Now I remember why I don't RTFA, that article is such a mess I had trouble following it. When I did decipher it, it just turned out to be a biased news piece bashing Microsoft by selecting sources and making insinuations.
Please explain your logic to me? I own a £400 laptop its only a 1.7Ghz Pentium M with a Intel 950 GMA card inside, its powerfull enough to do what I want to do on the go from playing games (like Myst Online and Tomb Raider), running engineering software like Proteus Isis and Matlab to general office stuff like Office 2007. Its perfect for portability reasons, it will even do Divx encoding and editing at a reasonable rate (about 1 hour 15 minutes to encode a 45 minutes.) Its a 15" widescreen, very light, decent battery life and it less than an inch thick, what more could you ask for in a portable computer? In comparision the cheapest Apple laptop I could find at the time might have been a Core 2 Duo but it still had exactly the same graphics card with only stereo speakers, the same amount of ram, screen size and DVD rewriter. In what way shape or form is that at the fulcrum point? Almost 4 times the price to have your bottle neck in exactly the same place?
It gets worse when you compare Desktops to Mac's, my entire desktop setup cost £750 thats including the 5.1 surround systems, the 19" screen, the TV card, the 400GB external hard drive, the wireless headphones, twin dvd rewriters and at the time the second best graphics card nvidia did. When I was building it I did look into Apple Mac's the closet I could find was about £1900. I purchased components based on expearence with build quality and performance sure the case I bought was not as pretty as the Mac's, but is a pretty case, keyboard and monitor worth £1200?
Laptops are not supposed to be huge powerhouses to do all your work, they exist so you can do work on the move. I've always wondered why people think they should be amazing do all devices.
I have seen and used a few Mac's laptops they are very nice, with a slew of cool extra features but these features can be found on other laptops (no other laptop has all of them) but for £600 you can get a Sony Vivao which looks quite pretty, has a VGA camera, a built in card reader and will match the internal specifications of you Mac. I suppose at the end of the day what would you prefer? If you could spend £1500 on a laptop to last you ten years, would you buy 1 top of the range machine now for £1500 or would you buy a £500 machine today and get a high mid end laptop and then when it fails in a 3/4 years buying anouther high mid end machine. Personally I'd rather stay on the high mid end curve since its where the best value for money tends to lie.
I use two vista PC's connected on a network ones a Laptop the other a desktop. The laptop is setup to sync with the desktop through the sync centre, so whenever I log into the network with it it makes sure that the chosen directory contains the most recent files in both folders. works great for me
I'm running six machines, four of which are currently using Vista. Certain features of vista have actually made things easier, I run a house network and always had a problem using sharing folders (on XP) this problem evaporated when I switched to Vista. Vista was given out under MSDN license to many of technology students in my university the six others who've picked up a copy have not had a problem running Vista and prefer it over XP.
In my expearence Vista's problems have pretty much been tied to drivers and now after 9 months that issue appears to have been solved. I'm running out of old hardware which Vista won't install automatically or the "check for solutions" thing doesn't provide a link directly to a driver for. Currently the last two pieces of hardware which don't install automatically or Vista can't find a solution for are a HP 3320 printer (I got free with a laptop in 2000) and a five year old Avermedia TV card (which Avermedia never produced a x64 driver for.) Funnily enough the hacked x64 HP drivers for XP x64 install a working Vista x64 driver. The normal XP drivers for the Avermedia card and HP printer function perfectly well in the 32bit version of Vista.
My gaming performance has pretty much returned to what it was before, with higher frame rates than my LCD's refresh rate. Creatives Vista x64 Audigy driver works better than their XP x64 driver (ALOT BETTER) and EAX reamins working on OpenAL games. I have lost functionality but to be honest pretty much every game I own uses OpenAL for EAX so its not something I've noticed. Vista is every bit as stable and usable as XP, with improved networking, pretty visuals and a bunch of tiny little extra's which improve it when compared to XP. Yes I'm not saying it works perfectly well for everyone but I do get the feeling that a small minority used it on public release day (or a little after) judged it unfairly (Nvidia's drivers wern't as good as Xp's and Creative drivers sucked thats just two companies I had expearence with) and then went on a crusade to bash the OS spreading as much FUD as possible. Alternativly these people tried Vista on machines which wern't capable of running Vista and attacked it for its slow response times. While I agree that Vista shouldn't have required higher specifications, I could have made exactly the same arguement about XP and only a year ago my brand new laptop didn't have the specifications to run XP properly (came with 256mb of ram) making it run redicously slow. I've seen OEM's sell laptops and desktops with 512MB of ram with onboard graphics cards which claim 128mb of that (in one instance I found a laptop which only had access to 440mb of ram), it would be similar to selling a laptop with 48mb of ram and putting Windows XP on it, you can't compare the speed of an OS if your not going to meet its minimum specifications.
From the little I've read about Open GL and Direct X there are some technical reasons why it wouldn't be a good idea to release Direct X 10 onto XP, which as I understand it have to do with Xp's driver model and the Direct3D API. Secondly the few developers who've posted about Direct X and Open GL feel that Direct X is better than Open GL, the one games developer I've asked about it said pretty much the same thing. Personally I wouldn't mind seeing things the other way around since I own a PS3 and the more developers switching to Open GL means more PS3 games.
But the fact remains you do have to make a logical arguement about why people should use Linux over Windows, why they should use Open GL over Direct X. When both appear to have less functionality (less games and program compatibility for the first and not as advanced for the latter) and are harder to use (Linux is harder than windows (although Ubunutu is changing that) and apparently Open GL is harder to use intially.) Screaming random FUD is not going to win people to your cause.
I'm not a fan of the 360 mostly because many of the games on it don't appeal to me or I can get them on the PC. But I purchased a PS3 a couple of weeks ago and haven't touched any of my PC games since. Motorstorm, Resistance Fall of Man and Pirates of the Carribean are all getting a real workout. I am still currently still living at home at the moment and ever since I got motorstorm almost every night several family members come in so we can take turns on Motorstorm, Resistance's online play is keeping me playing that quite regularly which is cool because apart from Counterstrike I've never been a huge console FPS player and pirates is just simple fun.
I agree not every game is great Sonic the Hedgehog was yet anouther 3d disapointment from "Team Sonic"*. But just those three have kept me going a while and I'm hearing great things about Oblivion and Transformers. To be honest I'm worried I don't have the time to play and beat them all before GTA IV comes out.
*Team Sonic seem to enjoy destroying the Sonic franchise, I know I'm using a PS3 but I'd love a 2D sonic game, give me hundreds of levels and take 2D graphics as far as you can and I'd be happy for life, Sonic, Tails, Robotnik, Amy and Knuckles were all the charracters I wanted adding clones and call them different names just annoys me. Making me run in a stupid group annoys me, making the game load for thirty seconds for one line of charracter text irratates me, trying to turn Sonic into a zelda/mario platform style game angers me. I mean they almost had it right with one level I did where sonic ran flat out and I had to control his path, if it has to be 3d give me that.
Windows Media Centre was barely able to run on the machine taking recordings was pointless using windows media centre or the avermedia PVR software. This 500Mhz chip would definitly not be enough, the 1Ghz and 1.5Ghz chips would do it though and even at 7.5watts the 1.5Ghz is redicoulously low power.
Most wireless networks I've come accross (which is alot) are secured, currently from my bedroom in my house I can detect 8 secured wireless networks and 0 unsecured, if I travel through the city with my PDA which supports 802.11b/g it highly rare to come accross a unsecure network. 3 or 4 years ago you would have been right I still remember being able to walk from my house the two miles into the city centre listening to Radio 1 as my device hopped from one network to anouther. Today I can't do that there are only three unsecured networks (University, B&Q and the pub/bar wifi network) that I've found in my home city and all through require you to go through a VPN to gain web access.
Perhaps you should spend less time insulting British people and making snide comments, networks were unsecured because people didn't know what WEP and WAP were, they didn't realise people could access their network. Thanks to prosecutions like this and the news/papers reporting on it they know now to secure their networks even if they still don't know what WAP and WEP are.
The opinion seems to be while its just a video game it might provide a little insight into how people react to these situations which could be usefull for future modeling.
Uru Myst does not have an inventory nor does realMyst, realMyst was a demo piece for the 3d rendering engine Cyan Worlds bought for their next project "DIRT" which evolved into the mutliplayer project "mudpie" which later became known as Uru: Ages beyond Myst. Uru: Ages Beyond Myst was to have a online component known as Uru Live, this was cancelled in its beta stages (known as Prologue) by Ubisoft. Last year Gametap and Cyan Worlds relaunched Uru Live and renamed it Myst Online: Uru Live, this is still going and worth checking out : http://www.mystonline.com/
To go through the myst series:
Myst has no inventory, you are able to pick up a page from each age and return it to its book you can hold only one page at a time.
In Riven you were given two books, one you could read and one you could give away you could not add to this inventory nor could you effect it, it was there as a plot device.
realMyst was released next which is Myst but in 3d, it had an extra age and was only avaliable for a short time, you could only pick up a blue or red page from each age.
Myst 3 had no inventory you were given a journal to read from and could only directly effect things in game.
Uru was released at this point you are able to create a avatar, collect links of places you've been to and collect "relto pages" to alter your personal space. This is as probably close to inventory based as a Myst universe game has gotten. Even then the items you can collect exist allow you to personalise your charracter rather than help you solve a puzzle.
Myst IV gave you an "imager" which allowed you to take pictures and notes as well as a locket these were the only items you could hold and use neither directly acted on the enviroment.
Myst V was released in 2005 this had a journal and you were able to pick up and use tablets, the tables were not placed in an inventory and you could only use a specific one in each age.
Inventory based games are different good examples would be the Discworld games and Starship Titanic, you were able to go around a 2d universe and start conversations with people/objects, these conversations if navigated correctly would mean you would be given an object you could combine items in your inventory to get past certain targets, using Discworld 2 as an example after completing a series of errands for a ships captain he would give you some rope, in the next chapter you would help out a woman in doing so you would come accross a hook, the hook and rope can be combined, in the third chapter you had to get past a guard, to do this you would combine the rope and hook and then select the new object and the wall, the charracter would then climb the building.
There are many types of adventure game two main styles existed, the Myst Puzzle style which involves logic and reasoning to solve by manipulating objects on the screen for example exploring and finding out four frequencies to make a crystal resonate. The other Starship Titanic Inventory style which involves figuring out puzzles and how your inventory can relate the enviroment around you.
I'm a adventure lover and hope the genre opens up more I'm tired of only having Myst Online as the place I can go for advernture fix.
Interesting thing to note I own a Laptop with 1GB of ram and an Intel GMA 950 with a Pentium M 1.7Ghz chip. I play Myst Online: Uru Live which is ported over to OSX with the Transgaming Cider thing. My Laptop can run Myst Online: Uru Live at the capped frame rate with all the setting half way, the Mac Mini's can't, even at minimum settings they have a low frame rate (1 or 2 FPS) and have huge rendering issues. As far as we can work out its the intel driver for OSX limiting Mini owners from playing as Mac's with similar specifications but Nvidia or Ati cards can play MO:UL and using bootcamp on the Mini MO:UL actually runs extremely well.
Myst was a puzzle based adventure game which has never included an inventory, this an inventory based adventure game. A better example would be Starship Titanic, a game I loved but in the end loathed due to a bug which meant a false move in the begining stopped you ever completing the game.
I had thought HD DVD was dead, in m home city in the UK there are only four shops selling "next gen" disc's. Virgin Megastore which only has a collection of Blue Ray films at the insane price of £25+, Anouther Virgin Megastore (yes my city centre has two) which has Blue Ray discs and a small bay of HDDVD discs (half the display of blueray) and the other two are Woowoths and Game both of which sell them because they sell PS3's. After nosing around those places as well as Son,panasonic,comet,dixons and a audiophile shop I've only seen blueray players.
Since I now own a PS3 I might buy a Bluray film if its as cheap as a DVD but to be honest I can't see a difference, it is annoying that Shrek the Third, Transformers and Bourne Ultimatum are all going to be HDDVD as they were the only three films I've liked all year.
I has thought HD DVD was dead, in m home city in the UK there are only four shops selling "next gen" disc's. Virgin Megastore which only has a collection of Blue Ray films at the insane price of £25+, Anouther Virgin Megastore (yes my city centre has two) which has Blue Ray discs and a small bay of HDDVD discs (half the display of blueray) and the other two are Woowoths and Game both of which sell them because they sell PS3's. Afer nosing around those places as wellas Son,panasonic,comet,dixons and a audiophile shop I've only seen blueray players.
Since I now own a PS3 I might buy a Bluray film if its as cheap as a DVD but to be honest I can't see a difference, i is bugging my that Shrek the Third, Transformers and Bourne Ultimatium are alll goingto be HDDVD only they were the only three films I've liked all year.
You'd think that and you'd be wrong I've been running Vista since January and for the first several months I was short several drivers and somethings like my sound card barely worked (actually for the first two weeks I had to use an onboard sound card since Creative released their first version on Feb 14th.
Its August and everything on my PC runs, I have an insane amount of USB devices and theres a driver for all of them to give some examples a USB Bluetooth 1.1 dongle I bought for £9.99 3 years ago made by a small company called Desma has a driver, my Belkin USB wireless stick has a working driver from planet64.com, my web cam (Creative Live) which had a horible 32bit XP driver (crashed alot) works really well in Vista x64, a 5 year old Medion laptop had a driver which autoinstalled it wasn't the medion driver but the thing works perfectly my Cannon and HP printers work without a problem, along with any avermedia card that was two years old or less when vista was released.
I ran Xp x64 most of my stuff worked and I was a big fan of Xp x64. You do occasionally come accross software which won't work correctly (Doom3, the original Myst) but for the most part applications (BBC's iPlayer) refuse to work because its Vista not because its Vista x64. One tip is not to pay attention to the Vista Capable sticker on devices three days ago I came accross my first incompatible piece of hardware, it was a D-Link Wireless stick. Manufacturer's are still making a difference between "Vista Capable" and "Vista x64 Capable".
Regular re-imaging and a anti-virus program seemed to be enough for my university, you could install whatever you liked run it and then turn the machine off. When the machines are turned on they would re-image themselves, they were also set to erase all the temporary user information when a user logged off. I went to that University for three years and it only suffered 1 problem and that was because a batch of new hard drives in the SAN starting failing sequentially and aparently as they went they destroyed half of the hard drives which wernt in the batch.
I'm not sure I recently got a Playstation 3 for £425 I got two controllers, Stealth (a poor film), Hitch (which I like), Motorstorm and Resistance: Fall of Man. When you consider I paied £220 for a PS2 with two controllers I bought two games with that which cost £80 I think so I spent £300 on that 2002 Christmas.
Compared to today your average blueray film is £25 (I know I was out looking today) and the PS3 bringing back the old mega drive level of prices (£50, which I agree is insane) taking the cost of the extra's the consoles £275, not cheap by any stretch of the imagination but not that much more that my PS2 either.
As much as I wanted a price drop it is good value for money, its a decent media centre has some smart additional functionality with my PSP which I think it cool on top of being a extremly good games console like my PS2. In the end I bought it for the same reasons I bought a PS2 it is the cheapest social activity in existance, for expsense for every hour of fun its at the top of the table and bowling, cinema, paintballing, and go karting don't even come close.
As for games you should buy the system which suites you, I hate the Wii as every game I've found lacks any form of challenge and I think the controllers a gimmick, the Xbox360 has very little appeal because any game I see on it that I like is also avaliable on the PC, you'd be right if I bought a PS3 on release day with the new bundle I'd be upset but fact is I don't think they will and there are more than a few games I'm interested in.
Theres this amazing thing called PRE-ORDERING take Myst V the only game I pre ordered I paid for the game 3 months before it came out and play.com mailed the game to me a week before its release to make sure I got it on release day. Its standard practice in the games industry you can even pre order films and music albums your either a troll or an idiot I'm not sure which
Did you not read the list? Halo 3 is listed 5th on the list, Halo 3 LIMITED EDITION is at 26th. Its becoming common practice for many publishers to release two versions of the boxes for example Myst V and Myst V collecter edition (the latter came with the soundtrack and the next myst book extract) Black & White 2 and Black & White 2 Limited edition (the latter having a making of DVD.) Most of the time these "limited editions" are brought out during release and generally cost exactly the same although the Halo Limited Edition pack is $10 more expesnive than the standard one. The Amazon database is going to see them as two different items so you will have two different listings. Not all places do this Woolworths in the UK group the two on the shelves but the system see's them as two different items, Virgin Megastore in the UK places them in the chart according to sales I remember seeing Myst V Collectors Edition on the top shelf and Myst V on the fourth shelf when it was released.
Nice uniformed point some may suggest your trying to add some spin.
They did enact some anti-camcorder policy in a Vue complex in plymouth I used to travel there on my motorcycle alot and carry my lid into the cinema screen, they stopped me taking it in and issued an ultimatum either they looked after it or I didn't get to see the movie I paid for. The reason for not allowing me to take it in was because there might be a video recorder in it.
For any motorcyclists out there facing the same issue they aren't allowed to do this as a lid is a piece of safety equipment and you need speacial insurrance to look after safety equipment, the policy has since been revoked but it still gets me.
Spiderpig has been a simpsons trailer for U,12,15 and 18 films I've gone to see recently so its not hard for everyone to know it. Myself and most of my freinds all went to see that horrible Harry Potter film at different times, we all saw it.
The big issue for me is the 20 - 30 minutes of trailers, if its some small rubbish film then you can count on 20 minutes of trailers which start at the cinema's listed start time, but bigger boxoffice films can have 30 minutes! Take transformers due to a bit of idiocy I bought the 20:15 showing tickets at 20:45 I walked in the cinema screen at 20:50 to find the BBFC message just starting to play thats 35 minutes of trailers and adverts after paying £5.50 for a film I can't see why I should be subjected to roughly an hours worth of adverts before I get to see the film. For anyone wondering why an hour my local cinema complex rarely has a empty theatre and its a good idea to get there 20 minutes early.
Do you know what else bothers me? Just before spiderman 3 was released I was on thepiratebay.org hoping a game patch would be torrented and came accross a movie listed as spiderman 3, if you do look on TPB you'll find a bunch of High Def movie rips. Yet a few days later in the cinema I'm sat waiting for Spiderman 3 to start watching the "its the expearence that counts" (using spiderman as its example) telling me pirated films aren't as good. I know full well I could have got a 720x576 with 5.1 sound Xvid file off the internet days earlier than the films release. Why are they telling us to goto the cinema when I'm there, I'm in the cinema because I can't get a 20ft screen with and incredible sound system at home you've won just stop lieing to me.
I'm from the UK the place with a far less insane record industry but I'm not certain how Universitys think this is unfair. I've just finished a 3 year course at University of Plymouth in order to connect to the network you had to go through a VPN which only allowed HTTP and FTP access. We had a extremely fast network I remember downloading Ubunutu at 1MB/s as well as Myst Online at 1.3MB/s. I could check my email, manage a domain I own and could view every website on the internet without issue including sites like http://www.stage6.com/ , http://www.youtube.com/ and at various times I saw other students looking at xxx sites. I did get HL2: Deathmatch and Myst Online working (intially the later required a blocked port) but bittyrant or limewire didn't work.
I can understand that bittyrant does help spread the load of linux distributions but I don't understand why other university's and colleges can't implement this as well. How does it hurt people? I don't know why people are fighting so hard. The university's policy did not stop me from learning nor did it stop me from playing (if I had lived in halls) it just stopped activities which either used high amounts of bandwidth or could land the univeristy in legal trouble.
Then again with iPods, portable usb drives and the messenger share folders most students could share music/video if they wanted to and I did see people moving to these methods in my final year.
I'm sure I'll get bashed but have you seen the amount of software that also tries to install Firefox with itself from Adobe Acrobat to Divx all have Firefox set to default install themselves. Applications that in no way using a internet browser now have firefox in the installers, why is this? I'm glad we will be getting more browser competition but are firefox's methods any better than Microsofts?
Slashdot Mirror
Now I remember why I don't RTFA, that article is such a mess I had trouble following it. When I did decipher it, it just turned out to be a biased news piece bashing Microsoft by selecting sources and making insinuations.
Please explain your logic to me? I own a £400 laptop its only a 1.7Ghz Pentium M with a Intel 950 GMA card inside, its powerfull enough to do what I want to do on the go from playing games (like Myst Online and Tomb Raider), running engineering software like Proteus Isis and Matlab to general office stuff like Office 2007. Its perfect for portability reasons, it will even do Divx encoding and editing at a reasonable rate (about 1 hour 15 minutes to encode a 45 minutes.) Its a 15" widescreen, very light, decent battery life and it less than an inch thick, what more could you ask for in a portable computer? In comparision the cheapest Apple laptop I could find at the time might have been a Core 2 Duo but it still had exactly the same graphics card with only stereo speakers, the same amount of ram, screen size and DVD rewriter. In what way shape or form is that at the fulcrum point? Almost 4 times the price to have your bottle neck in exactly the same place?
It gets worse when you compare Desktops to Mac's, my entire desktop setup cost £750 thats including the 5.1 surround systems, the 19" screen, the TV card, the 400GB external hard drive, the wireless headphones, twin dvd rewriters and at the time the second best graphics card nvidia did. When I was building it I did look into Apple Mac's the closet I could find was about £1900. I purchased components based on expearence with build quality and performance sure the case I bought was not as pretty as the Mac's, but is a pretty case, keyboard and monitor worth £1200?
Laptops are not supposed to be huge powerhouses to do all your work, they exist so you can do work on the move. I've always wondered why people think they should be amazing do all devices.
I have seen and used a few Mac's laptops they are very nice, with a slew of cool extra features but these features can be found on other laptops (no other laptop has all of them) but for £600 you can get a Sony Vivao which looks quite pretty, has a VGA camera, a built in card reader and will match the internal specifications of you Mac. I suppose at the end of the day what would you prefer? If you could spend £1500 on a laptop to last you ten years, would you buy 1 top of the range machine now for £1500 or would you buy a £500 machine today and get a high mid end laptop and then when it fails in a 3/4 years buying anouther high mid end machine. Personally I'd rather stay on the high mid end curve since its where the best value for money tends to lie.
I use two vista PC's connected on a network ones a Laptop the other a desktop. The laptop is setup to sync with the desktop through the sync centre, so whenever I log into the network with it it makes sure that the chosen directory contains the most recent files in both folders. works great for me
I'm running six machines, four of which are currently using Vista. Certain features of vista have actually made things easier, I run a house network and always had a problem using sharing folders (on XP) this problem evaporated when I switched to Vista. Vista was given out under MSDN license to many of technology students in my university the six others who've picked up a copy have not had a problem running Vista and prefer it over XP.
In my expearence Vista's problems have pretty much been tied to drivers and now after 9 months that issue appears to have been solved. I'm running out of old hardware which Vista won't install automatically or the "check for solutions" thing doesn't provide a link directly to a driver for. Currently the last two pieces of hardware which don't install automatically or Vista can't find a solution for are a HP 3320 printer (I got free with a laptop in 2000) and a five year old Avermedia TV card (which Avermedia never produced a x64 driver for.) Funnily enough the hacked x64 HP drivers for XP x64 install a working Vista x64 driver. The normal XP drivers for the Avermedia card and HP printer function perfectly well in the 32bit version of Vista.
My gaming performance has pretty much returned to what it was before, with higher frame rates than my LCD's refresh rate. Creatives Vista x64 Audigy driver works better than their XP x64 driver (ALOT BETTER) and EAX reamins working on OpenAL games. I have lost functionality but to be honest pretty much every game I own uses OpenAL for EAX so its not something I've noticed. Vista is every bit as stable and usable as XP, with improved networking, pretty visuals and a bunch of tiny little extra's which improve it when compared to XP. Yes I'm not saying it works perfectly well for everyone but I do get the feeling that a small minority used it on public release day (or a little after) judged it unfairly (Nvidia's drivers wern't as good as Xp's and Creative drivers sucked thats just two companies I had expearence with) and then went on a crusade to bash the OS spreading as much FUD as possible. Alternativly these people tried Vista on machines which wern't capable of running Vista and attacked it for its slow response times. While I agree that Vista shouldn't have required higher specifications, I could have made exactly the same arguement about XP and only a year ago my brand new laptop didn't have the specifications to run XP properly (came with 256mb of ram) making it run redicously slow. I've seen OEM's sell laptops and desktops with 512MB of ram with onboard graphics cards which claim 128mb of that (in one instance I found a laptop which only had access to 440mb of ram), it would be similar to selling a laptop with 48mb of ram and putting Windows XP on it, you can't compare the speed of an OS if your not going to meet its minimum specifications.
From the little I've read about Open GL and Direct X there are some technical reasons why it wouldn't be a good idea to release Direct X 10 onto XP, which as I understand it have to do with Xp's driver model and the Direct3D API. Secondly the few developers who've posted about Direct X and Open GL feel that Direct X is better than Open GL, the one games developer I've asked about it said pretty much the same thing. Personally I wouldn't mind seeing things the other way around since I own a PS3 and the more developers switching to Open GL means more PS3 games.
But the fact remains you do have to make a logical arguement about why people should use Linux over Windows, why they should use Open GL over Direct X. When both appear to have less functionality (less games and program compatibility for the first and not as advanced for the latter) and are harder to use (Linux is harder than windows (although Ubunutu is changing that) and apparently Open GL is harder to use intially.) Screaming random FUD is not going to win people to your cause.
I'm not a fan of the 360 mostly because many of the games on it don't appeal to me or I can get them on the PC. But I purchased a PS3 a couple of weeks ago and haven't touched any of my PC games since. Motorstorm, Resistance Fall of Man and Pirates of the Carribean are all getting a real workout. I am still currently still living at home at the moment and ever since I got motorstorm almost every night several family members come in so we can take turns on Motorstorm, Resistance's online play is keeping me playing that quite regularly which is cool because apart from Counterstrike I've never been a huge console FPS player and pirates is just simple fun.
I agree not every game is great Sonic the Hedgehog was yet anouther 3d disapointment from "Team Sonic"*. But just those three have kept me going a while and I'm hearing great things about Oblivion and Transformers. To be honest I'm worried I don't have the time to play and beat them all before GTA IV comes out.
*Team Sonic seem to enjoy destroying the Sonic franchise, I know I'm using a PS3 but I'd love a 2D sonic game, give me hundreds of levels and take 2D graphics as far as you can and I'd be happy for life, Sonic, Tails, Robotnik, Amy and Knuckles were all the charracters I wanted adding clones and call them different names just annoys me. Making me run in a stupid group annoys me, making the game load for thirty seconds for one line of charracter text irratates me, trying to turn Sonic into a zelda/mario platform style game angers me. I mean they almost had it right with one level I did where sonic ran flat out and I had to control his path, if it has to be 3d give me that.
Your right, I recently tried to build a Media Centre out of old computer parts, I built a:
700Mhz Intel Pentium 3
512mb SDram
Nvidia 5200
Avermedia TV card
Windows Media Centre was barely able to run on the machine taking recordings was pointless using windows media centre or the avermedia PVR software. This 500Mhz chip would definitly not be enough, the 1Ghz and 1.5Ghz chips would do it though and even at 7.5watts the 1.5Ghz is redicoulously low power.
Most wireless networks I've come accross (which is alot) are secured, currently from my bedroom in my house I can detect 8 secured wireless networks and 0 unsecured, if I travel through the city with my PDA which supports 802.11b/g it highly rare to come accross a unsecure network. 3 or 4 years ago you would have been right I still remember being able to walk from my house the two miles into the city centre listening to Radio 1 as my device hopped from one network to anouther. Today I can't do that there are only three unsecured networks (University, B&Q and the pub/bar wifi network) that I've found in my home city and all through require you to go through a VPN to gain web access.
Perhaps you should spend less time insulting British people and making snide comments, networks were unsecured because people didn't know what WEP and WAP were, they didn't realise people could access their network. Thanks to prosecutions like this and the news/papers reporting on it they know now to secure their networks even if they still don't know what WAP and WEP are.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6951918.stm
The opinion seems to be while its just a video game it might provide a little insight into how people react to these situations which could be usefull for future modeling.
Uru Myst does not have an inventory nor does realMyst, realMyst was a demo piece for the 3d rendering engine Cyan Worlds bought for their next project "DIRT" which evolved into the mutliplayer project "mudpie" which later became known as Uru: Ages beyond Myst. Uru: Ages Beyond Myst was to have a online component known as Uru Live, this was cancelled in its beta stages (known as Prologue) by Ubisoft. Last year Gametap and Cyan Worlds relaunched Uru Live and renamed it Myst Online: Uru Live, this is still going and worth checking out : http://www.mystonline.com/
To go through the myst series:
Myst has no inventory, you are able to pick up a page from each age and return it to its book you can hold only one page at a time.
In Riven you were given two books, one you could read and one you could give away you could not add to this inventory nor could you effect it, it was there as a plot device.
realMyst was released next which is Myst but in 3d, it had an extra age and was only avaliable for a short time, you could only pick up a blue or red page from each age.
Myst 3 had no inventory you were given a journal to read from and could only directly effect things in game.
Uru was released at this point you are able to create a avatar, collect links of places you've been to and collect "relto pages" to alter your personal space. This is as probably close to inventory based as a Myst universe game has gotten. Even then the items you can collect exist allow you to personalise your charracter rather than help you solve a puzzle.
Myst IV gave you an "imager" which allowed you to take pictures and notes as well as a locket these were the only items you could hold and use neither directly acted on the enviroment.
Myst V was released in 2005 this had a journal and you were able to pick up and use tablets, the tables were not placed in an inventory and you could only use a specific one in each age.
Inventory based games are different good examples would be the Discworld games and Starship Titanic, you were able to go around a 2d universe and start conversations with people/objects, these conversations if navigated correctly would mean you would be given an object you could combine items in your inventory to get past certain targets, using Discworld 2 as an example after completing a series of errands for a ships captain he would give you some rope, in the next chapter you would help out a woman in doing so you would come accross a hook, the hook and rope can be combined, in the third chapter you had to get past a guard, to do this you would combine the rope and hook and then select the new object and the wall, the charracter would then climb the building.
There are many types of adventure game two main styles existed, the Myst Puzzle style which involves logic and reasoning to solve by manipulating objects on the screen for example exploring and finding out four frequencies to make a crystal resonate. The other Starship Titanic Inventory style which involves figuring out puzzles and how your inventory can relate the enviroment around you.
I'm a adventure lover and hope the genre opens up more I'm tired of only having Myst Online as the place I can go for advernture fix.
Interesting thing to note I own a Laptop with 1GB of ram and an Intel GMA 950 with a Pentium M 1.7Ghz chip. I play Myst Online: Uru Live which is ported over to OSX with the Transgaming Cider thing. My Laptop can run Myst Online: Uru Live at the capped frame rate with all the setting half way, the Mac Mini's can't, even at minimum settings they have a low frame rate (1 or 2 FPS) and have huge rendering issues. As far as we can work out its the intel driver for OSX limiting Mini owners from playing as Mac's with similar specifications but Nvidia or Ati cards can play MO:UL and using bootcamp on the Mini MO:UL actually runs extremely well.
Myst was a puzzle based adventure game which has never included an inventory, this an inventory based adventure game. A better example would be Starship Titanic, a game I loved but in the end loathed due to a bug which meant a false move in the begining stopped you ever completing the game.
I had thought HD DVD was dead, in m home city in the UK there are only four shops selling "next gen" disc's. Virgin Megastore which only has a collection of Blue Ray films at the insane price of £25+, Anouther Virgin Megastore (yes my city centre has two) which has Blue Ray discs and a small bay of HDDVD discs (half the display of blueray) and the other two are Woowoths and Game both of which sell them because they sell PS3's. After nosing around those places as well as Son,panasonic,comet,dixons and a audiophile shop I've only seen blueray players. Since I now own a PS3 I might buy a Bluray film if its as cheap as a DVD but to be honest I can't see a difference, it is annoying that Shrek the Third, Transformers and Bourne Ultimatum are all going to be HDDVD as they were the only three films I've liked all year.
I has thought HD DVD was dead, in m home city in the UK there are only four shops selling "next gen" disc's. Virgin Megastore which only has a collection of Blue Ray films at the insane price of £25+, Anouther Virgin Megastore (yes my city centre has two) which has Blue Ray discs and a small bay of HDDVD discs (half the display of blueray) and the other two are Woowoths and Game both of which sell them because they sell PS3's. Afer nosing around those places as wellas Son,panasonic,comet,dixons and a audiophile shop I've only seen blueray players.
Since I now own a PS3 I might buy a Bluray film if its as cheap as a DVD but to be honest I can't see a difference, i is bugging my that Shrek the Third, Transformers and Bourne Ultimatium are alll goingto be HDDVD only they were the only three films I've liked all year.
You'd think that and you'd be wrong I've been running Vista since January and for the first several months I was short several drivers and somethings like my sound card barely worked (actually for the first two weeks I had to use an onboard sound card since Creative released their first version on Feb 14th.
Its August and everything on my PC runs, I have an insane amount of USB devices and theres a driver for all of them to give some examples a USB Bluetooth 1.1 dongle I bought for £9.99 3 years ago made by a small company called Desma has a driver, my Belkin USB wireless stick has a working driver from planet64.com, my web cam (Creative Live) which had a horible 32bit XP driver (crashed alot) works really well in Vista x64, a 5 year old Medion laptop had a driver which autoinstalled it wasn't the medion driver but the thing works perfectly my Cannon and HP printers work without a problem, along with any avermedia card that was two years old or less when vista was released.
I ran Xp x64 most of my stuff worked and I was a big fan of Xp x64. You do occasionally come accross software which won't work correctly (Doom3, the original Myst) but for the most part applications (BBC's iPlayer) refuse to work because its Vista not because its Vista x64. One tip is not to pay attention to the Vista Capable sticker on devices three days ago I came accross my first incompatible piece of hardware, it was a D-Link Wireless stick. Manufacturer's are still making a difference between "Vista Capable" and "Vista x64 Capable".
Regular re-imaging and a anti-virus program seemed to be enough for my university, you could install whatever you liked run it and then turn the machine off. When the machines are turned on they would re-image themselves, they were also set to erase all the temporary user information when a user logged off. I went to that University for three years and it only suffered 1 problem and that was because a batch of new hard drives in the SAN starting failing sequentially and aparently as they went they destroyed half of the hard drives which wernt in the batch.
The BBC has a different story
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6936235.stm
Actually while Virgin did hermirage some customers the total number of their customers has actually risen slightly.
I'm not sure I recently got a Playstation 3 for £425 I got two controllers, Stealth (a poor film), Hitch (which I like), Motorstorm and Resistance: Fall of Man. When you consider I paied £220 for a PS2 with two controllers I bought two games with that which cost £80 I think so I spent £300 on that 2002 Christmas.
Compared to today your average blueray film is £25 (I know I was out looking today) and the PS3 bringing back the old mega drive level of prices (£50, which I agree is insane) taking the cost of the extra's the consoles £275, not cheap by any stretch of the imagination but not that much more that my PS2 either.
As much as I wanted a price drop it is good value for money, its a decent media centre has some smart additional functionality with my PSP which I think it cool on top of being a extremly good games console like my PS2. In the end I bought it for the same reasons I bought a PS2 it is the cheapest social activity in existance, for expsense for every hour of fun its at the top of the table and bowling, cinema, paintballing, and go karting don't even come close.
As for games you should buy the system which suites you, I hate the Wii as every game I've found lacks any form of challenge and I think the controllers a gimmick, the Xbox360 has very little appeal because any game I see on it that I like is also avaliable on the PC, you'd be right if I bought a PS3 on release day with the new bundle I'd be upset but fact is I don't think they will and there are more than a few games I'm interested in.
Theres this amazing thing called PRE-ORDERING take Myst V the only game I pre ordered I paid for the game 3 months before it came out and play.com mailed the game to me a week before its release to make sure I got it on release day. Its standard practice in the games industry you can even pre order films and music albums your either a troll or an idiot I'm not sure which
Did you not read the list? Halo 3 is listed 5th on the list, Halo 3 LIMITED EDITION is at 26th. Its becoming common practice for many publishers to release two versions of the boxes for example Myst V and Myst V collecter edition (the latter came with the soundtrack and the next myst book extract) Black & White 2 and Black & White 2 Limited edition (the latter having a making of DVD.) Most of the time these "limited editions" are brought out during release and generally cost exactly the same although the Halo Limited Edition pack is $10 more expesnive than the standard one. The Amazon database is going to see them as two different items so you will have two different listings. Not all places do this Woolworths in the UK group the two on the shelves but the system see's them as two different items, Virgin Megastore in the UK places them in the chart according to sales I remember seeing Myst V Collectors Edition on the top shelf and Myst V on the fourth shelf when it was released.
Nice uniformed point some may suggest your trying to add some spin.
They did enact some anti-camcorder policy in a Vue complex in plymouth I used to travel there on my motorcycle alot and carry my lid into the cinema screen, they stopped me taking it in and issued an ultimatum either they looked after it or I didn't get to see the movie I paid for. The reason for not allowing me to take it in was because there might be a video recorder in it.
For any motorcyclists out there facing the same issue they aren't allowed to do this as a lid is a piece of safety equipment and you need speacial insurrance to look after safety equipment, the policy has since been revoked but it still gets me.
Spiderpig has been a simpsons trailer for U,12,15 and 18 films I've gone to see recently so its not hard for everyone to know it. Myself and most of my freinds all went to see that horrible Harry Potter film at different times, we all saw it.
The big issue for me is the 20 - 30 minutes of trailers, if its some small rubbish film then you can count on 20 minutes of trailers which start at the cinema's listed start time, but bigger boxoffice films can have 30 minutes! Take transformers due to a bit of idiocy I bought the 20:15 showing tickets at 20:45 I walked in the cinema screen at 20:50 to find the BBFC message just starting to play thats 35 minutes of trailers and adverts after paying £5.50 for a film I can't see why I should be subjected to roughly an hours worth of adverts before I get to see the film. For anyone wondering why an hour my local cinema complex rarely has a empty theatre and its a good idea to get there 20 minutes early.
Do you know what else bothers me? Just before spiderman 3 was released I was on thepiratebay.org hoping a game patch would be torrented and came accross a movie listed as spiderman 3, if you do look on TPB you'll find a bunch of High Def movie rips. Yet a few days later in the cinema I'm sat waiting for Spiderman 3 to start watching the "its the expearence that counts" (using spiderman as its example) telling me pirated films aren't as good. I know full well I could have got a 720x576 with 5.1 sound Xvid file off the internet days earlier than the films release. Why are they telling us to goto the cinema when I'm there, I'm in the cinema because I can't get a 20ft screen with and incredible sound system at home you've won just stop lieing to me.
It was proportion representative government which put Hitler in charge! Its evil I tell you!
I'm from the UK the place with a far less insane record industry but I'm not certain how Universitys think this is unfair. I've just finished a 3 year course at University of Plymouth in order to connect to the network you had to go through a VPN which only allowed HTTP and FTP access. We had a extremely fast network I remember downloading Ubunutu at 1MB/s as well as Myst Online at 1.3MB/s. I could check my email, manage a domain I own and could view every website on the internet without issue including sites like http://www.stage6.com/ , http://www.youtube.com/ and at various times I saw other students looking at xxx sites. I did get HL2: Deathmatch and Myst Online working (intially the later required a blocked port) but bittyrant or limewire didn't work.
I can understand that bittyrant does help spread the load of linux distributions but I don't understand why other university's and colleges can't implement this as well. How does it hurt people? I don't know why people are fighting so hard. The university's policy did not stop me from learning nor did it stop me from playing (if I had lived in halls) it just stopped activities which either used high amounts of bandwidth or could land the univeristy in legal trouble.
Then again with iPods, portable usb drives and the messenger share folders most students could share music/video if they wanted to and I did see people moving to these methods in my final year.
I'm sure I'll get bashed but have you seen the amount of software that also tries to install Firefox with itself from Adobe Acrobat to Divx all have Firefox set to default install themselves. Applications that in no way using a internet browser now have firefox in the installers, why is this? I'm glad we will be getting more browser competition but are firefox's methods any better than Microsofts?