A 1/4in plug connected to the gameport? I guess I dont quite understand what this is...
I dont see why this couldnt be built using fairly easy-to-come-by components - IE, an IR LED, an IR Detector simply connected by paralell port. While the detector is true, keep counting, if its false, your beam got broken and you can count that as you need. The software would be rather simple. The hardest part will be doing the polling to the accuracy you need.
Shrug... Unless there is anything special that hardware can do that you cant recreate simply, do it that way.
In highschool the hardware we were using was on the Mac. Dont think its at all device dependent.
Heck, get ambitious and work on getting a plotting function too.
If theres a CS department at the school I bet you could get some help developing some of the routines, save the device driver.
I know of at least one package I've used in a completely different situation that can pull down the datetime and gps reading through the serial connection, and has a programming API. Now, this was in windows but I'm sure its available for flavors of unix as well.
Trimble's Pathfinder. If you need some code I may be able to dig some up. A warning, it'll be in VB, but it works.
actually the idea to put security sensitive piece of software in a library isn't bad. While I have no idea how this specific case is handled in linux, it's clear that also in linux cryptographic libraries exist and are used throughout different apps.
Exactly right and having the crypto in a library every can get at is a good thing. What you missed was that this windows problem isnt in the security library it should have been in.
"Company officials added that the flaw isn't in Microsoft's CryptoAPI application program interface (CAPI) either, which would have left a number of applications and Windows services vulnerable, not just Internet Explorer."
So they screwed up and didnt include this code for verifying trust signatures in their API, its somewhere in the OS.
And although knowing MS's previous security problems, its highly unlikely that this a problem in the kernel, since it affects NT based as well as 9x based systems.
I certainly agree. I am currently in a couple of projects now that have people across the country, across different platforms (Mac and Win2k mainly, but I use Linux at home often) and we want to be able to share a contact list for our media contacts. Right now there's no good way of doing it aside from a text listing we have on our website, which sucks in comparison to an LDAP server we could have running somewhere. This would reduce the confusion we have when we're updating the contacts list and not everyone has the contacts in their personal Outlook/Netscape/Lotus Notes/whatever contact lists.
Any resources on this? I checked google to only small avail (though my query might have sucked).
As I dig out my Algorithms textbook, I see mention that Fibonacci heaps give fast times in Dijkstra and Prim's algorithms for Shortest dag path and Minimum Spanning Trees respectively: O(m+nlogn) in both cases. This is very fast for dense graphs.
i'm absolutely amazed. I havent listened to an xm or it or s3m or whathaveyou in a long time. Future Crew, Triton, KFMF, god theres a HUGE selection of great stuff out there, though I dont know whats actually out there still.
Time to break out the couple cds I have left of music. I have archives of dreamcatcher99/00, most of the old hornet archives, and kfmf archives 1996-2000.
Catch that goblin (Purple Motion of Future Crew if i'm not mistaken), Unreal2 (a demo from Future crew, it was abso-friggin-lutely unbelievable), and Interphase are ones I recognize immediately, though my guess is I have many of the others around heh.
Uh, I know I just took algorithms in my CS course, but we went over this type of problem in our greedy algorithm section. Earliest finish time first scheduling.
"shedule the class E that has the earliest finish time then recurse on the classes that start after E ends"
seems like this, applied and limited by the available personel, and per position could work pretty easily, and be easy to maintain.
It is possible that there is a reason these companies were bought by microsoft. In the case of Bungie, it was to help fund the last phase of development for Halo, and to push the development of their next two games (Project Phoenix and something like Halo 2). Microsoft offered more people to work on the projects, more resources to produce a quality game and all within less time (It was crucial to the Xbox launch that Halo be shipped with it. It is the killer game for the Xbox still).
Halo will be coming out for the PC and Mac, but it may not be for a while... personel are still focused on the next game release, and not porting the game to PC/Mac.
Bungie will keep its name, as one of the many subsidiary companies of a larger company throughout the gaming industry.
This is relatively suprising that he got 'caught' considering the length of time the CU ResNet and ITS takes to find things like this.
It took weeks, months, and more for them to actually send an email to the guy running a CounterStrike server down the hall, and it took them even longer to find my server.
It seems the CU ResNet policy is to give the student the runaround whilest not providing any information or help at all. I've heard a few different situations that come up:
Server Is found: * ITS sends email to user explaining they are in violation of the AUP * ITS shuts down all external access to user dropping all packets from and to outside networks, and sends email like above * ITS shuts down all external access without any explanation * ITS literally disables the port the offender is on, after the one or two of the above procedures.
Which happens is anyones guess. Will the offense actually be recorded or not is anyones guess.
Here's my experience:
I was running a mp3 ftp server. I know. AUP violation plain and simple. So i'm suprised, but not perplexed when my connection gets turned off. I call ITS to see whats up (and how long I'll be down, etc.). They have no record of the violation, and they can see my machine, MAC address, etc just fine.
They come out and test the connection by plugging in their own equipment and everything works. I show them I still get link light on my machine, and the switch I have attached (another little linux box I have for development). They connect through the switch and still they work. They give up and go back to research some stuff on the internal routers.
Two days go by.
We finally get a call back from the techs. They explain my machine was blocked off at the external routers, the same procedure if we were to be 'blackholed', except the record was never entered. The tech who finally found the problem removed the block, and I was back on instantly.
So in general, suprising he got to even talk to someone.
Anyway, as to his specific problem though, I would think that if he can prove his access point was secure, so that nobody outside the campus, could get on (the only way they could is through a NAT or if they set up their machine with the dhcp servers on the network. You must register your MAC with those servers to get access outside the campus), he should be fine. There were many of us in the dorms that had more than one machine hooked up on switches, and no complaints there.
Noticed quite a few mesages exclaiming about trillian already. I love it. It just needs more skins (or I need to learn the differences between the old and new format).
I will venture, rather safely, to say that Trillian is not affected by this exploit. The exploit is in the 'game request' feature in the AIM client for windows, a feature that has not yet been included in Trillian in the first place, and a feature that would obviously use different, hopefully better-bounds-checked code if it were there (since trillian uses its own libraries to do everything, no reliance on AIM).
Bah, I'm a 19 year old about to turn 20 who has 5 years of experience, and the 5 year pin to prove it. I probably cant get as far as this poster though because he does have certifications and I have but one, a CNA.
I've gone through 4 IT managers, and all but the current one have treated me as a kid, not taking me seriously. This one though knows I know more about the history of the office's network than anyone else there, so my skills are valuable, and even though I dont work much during the semester, I still get called about some obscure issues predating any of the staff there. I'm still offered my position back at every break.
I have been ignored quite a few times, because I'm young, and they ask for one of my older coworkers. But there are still quite a few who value my expertice and knowledge about the systems we maintain.
I have never been offered a promotion, though I have gotten raises by threatening offers from other companies (which I have recieved). I understand why not, because I'm not a full time employee.
But if this poster is full time, has intimate knowledge of the system, and is getting 'bullied' by older staff because of his age and his possibly more current knowledge, it does sound like age discrimination, and he should seek help with it outside of the IT department (office manager, HR manager, etc).
I have an ABIT KA7 (not -100) that blew all the capacitors on the processor side of the board. I still havent figured it out exactly, but I guessed that it was a combination of maybe over-overclocking without sufficient cooling, or when I plugged in my printer it had a bad ground. That or it was just a nice random occurance to make me go and spend money:-).
Not certain on either one, but it made me buy a new board and processor (and ram... DDR is god) and now I dont use my printer any more because I really dont want to fry this one.
More or less, the things that others have said about the rounded cables not being the problem are probably right. Not nearly enough voltage to blow all those caps.
Oh well. I havent tested out my processor to see if it is still okay yet. I want to use it for a server so I hope it is.
Thats nothing. The Geforce 3s run that tree/forest/water scene (which is prerendered in that demo) realtime with more detail at a higher resolution. We raided the nvidia office at E3 just to be able to see it. talk about an experience. oh man, that and the pixel shader benchmark were incredible.
If you ever get the chance definatly run 3dMark2k1 on a gf3. its amazing.
Use the DbPowerAmp Music Converter (and ripper)
http://admin.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm
http://admin.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central.htm
It has plugins including:
Ogg (Beta 4), WMA, LAME mp3, and many more!
Seriously, I've used this at home and it really is the best encoder/ripper I've ever used. Without some of the really neat goodies you can pay for, it is free though, and still fully functional.
I'd like to see some better videos of the movement and maybe some information on the other equipment. The videos are of such high-compression that they look to be faked already (though it is apparent that lots of compression is being done)
problem is I can't forsee any real practical application of this technology (item sorting is great, but why do it this way? sure, for HazMats it _might_ be useful, but looks extremely complicated.)
Even though I found my eyes glazing over at some of Jonathan's questions (He being a student of CG and obviously asking the complicated questions), The interview was much akin to the standard fare of Ars Technica writing, that being excellent.
I think the interview actually answered a lot of MY questions and interests with the movie, but I do hope that the Square team will continue to be open to questions here and there for maybe another batch of questions.
Anyway, I'm glad I was able to read the interview even before it gets slashdotted (Ars servers were down just before I read it?)
Is there a cult of people starting to show up who think they can assign any meaning to any word to suit their own purposes?
A friend and I just had a discussion with some girl over ICQ that was of the belief that a person should not be 'tied to the meanings of words' and that we should 'open our minds'. I believe her mind was so open that her brains flew out the door.
There is something inherently wrong with randomly giving a meaning to a word for ones own use. It rather defeats the purpose of words, language, thought, etc, since society must usually universally agree on the meaning.
Microsoft: We do not commingle code, we put related functions close to each other for ease of use
Translation: I have a fuzzy puppy dog, and he likes to eat socks.
see how that doesnt work? might as well throw away the language if one cannot assign a specific set of meanings to words and have society universally agree on the meaning.
silly silly poster, remember that windows 2000 has IE5 integrated, 98 has IE4 integrated and ME has IE5 integrated. No need to install IE4 when a newer version is already commingled...
Of course their site is slashdotted, so I'm going to go ahead and post here. Feel free to share these ideas (at least give me credit though hehe).
The Nyko wormlight does work on the GBA but produces rather unsightly glare. A glare screen (like on monitors or the film on glasses lenses) could help for that.
3M has many many different films that do nearly what you are proposing for the LED side-lighting system. I believe solutions can be manufactured to the specific angles needed as well. (A related technology is used in holography, and on those traffic signals you can only see from one lane). Their site is a bit hard to get around so I recommend contacting a rep.
I think the MMO(RP)G community of gamers and developers is emotional, loyalty driven and new that it is hard to predict what will happen to some games.
"Ultima online, old technology as it is, is still (to me) the most intriguing MMORPG out right now. Shadowbane would have been cool, had it had a publisher. Camelot is great looking and well thought out, but suprisingly limited. The gameplay in AO annoys me a bit. EQ... well EQ is boring. Horizons is going to kill." (These being my opinions)
See the obvious opinions I made just from some of my experiences? In the MMORPG community I think that this is extremely commonplace. Look at the boards for some of the upcoming games (Namely horizons http://artifact-entertainment.com/horizons - of course that assumes that their servers are back up) and see the amazing support they've gotten, the amazing criticism on what they've put out and havent put out. The levels of involvement of gamers in these games is quite indicated in their public involvement.
One of the best things I have done, however, is get in betas for games when possible. See what kind of userbase it will have, and you can make a pretty decent judgement on how well the game will do. There are a number of korean games I would LOVE to try out (tetramorph!) that I saw at e3, if only I spoke Korean:-).
Bah, here I was just wondering if there was a way to get true multihomed consumer type internet - through a cable line and a dsl line. I'm moving in next door with my buddy and one of us was going to get cable, the other adsl, and we were going to share eachothers connections to get multihomed... but from the looks of it, its just not possible.
Heh I quite agree with the square-support rule as well. FFX is great - played it (in japanese...) at E3 and was thouroughly impressed already, even in their limited demo. XI looks interesting as well, even though not a whole lot is known about it yet.
As for the Xbox. I was actually just discussing this with my friend (Xbox zealot) and even he is questioning some of the decisions and strange information leaks coming out of the MS-Xbox camp. Such things as Xboxes being shipped without any broadband hardware, dvd support (ie you have to buy the remote!), and a slew of other wierd problems.
The broadband issue has already come up. The only game that has kept my interest in the xbox, Halo, is NOT being shipped with support for broadband. They were not forthcoming on what exactly this means, but I assume it's that they didnt get the networking SDK in time for the game to be released on shipping, but the hardware is still in the xbox for when they update the game. (is everyone ready for patches for their console games? Yay, great.) Scary thought being that they will be releasing a broadband addon (100$ probably) later to enable the support (so 400$ for a full networked gaming system, whereas both sony and nintendo are shooting for 300$ max).
This all comes down to microsoft's release-wait-see-patch-wait-see-fix-repeat scheme of everything - "lets release the xbox as soon as possible, and wait to see how well it does, then we'll add stuff/fix problems. yah." I dont think that is going to fly in the loyalty-driven console market. People are going to realize that microsoft is really just along for the ride, and the xbox will go the way of the Jaguar (good tech, bad implementation).
But all of the above is obviously pending some offical release of info, or maybe even the actual hardware.
BTW the xbox hardware at E3 was relatively interesting... midtower boxes with dvd drives and nifty faceplates. It was said a couple times that it was only really running at half effeciency - mainly that the sound was being processed in software for some reason.
... ANYWAY... i guess this ends my way-offtopic rant...
Slashdot Mirror
A 1/4in plug connected to the gameport? I guess I dont quite understand what this is...
I dont see why this couldnt be built using fairly easy-to-come-by components - IE, an IR LED, an IR Detector simply connected by paralell port. While the detector is true, keep counting, if its false, your beam got broken and you can count that as you need. The software would be rather simple. The hardest part will be doing the polling to the accuracy you need.
Shrug... Unless there is anything special that hardware can do that you cant recreate simply, do it that way.
In highschool the hardware we were using was on the Mac. Dont think its at all device dependent.
Heck, get ambitious and work on getting a plotting function too.
If theres a CS department at the school I bet you could get some help developing some of the routines, save the device driver.
I know of at least one package I've used in a completely different situation that can pull down the datetime and gps reading through the serial connection, and has a programming API. Now, this was in windows but I'm sure its available for flavors of unix as well.
Trimble's Pathfinder. If you need some code I may be able to dig some up. A warning, it'll be in VB, but it works.
Exactly right and having the crypto in a library every can get at is a good thing. What you missed was that this windows problem isnt in the security library it should have been in.
"Company officials added that the flaw isn't in Microsoft's CryptoAPI application program interface (CAPI) either, which would have left a number of applications and Windows services vulnerable, not just Internet Explorer."
So they screwed up and didnt include this code for verifying trust signatures in their API, its somewhere in the OS.
And although knowing MS's previous security problems, its highly unlikely that this a problem in the kernel, since it affects NT based as well as 9x based systems.
I certainly agree. I am currently in a couple of projects now that have people across the country, across different platforms (Mac and Win2k mainly, but I use Linux at home often) and we want to be able to share a contact list for our media contacts. Right now there's no good way of doing it aside from a text listing we have on our website, which sucks in comparison to an LDAP server we could have running somewhere. This would reduce the confusion we have when we're updating the contacts list and not everyone has the contacts in their personal Outlook/Netscape/Lotus Notes/whatever contact lists.
Any resources on this? I checked google to only small avail (though my query might have sucked).
As I dig out my Algorithms textbook, I see mention that Fibonacci heaps give fast times in Dijkstra and Prim's algorithms for Shortest dag path and Minimum Spanning Trees respectively: O(m+nlogn) in both cases. This is very fast for dense graphs.
Shrug.
i'm absolutely amazed. I havent listened to an xm or it or s3m or whathaveyou in a long time. Future Crew, Triton, KFMF, god theres a HUGE selection of great stuff out there, though I dont know whats actually out there still.
Time to break out the couple cds I have left of music. I have archives of dreamcatcher99/00, most of the old hornet archives, and kfmf archives 1996-2000.
Catch that goblin (Purple Motion of Future Crew if i'm not mistaken), Unreal2 (a demo from Future crew, it was abso-friggin-lutely unbelievable), and Interphase are ones I recognize immediately, though my guess is I have many of the others around heh.
Uh, I know I just took algorithms in my CS course, but we went over this type of problem in our greedy algorithm section. Earliest finish time first scheduling.
"shedule the class E that has the earliest finish time then recurse on the classes that start after E ends"
seems like this, applied and limited by the available personel, and per position could work pretty easily, and be easy to maintain.
dont knock the halo control scheme until you have tried it. I like it a lot - it lends itself well to the game.
It is possible that there is a reason these companies were bought by microsoft. In the case of Bungie, it was to help fund the last phase of development for Halo, and to push the development of their next two games (Project Phoenix and something like Halo 2). Microsoft offered more people to work on the projects, more resources to produce a quality game and all within less time (It was crucial to the Xbox launch that Halo be shipped with it. It is the killer game for the Xbox still).
Halo will be coming out for the PC and Mac, but it may not be for a while... personel are still focused on the next game release, and not porting the game to PC/Mac.
Bungie will keep its name, as one of the many subsidiary companies of a larger company throughout the gaming industry.
Its all about project funding.
This is relatively suprising that he got 'caught' considering the length of time the CU ResNet and ITS takes to find things like this.
It took weeks, months, and more for them to actually send an email to the guy running a CounterStrike server down the hall, and it took them even longer to find my server.
It seems the CU ResNet policy is to give the student the runaround whilest not providing any information or help at all. I've heard a few different situations that come up:
Server Is found:
* ITS sends email to user explaining they are in violation of the AUP
* ITS shuts down all external access to user dropping all packets from and to outside networks, and sends email like above
* ITS shuts down all external access without any explanation
* ITS literally disables the port the offender is on, after the one or two of the above procedures.
Which happens is anyones guess. Will the offense actually be recorded or not is anyones guess.
Here's my experience:
I was running a mp3 ftp server. I know. AUP violation plain and simple. So i'm suprised, but not perplexed when my connection gets turned off. I call ITS to see whats up (and how long I'll be down, etc.). They have no record of the violation, and they can see my machine, MAC address, etc just fine.
They come out and test the connection by plugging in their own equipment and everything works. I show them I still get link light on my machine, and the switch I have attached (another little linux box I have for development). They connect through the switch and still they work. They give up and go back to research some stuff on the internal routers.
Two days go by.
We finally get a call back from the techs. They explain my machine was blocked off at the external routers, the same procedure if we were to be 'blackholed', except the record was never entered. The tech who finally found the problem removed the block, and I was back on instantly.
So in general, suprising he got to even talk to someone.
Anyway, as to his specific problem though, I would think that if he can prove his access point was secure, so that nobody outside the campus, could get on (the only way they could is through a NAT or if they set up their machine with the dhcp servers on the network. You must register your MAC with those servers to get access outside the campus), he should be fine. There were many of us in the dorms that had more than one machine hooked up on switches, and no complaints there.
Noticed quite a few mesages exclaiming about trillian already. I love it. It just needs more skins (or I need to learn the differences between the old and new format).
I will venture, rather safely, to say that Trillian is not affected by this exploit. The exploit is in the 'game request' feature in the AIM client for windows, a feature that has not yet been included in Trillian in the first place, and a feature that would obviously use different, hopefully better-bounds-checked code if it were there (since trillian uses its own libraries to do everything, no reliance on AIM).
Bah, I'm a 19 year old about to turn 20 who has 5 years of experience, and the 5 year pin to prove it. I probably cant get as far as this poster though because he does have certifications and I have but one, a CNA.
I've gone through 4 IT managers, and all but the current one have treated me as a kid, not taking me seriously. This one though knows I know more about the history of the office's network than anyone else there, so my skills are valuable, and even though I dont work much during the semester, I still get called about some obscure issues predating any of the staff there. I'm still offered my position back at every break.
I have been ignored quite a few times, because I'm young, and they ask for one of my older coworkers. But there are still quite a few who value my expertice and knowledge about the systems we maintain.
I have never been offered a promotion, though I have gotten raises by threatening offers from other companies (which I have recieved). I understand why not, because I'm not a full time employee.
But if this poster is full time, has intimate knowledge of the system, and is getting 'bullied' by older staff because of his age and his possibly more current knowledge, it does sound like age discrimination, and he should seek help with it outside of the IT department (office manager, HR manager, etc).
I have an ABIT KA7 (not -100) that blew all the capacitors on the processor side of the board. I still havent figured it out exactly, but I guessed that it was a combination of maybe over-overclocking without sufficient cooling, or when I plugged in my printer it had a bad ground. That or it was just a nice random occurance to make me go and spend money :-).
Not certain on either one, but it made me buy a new board and processor (and ram... DDR is god) and now I dont use my printer any more because I really dont want to fry this one.
More or less, the things that others have said about the rounded cables not being the problem are probably right. Not nearly enough voltage to blow all those caps.
Oh well. I havent tested out my processor to see if it is still okay yet. I want to use it for a server so I hope it is.
Thats nothing. The Geforce 3s run that tree/forest/water scene (which is prerendered in that demo) realtime with more detail at a higher resolution. We raided the nvidia office at E3 just to be able to see it. talk about an experience. oh man, that and the pixel shader benchmark were incredible.
If you ever get the chance definatly run 3dMark2k1 on a gf3. its amazing.
stupid not hitting submit. i swear. screw it i'm goin to bed.
me and my friend were actually just having a conversation over icq in psuedo-xml. we need to make sure that the tags are quite flexible (ie or )
:-] vers :-) crap hehe.
Oh well. now people will be able to display their emotion icons how ever they want, no more of this silly
Use the DbPowerAmp Music Converter (and ripper)
http://admin.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm
http://admin.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central.htm
It has plugins including:
Ogg (Beta 4), WMA, LAME mp3, and many more!
Seriously, I've used this at home and it really is the best encoder/ripper I've ever used. Without some of the really neat goodies you can pay for, it is free though, and still fully functional.
I'd like to see some better videos of the movement and maybe some information on the other equipment. The videos are of such high-compression that they look to be faked already (though it is apparent that lots of compression is being done)
problem is I can't forsee any real practical application of this technology (item sorting is great, but why do it this way? sure, for HazMats it _might_ be useful, but looks extremely complicated.)
Even though I found my eyes glazing over at some of Jonathan's questions (He being a student of CG and obviously asking the complicated questions), The interview was much akin to the standard fare of Ars Technica writing, that being excellent.
I think the interview actually answered a lot of MY questions and interests with the movie, but I do hope that the Square team will continue to be open to questions here and there for maybe another batch of questions.
Anyway, I'm glad I was able to read the interview even before it gets slashdotted (Ars servers were down just before I read it?)
--Onyx
Is there a cult of people starting to show up who think they can assign any meaning to any word to suit their own purposes?
A friend and I just had a discussion with some girl over ICQ that was of the belief that a person should not be 'tied to the meanings of words' and that we should 'open our minds'. I believe her mind was so open that her brains flew out the door.
There is something inherently wrong with randomly giving a meaning to a word for ones own use. It rather defeats the purpose of words, language, thought, etc, since society must usually universally agree on the meaning.
Microsoft: We do not commingle code, we put related functions close to each other for ease of use
Translation: I have a fuzzy puppy dog, and he likes to eat socks.
see how that doesnt work? might as well throw away the language if one cannot assign a specific set of meanings to words and have society universally agree on the meaning.
silly silly poster, remember that windows 2000 has IE5 integrated, 98 has IE4 integrated and ME has IE5 integrated. No need to install IE4 when a newer version is already commingled...
Of course their site is slashdotted, so I'm going to go ahead and post here. Feel free to share these ideas (at least give me credit though hehe).
The Nyko wormlight does work on the GBA but produces rather unsightly glare. A glare screen (like on monitors or the film on glasses lenses) could help for that.
3M has many many different films that do nearly what you are proposing for the LED side-lighting system. I believe solutions can be manufactured to the specific angles needed as well. (A related technology is used in holography, and on those traffic signals you can only see from one lane). Their site is a bit hard to get around so I recommend contacting a rep.
I think the MMO(RP)G community of gamers and developers is emotional, loyalty driven and new that it is hard to predict what will happen to some games.
:-).
"Ultima online, old technology as it is, is still (to me) the most intriguing MMORPG out right now. Shadowbane would have been cool, had it had a publisher. Camelot is great looking and well thought out, but suprisingly limited. The gameplay in AO annoys me a bit. EQ... well EQ is boring. Horizons is going to kill." (These being my opinions)
See the obvious opinions I made just from some of my experiences? In the MMORPG community I think that this is extremely commonplace. Look at the boards for some of the upcoming games (Namely horizons http://artifact-entertainment.com/horizons - of course that assumes that their servers are back up) and see the amazing support they've gotten, the amazing criticism on what they've put out and havent put out. The levels of involvement of gamers in these games is quite indicated in their public involvement.
One of the best things I have done, however, is get in betas for games when possible. See what kind of userbase it will have, and you can make a pretty decent judgement on how well the game will do. There are a number of korean games I would LOVE to try out (tetramorph!) that I saw at e3, if only I spoke Korean
Bah, here I was just wondering if there was a way to get true multihomed consumer type internet - through a cable line and a dsl line. I'm moving in next door with my buddy and one of us was going to get cable, the other adsl, and we were going to share eachothers connections to get multihomed... but from the looks of it, its just not possible.
Is everyone sure that this is the case???
Heh I quite agree with the square-support rule as well. FFX is great - played it (in japanese...) at E3 and was thouroughly impressed already, even in their limited demo. XI looks interesting as well, even though not a whole lot is known about it yet.
... i guess this ends my way-offtopic rant ...
As for the Xbox. I was actually just discussing this with my friend (Xbox zealot) and even he is questioning some of the decisions and strange information leaks coming out of the MS-Xbox camp. Such things as Xboxes being shipped without any broadband hardware, dvd support (ie you have to buy the remote!), and a slew of other wierd problems.
The broadband issue has already come up. The only game that has kept my interest in the xbox, Halo, is NOT being shipped with support for broadband. They were not forthcoming on what exactly this means, but I assume it's that they didnt get the networking SDK in time for the game to be released on shipping, but the hardware is still in the xbox for when they update the game. (is everyone ready for patches for their console games? Yay, great.) Scary thought being that they will be releasing a broadband addon (100$ probably) later to enable the support (so 400$ for a full networked gaming system, whereas both sony and nintendo are shooting for 300$ max).
This all comes down to microsoft's release-wait-see-patch-wait-see-fix-repeat scheme of everything - "lets release the xbox as soon as possible, and wait to see how well it does, then we'll add stuff/fix problems. yah." I dont think that is going to fly in the loyalty-driven console market. People are going to realize that microsoft is really just along for the ride, and the xbox will go the way of the Jaguar (good tech, bad implementation).
But all of the above is obviously pending some offical release of info, or maybe even the actual hardware.
BTW the xbox hardware at E3 was relatively interesting... midtower boxes with dvd drives and nifty faceplates. It was said a couple times that it was only really running at half effeciency - mainly that the sound was being processed in software for some reason.
... ANYWAY