on many filesystems these days. Of course qmail couldn't count on the existence of any of these back then, but to not even mention them now, even in passing, is somewhat telling.
DJB in section 5.2 doesn't even plug all the potential holes, as there could be more or less of them depending on the platform you're on. And of course, the sandboxing with all the chroot'ing and seteuid'ing and so forth has to run as root to start with, whereas a proper MAC implementation can impose a restrictive security context on any process without needing escalated privileges to start, nor needing to laboriously duplicate this byzantine security context setup with every process.
DJB is no dummy, but he's definitely not the Knuth of security either.
Congratulations on posting the first reply that looks like it was penned by someone over the age of 15. The rest of the lame joke comments make me feel like I'm on digg.
> Taco said in one of his write-ups, comments will (very rarely) be removed for legal reasons.
He also says that they don't post slashvertisements. Slashdot isn't able to stand up for basic editorial values like fact-checking, not shilling, or just plain copy editing for basic grammar and spelling. So pardon me if my faith is only as strong as the actual practice of their principles.
Slashdot Mirror
> Rare? Try finding the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2. The Stop wants $30 used for it.
I think I may still have my PS2 copy of it. I'll GIVE it to you if you want. I don't want it taking up space on my shelf. Better than DA1, but still an outstandingly awful game.
I got the Elite, mostly because I wanted HDMI outputs, and it has a reasonably big drive, so I don't have the problem, but I definitely hear ya. The hardware hack to take the drive out is pretty trivial, but apparently the 360 will refuse to format it at a higher capacity no matter what you put in. Sony on the other hand, lets you throw any SATA drive in, and it'll use it all. Funny thing that, I like the PS3 more than the 360 in every respect ... except as a freakin game console.
This means they're pushing digital distribution of actual games. These aren't Microsoft titles, so they've actually gotten agreements with the publishers. Meaning there's really no necessary distinction between these titles and new ones. Finally, a chance to put a stake in the heart of GameStop and their skeezy incompetent chain of pawnshops. No, I would NOT like to preorder, bitch!
And is this why XBL fell over last night? I had to unplug the goddam network just to be able to sign in to my own profile.
Speech recognition and text-to-speech software must be working really well these days. I applaud the way it gives the pre-literate access to online fora.
Ken Thompson, of course. Multics impregnated him with the ideas, he carried 'em to term and birthed 'em on a PDP-7.
Okay, I really don't want to continue this analogy.
> Sony wouldn't allow porn on betamax.
[[citation needed]]
> More recently, Sony initially refused to allow porn on the Blu-ray format
Urban legend. They won't press porn discs in their facilities. Neither will Disney. There's already plenty of blu-ray porn out there (me, I think a certain level of definition is just too much).
When they crucify you they're nice enough to tie you there. Nail you if you're really special.
Blogs have moved to open proxy block lists. Then again, implementing that would entail slashdot's development actually accellerating beyond two new features per decade.
Let's try Sam and Max for our rejoinder:
"No, I was right, I could care less, because I care even less about what you're saying right now."
> Does Real give kickbacks to labels based on popularity of their titles?
They purchase titles, and they'd be less likely to if they weren't popular. I guess compared to the alternative of buying direct, it doesn't help Sony, but I'm not sure it really hurts 'em. Me, I guess I prefer stores like eMusic, even if I sometimes go a whole month without being able to decide on what I want.
As for the virus, you can always use loaded words like "spies" instead of "tracks", but yeah, at some point people just don't care.
When you know you're going to lose, you resign. You offer a draw when you're in move 20 of a 50-move-stalemate.
Well sure, if Blu-ray loses Disney as an exclusive, it's game over. Or I should say game on, because the only thing that will ship on blu-ray after that will be ps3 games. However, Disney shows no signs of any inclination to switch. Aren't they a founding member of the blu-ray consortium?
> Sony refuses to allow porn on Blu-Ray
Sony just doesn't let its own stamping facilities get used for adult titles. They are far from the only one to do so. They have no such restriction on the format itself.
> Also the MP3 v. AACS (or whatever nonsense their MP3 players used)
ATRAC. AACS is the key management system used on blu-ray and hd-dvd, and AAC is the format used by the iPod (and 3G, and one of the choices for mpeg-4)
I don't bother to tell my friends and family not to buy Sony products, because it's hard to explain ("What? What the hell is a rootkit?" has been the response)
It's not hard to explain: "Sony hacks your computer with a virus when you put in a sony CD". I mean they'll look at you like you're crazy when you say that, but you can tell 'em they actually got taken to court over it.
Of course they don't do it now, so the argument doesn't still have a lot of legs with average folks.
I still like my PS2, but I do curse a little every time I put in a Sony DVD to just play it on my PC (because my firefly PC remote is so much nicer) and wonder whether ARccOS is going to screw it up.
If you think you're somehow hurting Sony by listening to their labels over Rhapsody, your zealous hatred has basically lead you to self-delusion.
> You could get the VHS machines cheaper, and the tapes were cheaper.
You could also get longer tapes, which made a huge difference. And while technically Blu-Ray also has higher capacity, it's too huge to make a real difference to anyone, since they don't record their shows on blu-ray discs anyway.
Grok actually makes me interested in Zope 3 -- because ZCML makes J2EE's XML configuration look sane. It's perhaps a perfect example of how not to write a configuration language, and especially how to not write an XML configuration language.
I just wish I could find decent documentation on Zope3. The greatest fear of the Zope 3 development community seems to be that someone might someday actually be able to use it.
> The only difference I see is the annoying screen that always asks you what storage device you want to use when saving game state
This boggles the crap out of me, why I'm always getting that screen. I don't even have a memory card, I do have a hundred freakin gigs on the HDD. Maybe the 360 should try some really advanced AI and figure out that when there's only one available option, it might be a sensible default?
> Nowdays, kids just abandon their parents anyway.
Used to be that houses were inherited between generations instead of being sold off to pay for a retirement. When you boot 'em out at 18 and only want them back on Thanksgiving and Christmas, then don't be surprised if they grow a little bit distant.
> When Peter Molyneax left Bullfrog and EA made a valient attempt at Dungeon Keeper 2 and Populous whatever.
Dungeon Keeper 2 was more of a face lift, but was otherwise an excellent game and what DK1 should have been. Shame that it doesn't run on XP (for more than 5 minutes at a time anyway). Populous: The Beginning was a rather different game, but excellent on its own merits.
What did Molyneaux bestow on us in the meantime? Black and White, a virtual pet with a mediocre RTS tacked on and a control scheme that hates normal people. Fable, a story of great myth and superreal fantasy -- those adjectives are to describe the marketing, of what was otherwise a standard action/console RPG with no really coherent plot.
I miss Bullfrog too, but it's clear that Bullfrog was not Molyneaux alone.
I find his disparagement of POLA (Principle Of Least Authority, which is what it's usually called) somewhat puzzling, considering that his whole notion of reducing the TCB and all the unix syscalls he goes through to sandbox a process are pretty much the same thing.
It seems to me that DJB has been in academia too long, since he seems completely ignorant of modern OS facilities like mandatory access control, random number generation, and even the fact that directory access isn't O(n) on many filesystems these days. Of course qmail couldn't count on the existence of any of these back then, but to not even mention them now, even in passing, is somewhat telling.
DJB in section 5.2 doesn't even plug all the potential holes, as there could be more or less of them depending on the platform you're on. And of course, the sandboxing with all the chroot'ing and seteuid'ing and so forth has to run as root to start with, whereas a proper MAC implementation can impose a restrictive security context on any process without needing escalated privileges to start, nor needing to laboriously duplicate this byzantine security context setup with every process.
DJB is no dummy, but he's definitely not the Knuth of security either.
Congratulations on posting the first reply that looks like it was penned by someone over the age of 15. The rest of the lame joke comments make me feel like I'm on digg.
> Taco said in one of his write-ups, comments will (very rarely) be removed for legal reasons.
He also says that they don't post slashvertisements. Slashdot isn't able to stand up for basic editorial values like fact-checking, not shilling, or just plain copy editing for basic grammar and spelling. So pardon me if my faith is only as strong as the actual practice of their principles.
"N game" pulls it up almost immediately. You want something tough to google for, name a game "fun" or "good" or "hard".
Ah, "This PDF" would be TFA. Thwack. Use the proper Slashdot Standard Acronym next type ;)