Game reviews frequently have 3-4 screenshots if you click through to the full review. Well, they used to-- there haven't been any game reviews in awhile, not that I recall.
Infogrames went to a blow-out sale and ended up with the rights to the Atari brand. They've been rolling out games using it for like 5 years now, and I'm perplexed at the number of comments here from people who didn't know that-- I mean, seriously, you went all this time without seeing Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes or Demonstone in stores?
Why is it that people lose the ability to understand simple economics as soon as the commodity is labor?
Oh no, people lose that ability when the commodity is fuel also. Thus all the hand-wringing over Exxon's record profits (wow, they sold a record amount of gas and therefore made a record profit-- duh!), and the people crying out about gouging when a gas station ups the price of gas.
You do, the difference is that in the Eastern US (you know, IBM territory), those contracts are generally legally enforceable and actually enforced. In the western US (you know, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, et al) these contracts are either not legally enforceable, or they are but never actually enforced.
The west coast doesn't just luck-into having great tech companies, there's a legal and philosophical environment in place which makes it a great place to open a tech company.
(Being from Europe, you might be unaware that the "United States" isn't nearly as united as the name implies; each state (or commonwealth) is responsible for its own affairs, generally, including labor laws.)
MS doesn't have a monopoly on browsers any more. If they want to scare away everyone using firefox, then let them shoot themselves in the foot. There are easy alternatives to any of the handful of sites that don't properly support firefox.
If you buy into that conspiracy theory, yes. But it's much more likely that it's a simple mistake on the part of either Firefox or one of Hotmail's web developers. I've seen nothing whatsoever to convince me that this is done on purpose.
Um, not if IE is using non-standard js, that isn't supported in Firefox. I think that's kinda the problem. Hotmail's code for Firefox doesn't work because MS broke it, and the IE js isn't compliant.
What are you suggesting here? That Microsoft went out of their way to find some exact combination of Javascript functions that: 1) Works in IE 2) Works in FF2 3) But doesn't work in FF3 4) Was installed before any FF3 betas were around (since this has been reported for every version of FF3.)
Seriously? Do you think that's even technically possible? Hell, do you think the combination of points 2 and 3 is even technically possible?
It's a billion times more likely that this problem is caused by a obscure error in FF3 that didn't exist in FF2.
Why do you care what site it is? The simple fact is that every web browser should work with every web site. Period. Would your opinion be different if this was for Yahoo Mail or Gmail?
But why would I have to be patient, when the previous product (2.x) works just great for me, and enables me to be productive, while the new one hinders me?
Then use Firefox 2.x and STFU and leave the rest of us alone. It's not like 2.x stopped working the instant 3 was released, you know.
But it was just like a regular x86 PC. While all other consoles have their own architectures and a lot of custom designs, which sometimes makes programming for them much harder (Playstation 2 i'm looking at you.), the first xbox was just a fucking PC.
And this makes the Xbox bad... how? In fact, what does it matter at all? It didn't make the Xbox unnecessarily expensive, it certainly didn't hurt its performance (it completely dominated its generation), and it allowed additional features (the HD, the ethernet) that other consoles had only began thinking about.
The parent said that all the xbox did was add DRM is true : Microshat took a PC and only added DRM to it, that's what the xbox was. Other consoles have a DRM too but the DRM is not the only thing that made the difference with a regular PC box.
That's still a retarded argument; as soon as you get that stock standard PC and install a video game, your PC suddenly has *gasp* DRM ON IT! CALL THE POLICE!
The fact is, DRM is a standard in the video games industry. It's a pretty strong argument that the Atari's lack of DRM on the 2600 practically killed the entire US games industry, it took decades (until the Xbox, actually) for another American console to succeed on the console market. (That's a pretty remarkable feat too, when you think about it.) Nintendo, IIRC, had the first console DRM on their original NES console.
Not to mention that IE was the browser of choice on Macintosh, too. On a platform: * Microsoft had absolutely no control or hold over * Which had a larger concentration of Microsoft-haters than most (yes, even in the mid-90s) * Either didn't include any web browser by default, or shipped both Netscape and IE on the same install disk
By all rights, IE should have completely tanked on Macintosh. But it was simply a better product. And I think a large part of that success was that IE was *just* a browser, not a huge package of "crap you don't need, oh, and it includes a browser" that Netscape had become.
(They discontinued Netscape Navigator around version 4.0.8 and only released Netscape Communicator after that point. I think that decision killed Netscape as a competitor. Deciding to scrap the product and re-write it was just the corpse twitching before rigor mortise set in.)
If Netscape had decide to actually develop their namesake product instead of basically black-holing it for 3+ years, they might have been able to pull it off, but frankly, Microsoft just out-classed them. Which is really, really sad.
Maybe they didn't "design" anything, but it has a lot of console firsts. It had the first integrated storage device, big enough to store entire games on (instead of just tiny save games). It had the first integrated network card, although some consoles had integrated modems before. First HDTV support, although that's more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Oh, and they didn't "add DRM", that's ridiculous. Every game console going back to the original NES had DRM in it. All current-gen consoles have DRM. At worst, you could say Microsoft "didn't remove the DRM expected to be in a game console."
In short, the Xbox wasn't a bad piece of hardware by any stretch of the imagination. And, in any case, it sure sold a lot of units in a competitive market on its own merits.
Just to clarify a few things for you - just because u were playing tribes and warcraft, doesn't mean youre right either.
The fact that I was playing them with bandwidth orders of magnitude lower than home broadband, well, that makes me just feel right on several levels. Also, I can spell the words "you" and "you're." (Yeah, cheap shot, I know.)
You are still both wrong - while the word impossible might be incorrect a 5v5 is still a 5 on 5 fps game to every modern gamer out there.
Oh yeah, I forgot that Tribes was actually a farming simulator and not a FPS game. Silly me!
I think you need to look up signalling - specifically the nyquist rate and shannon-hartly sampling theorum - and imagine how a computer game would want to interpolate positional vectors for accuracy.
I have a better idea; instead of bothering with a crapload of buzzwords I don't really give a crap about, how about I just trust my extensive personal experience with the matter?
Either that, or it's not a sub 50ms game.
Yes, if you move the goalposts, then you're probably right on the issue. But that's not what you said, not even close. You can't change the premise halfway through the argument.
It seems you've lost plot and really missed the point.
I've "lost plot?" English, please.
Tell me, have u tried setting up 8+ man fps games on an xbox 360? IIRC, Call of Duty didn't allow more than 8 players.
Moving the goalposts, and now cherry-picking titles. Awesome.
Halo 2 allows 16 players, hosted over a home broadband connection, which speech and all the other Live niceties. I hear rumors that this "Halo" series was kind of popular, you should check it out.
I'm not a know it all and don't profess to be,
That's why you bring up "Nyquist Rate" and "Shannon-Hartly Sampling Theorem" in a casual argument? Riiight.
but it seems u seem to know less than me which somehow makes me wrong for being educated (and right). You're a troll the internet didn't want to access broadband.
I can't even parse that. English, please.
I can hardly call myself educated when I can't question the wrong tuition of a mere undergraduate lecturer.
A "mere" undergraduate lecturer? And what were your credentials in the class, exactly? You're a know-it-all and an asshole.
Yours truely, a bloke who first started playing network games over DOS packet drivers and BSD stack,
Well, whoop-de-shit.
Look, I'm not saying "mere" undergraduate lecturers are always right. But that particular example, you know the one you told him to go "fuck off" over? He was right about that. If you hadn't added the "fuck off" I might have let it slide.
For the record, Tribes ran so smoothly because it had an excellent implementation of client-side prediction, and was very bandwidth-efficient and packet-loss tolerant. But its hardly the only game this applies to; I was running 8-player Warcraft II games on my Mac 68040 back in the day over AOL on a 14.4k baud modem, for example.
Like I said, I didn't understand the specifics of the problem, but I was sure that your blanket "it's impossible" line was complete BS simply because I've done it.
Most ISPs have 512k or 786k upstreams, so you can see my problem here.
Yeah, your problem is that you lack industry experience (i.e. you apparently were never exposed to multiplayer games back when modems were the norm), and you're kind of a know-it-all jerk.
Also, you know the reason someone like Google won't sign up to be willing participants is because it's signing away their common carrier status. That will have HUGE legal repercussions in the United States.
1) ISPs don't have common carrier status. 2) Google isn't an ISP. 3) This law is being considered in France, and will likely have few, if any, repercussions in the United States.
I ignore the fact that I was probably more qualified to teach when he questioned my analysis on throughput, net code, and the fact you couldn't realistically expect to host a 5v5 on a home broadband connection (he said he could do it on his XBox - so that made him right: if he reads this - f u c k o f f, and go study signalling).
Wait, what?
I used to host 16-player Tribes games on a 56k modem shared between two people. Obviously I don't know the specifics of the problem, but to say it's impossible to host a 5v5 game on a home broadband connection, that's simply ridiculous.
For what its worth, your teacher was right: tens of thousands of Xboxes have done exactly that.
Also, I think it is not very user-friendly if you want to track multiple revisions. The display gets really cluttered tying to display three or four different versions. Overall, I think it is a poor substitute for a version control system.
Only if you completely ignore usability factors. It makes no sense to go to a totally different program/site to "check-in" your changes to a repository. Not to mention, I don't know of any version control systems that understand the DOC format well enough to create a usable "diff" between two revisions.
If you don't like viewing 4 revisions at the same time, just turn off the feature. But saying that a VCS designed for text documents would be better? Ridiculous.
For what it's worth, I think this should be used with html, ecmascript, and css. You should only be ALLOWED to implement those standards if you can agree to follow those standards.
That's great, except they'd actually have to write a *gasp* reference implementation to do it. I think they should have written a reference implementation decades ago, if they ever expected any browser maker to follow any standard, especially poorly-written and vague web standards. But oh well.
Wait, what? Blockbuster Online has a virtually identical service, with a virtually identical selection of movies and a virtually identical featureset. You might not like Blockbuster as a company, but to say there's not "real competition" is ridiculous.
1) I've worked hard, my parents worked hard, and their parents worked hard to earn the lifestyle we have now. Screw you if you want to throw all their hard work in the dumpster and live the exact same way people lived in 1920. The reason the US pollutes is because the US makes and trades things. (We actually pollute less than our due, if you consider our contribution to the world GNP.)
2) Changing people's behavior is very, very, very hard-- much harder than finding new sources of energy. It's inefficient and a waste of resources to even try.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, now that I know about it, it's the name of my next World of Warcraft character!
Game reviews frequently have 3-4 screenshots if you click through to the full review. Well, they used to-- there haven't been any game reviews in awhile, not that I recall.
Infogrames went to a blow-out sale and ended up with the rights to the Atari brand. They've been rolling out games using it for like 5 years now, and I'm perplexed at the number of comments here from people who didn't know that-- I mean, seriously, you went all this time without seeing Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes or Demonstone in stores?
Why is it that people lose the ability to understand simple economics as soon as the commodity is labor?
Oh no, people lose that ability when the commodity is fuel also. Thus all the hand-wringing over Exxon's record profits (wow, they sold a record amount of gas and therefore made a record profit-- duh!), and the people crying out about gouging when a gas station ups the price of gas.
You do, the difference is that in the Eastern US (you know, IBM territory), those contracts are generally legally enforceable and actually enforced. In the western US (you know, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, et al) these contracts are either not legally enforceable, or they are but never actually enforced.
The west coast doesn't just luck-into having great tech companies, there's a legal and philosophical environment in place which makes it a great place to open a tech company.
(Being from Europe, you might be unaware that the "United States" isn't nearly as united as the name implies; each state (or commonwealth) is responsible for its own affairs, generally, including labor laws.)
I think if they could have shut up their most ardent supporters, the Democrats would have won the last election.
John Kerry? The least exciting politician of the last 20 years? (At least Bush gets people really, really pissed-off, that's a form of exciting.)
No, the Demos had a crappy candidate. The majority of votes Kerry got in the first place were votes *against* Bush, not votes *for* Kerry.
So, let's say my site consists of a "BuildNiceWebSite" tag that should automatically engineer a profitable online service.
Renders as a blank page or an error. Blame the web browser?!
Yah, this is getting somewhere...
What the hell are you talking about?
MS doesn't have a monopoly on browsers any more. If they want to scare away everyone using firefox, then let them shoot themselves in the foot. There are easy alternatives to any of the handful of sites that don't properly support firefox.
If you buy into that conspiracy theory, yes. But it's much more likely that it's a simple mistake on the part of either Firefox or one of Hotmail's web developers. I've seen nothing whatsoever to convince me that this is done on purpose.
They've never done it on Blockbuster Online.
In fact, I've never heard of them doing this in brick and mortars-- Wal-Mart has, but Blockbuster? That's a new one for me.
Um, not if IE is using non-standard js, that isn't supported in Firefox. I think that's kinda the problem. Hotmail's code for Firefox doesn't work because MS broke it, and the IE js isn't compliant.
What are you suggesting here? That Microsoft went out of their way to find some exact combination of Javascript functions that:
1) Works in IE
2) Works in FF2
3) But doesn't work in FF3
4) Was installed before any FF3 betas were around (since this has been reported for every version of FF3.)
Seriously? Do you think that's even technically possible? Hell, do you think the combination of points 2 and 3 is even technically possible?
It's a billion times more likely that this problem is caused by a obscure error in FF3 that didn't exist in FF2.
Why do you care what site it is? The simple fact is that every web browser should work with every web site. Period. Would your opinion be different if this was for Yahoo Mail or Gmail?
But why would I have to be patient, when the previous product (2.x) works just great for me, and enables me to be productive, while the new one hinders me?
Then use Firefox 2.x and STFU and leave the rest of us alone. It's not like 2.x stopped working the instant 3 was released, you know.
Who gives a shit?
But it was just like a regular x86 PC. While all other consoles have their own architectures and a lot of custom designs, which sometimes makes programming for them much harder (Playstation 2 i'm looking at you.), the first xbox was just a fucking PC.
And this makes the Xbox bad... how? In fact, what does it matter at all? It didn't make the Xbox unnecessarily expensive, it certainly didn't hurt its performance (it completely dominated its generation), and it allowed additional features (the HD, the ethernet) that other consoles had only began thinking about.
The parent said that all the xbox did was add DRM is true : Microshat took a PC and only added DRM to it, that's what the xbox was. Other consoles have a DRM too but the DRM is not the only thing that made the difference with a regular PC box.
That's still a retarded argument; as soon as you get that stock standard PC and install a video game, your PC suddenly has *gasp* DRM ON IT! CALL THE POLICE!
The fact is, DRM is a standard in the video games industry. It's a pretty strong argument that the Atari's lack of DRM on the 2600 practically killed the entire US games industry, it took decades (until the Xbox, actually) for another American console to succeed on the console market. (That's a pretty remarkable feat too, when you think about it.) Nintendo, IIRC, had the first console DRM on their original NES console.
Not to mention that IE was the browser of choice on Macintosh, too. On a platform:
* Microsoft had absolutely no control or hold over
* Which had a larger concentration of Microsoft-haters than most (yes, even in the mid-90s)
* Either didn't include any web browser by default, or shipped both Netscape and IE on the same install disk
By all rights, IE should have completely tanked on Macintosh. But it was simply a better product. And I think a large part of that success was that IE was *just* a browser, not a huge package of "crap you don't need, oh, and it includes a browser" that Netscape had become.
(They discontinued Netscape Navigator around version 4.0.8 and only released Netscape Communicator after that point. I think that decision killed Netscape as a competitor. Deciding to scrap the product and re-write it was just the corpse twitching before rigor mortise set in.)
If Netscape had decide to actually develop their namesake product instead of basically black-holing it for 3+ years, they might have been able to pull it off, but frankly, Microsoft just out-classed them. Which is really, really sad.
Maybe they didn't "design" anything, but it has a lot of console firsts. It had the first integrated storage device, big enough to store entire games on (instead of just tiny save games). It had the first integrated network card, although some consoles had integrated modems before. First HDTV support, although that's more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Oh, and they didn't "add DRM", that's ridiculous. Every game console going back to the original NES had DRM in it. All current-gen consoles have DRM. At worst, you could say Microsoft "didn't remove the DRM expected to be in a game console."
In short, the Xbox wasn't a bad piece of hardware by any stretch of the imagination. And, in any case, it sure sold a lot of units in a competitive market on its own merits.
Yeah, no kidding. Gee, maybe people picked Outlook over Notes because Notes sucked ass? Just maybe? Naaah, must have been the crack-cocaine!
Wow, you really come across as an asshole.
Just to clarify a few things for you - just because u were playing tribes and warcraft, doesn't mean youre right either.
The fact that I was playing them with bandwidth orders of magnitude lower than home broadband, well, that makes me just feel right on several levels. Also, I can spell the words "you" and "you're." (Yeah, cheap shot, I know.)
You are still both wrong - while the word impossible might be incorrect a 5v5 is still a 5 on 5 fps game to every modern gamer out there.
Oh yeah, I forgot that Tribes was actually a farming simulator and not a FPS game. Silly me!
I think you need to look up signalling - specifically the nyquist rate and shannon-hartly sampling theorum - and imagine how a computer game would want to interpolate positional vectors for accuracy.
I have a better idea; instead of bothering with a crapload of buzzwords I don't really give a crap about, how about I just trust my extensive personal experience with the matter?
Either that, or it's not a sub 50ms game.
Yes, if you move the goalposts, then you're probably right on the issue. But that's not what you said, not even close. You can't change the premise halfway through the argument.
It seems you've lost plot and really missed the point.
I've "lost plot?" English, please.
Tell me, have u tried setting up 8+ man fps games on an xbox 360? IIRC, Call of Duty didn't allow more than 8 players.
Moving the goalposts, and now cherry-picking titles. Awesome.
Halo 2 allows 16 players, hosted over a home broadband connection, which speech and all the other Live niceties. I hear rumors that this "Halo" series was kind of popular, you should check it out.
I'm not a know it all and don't profess to be,
That's why you bring up "Nyquist Rate" and "Shannon-Hartly Sampling Theorem" in a casual argument? Riiight.
but it seems u seem to know less than me which somehow makes me wrong for being educated (and right). You're a troll the internet didn't want to access broadband.
I can't even parse that. English, please.
I can hardly call myself educated when I can't question the wrong tuition of a mere undergraduate lecturer.
A "mere" undergraduate lecturer? And what were your credentials in the class, exactly? You're a know-it-all and an asshole.
Yours truely, a bloke who first started playing network games over DOS packet drivers and BSD stack,
Well, whoop-de-shit.
Look, I'm not saying "mere" undergraduate lecturers are always right. But that particular example, you know the one you told him to go "fuck off" over? He was right about that. If you hadn't added the "fuck off" I might have let it slide.
For the record, Tribes ran so smoothly because it had an excellent implementation of client-side prediction, and was very bandwidth-efficient and packet-loss tolerant. But its hardly the only game this applies to; I was running 8-player Warcraft II games on my Mac 68040 back in the day over AOL on a 14.4k baud modem, for example.
Like I said, I didn't understand the specifics of the problem, but I was sure that your blanket "it's impossible" line was complete BS simply because I've done it.
Most ISPs have 512k or 786k upstreams, so you can see my problem here.
Yeah, your problem is that you lack industry experience (i.e. you apparently were never exposed to multiplayer games back when modems were the norm), and you're kind of a know-it-all jerk.
Also, you know the reason someone like Google won't sign up to be willing participants is because it's signing away their common carrier status. That will have HUGE legal repercussions in the United States.
1) ISPs don't have common carrier status.
2) Google isn't an ISP.
3) This law is being considered in France, and will likely have few, if any, repercussions in the United States.
Who modded this tripe up?
I ignore the fact that I was probably more qualified to teach when he questioned my analysis on throughput, net code, and the fact you couldn't realistically expect to host a 5v5 on a home broadband connection (he said he could do it on his XBox - so that made him right: if he reads this - f u c k o f f, and go study signalling).
Wait, what?
I used to host 16-player Tribes games on a 56k modem shared between two people. Obviously I don't know the specifics of the problem, but to say it's impossible to host a 5v5 game on a home broadband connection, that's simply ridiculous.
For what its worth, your teacher was right: tens of thousands of Xboxes have done exactly that.
Also, I think it is not very user-friendly if you want to track multiple revisions. The display gets really cluttered tying to display three or four different versions. Overall, I think it is a poor substitute for a version control system.
Only if you completely ignore usability factors. It makes no sense to go to a totally different program/site to "check-in" your changes to a repository. Not to mention, I don't know of any version control systems that understand the DOC format well enough to create a usable "diff" between two revisions.
If you don't like viewing 4 revisions at the same time, just turn off the feature. But saying that a VCS designed for text documents would be better? Ridiculous.
For what it's worth, I think this should be used with html, ecmascript, and css. You should only be ALLOWED to implement those standards if you can agree to follow those standards.
That's great, except they'd actually have to write a *gasp* reference implementation to do it. I think they should have written a reference implementation decades ago, if they ever expected any browser maker to follow any standard, especially poorly-written and vague web standards. But oh well.
Wait, what? Blockbuster Online has a virtually identical service, with a virtually identical selection of movies and a virtually identical featureset. You might not like Blockbuster as a company, but to say there's not "real competition" is ridiculous.
No, for two reasons:
1) I've worked hard, my parents worked hard, and their parents worked hard to earn the lifestyle we have now. Screw you if you want to throw all their hard work in the dumpster and live the exact same way people lived in 1920. The reason the US pollutes is because the US makes and trades things. (We actually pollute less than our due, if you consider our contribution to the world GNP.)
2) Changing people's behavior is very, very, very hard-- much harder than finding new sources of energy. It's inefficient and a waste of resources to even try.