Can't they just have parental lockout for games with a certain rating, just like DVR's and TV's do now?
Uh, yeah. They already do, way ahead of you there. But much like the V-Chip required in every TV, it does nothing to prevent busy-bodies from trying to censor everything they don't like.
IIRC, Zelda 2 was actually $60, at first at least.
At that time, I was mostly gaming on my Commodore 64 which had thousands of games and was being surpassed by other systems, so that you could frequently find C-64 games on sale at Toys Backwards-R Us for dirt cheap. (I remember at one point I bought Sigma 7, and Force 7 for C-64 for $7 each. Both decent games, too.)
Why are you going to Iraq? To defend the American way of life? Why would you also do something that's destructive to American businesses and American citizens from whom you're stealing?
Strikes me as hypocrisy, unless you're specifically going to Iraq for something completely unrelated to national defense... perhaps getting college money and screw everything else. In which case, you don't get off the hook by saying you're a soldier, sorry.
A lot of Slashdotters are Luddites, period. Look at, for instance, the whining when Microsoft changed the Office interface... despite their having solid scientific evidence that the new interface is better than the old.
Microsoft surely knows how to write applications using their own APIs on the operating system *they* developed.
What makes you think there's any overlap in the IE team and the Windows team? Out of curiosity. I think people who say things like this don't realize how huge Microsoft is. They have something like 70,000+ employees.
Then IE 3.0 came out, was totally free, and even had the IEAK which allowed us to pre-set bookmarks, brand it, etc. It also supported a sign-up server allowing us to just distribute the disks with "insert this disk to sign up!" on them, and it would connect up to our systems and walk the users through creating their accounts, after I wrote some custom C code. This was HUGE for us. No more stopping into the office to sign up, no more paperwork.
I find it interesting that you say Netscape was better in the first paragraph, then spend the second paragraph outlining all the various ways that IE was better. (At least, from a business standpoint.) Did you mean that Netscape was better for the end-user?
We were talking about the iPhone's touchscreen interface... but, you know, just go ahead with your paranoid rant about drug companies. We'll wait for you to finish.
I know that most MST3K fans disagree with me, but personally I loved the season which introduced Pearl, Brain Guy and Prof. Bobo and had kind of the continuing storyline. The host segments had some hilarious moments, especially the ones set in... Emperor: "Welcome... to Roman Times!" I also enjoyed the episodes where the host segments were part of an actual storyline instead of just random skits, like in Time Chasers where Croooow goes back in time to "save" Mike from being stuck in space.
It's still used in a few fields where Word hasn't completely taken hold. I used to work at a hospital, and our Medical Coders preferred it to Word. I hear that the legal profession also is still mostly WordPerfect users.
Safeway and (some) Albertsons still do this. The problem is that people simply aren't that interested in it... while you like the idea, obviously a lot of people don't or my local Albertsons would have to buy another truck. That's not to say that Webvan couldn't make it work; if they had partnered with a big grocery store chain that already had the warehouses (stores), they probably could have been much more successful.
I agree with you, and I offer a bit of evidence in the form of a control group.
Everyone knows that Netscape lost to IE on the Windows platform, because of Microsoft bundling IE with the OS for free. What's interesting to me is that Netscape also lost on the Macintosh platform, despite the fact that Apple included both Netscape and IE for free with the OS. Even though I'm sure I'll get flamed by Slashdotters, IE was simply a better product at the time.
The sad truth is that Netscape killed themselves with a horribly bloated and buggy product. IE may not have been the golden standard, but Netscape crashed every hour and ran slow because of the included email/IRC/kitchen sink that were bundled with the product, despite the fact that virtually nobody used or wanted them.
(Before I made the leap to IE on my Mac, I had to dig through the Netscape.com FTP site to find the old 4.0.8 version-- the last stand-alone version they made before shoveling the crap in, and the last one that could run longer than an hour without crashing.)
Members of a really crappy rock band try to contact the outside world (from memory):
Singer 1: "The TV's not working!" Singer 2: "The radio's making a funny noise, too." Bots: "It's called MUSIC!"
Also, in The Atomic Brain (again, from memory):
Housekeeper 1 (with a really bad fake European accent): "Oh, leave without me, I won't make it!" Housekeeper 2: "Don't talk like that!" Bots: "We've been saying that the WHOLE MOVIE!"
Fair enough. I wasn't really trying to single you out, but it seems that there's a lot of people who talk crap about games when they have very little experience with them.
Marathon runs good on Macs using the Aleph One open source engine, and I think the Map, Sound, Physics, etc files were made free some time ago. (At least, I downloaded them for free from a Bungie site, but I don't know if they are still up, or if it was a limited-time thing.) I haven't tried it on Windows.
Ok, before you say ANYTHING about story in FPS games, you need to play Marathon, System Shock 2, Chronicles of Riddick, Thief, or anything more substantial than Half-Life and Halo. (To pre-empt the obvious question: the Chronicles of Riddick videogame is about 10 times better than the movie, which sucked.)
You're basically sitting here telling us that all movies are terrible, but all you've ever seen is Weekend At Bernie's. Watch some Kubrick films, then come back and tell me all movies are terrible, and I might lend your opinion a little weight.
Pathways Into Darkness Marathon series System Shock 2 Thief series Halo/Halo 2 (especially Halo 2)
Now, you're right that most FPS games have crummy stories. Gears of War and Half-Life 2 disappointed me, since they tell you basically nothing about how the world you're in came to be. The story of Lost Planet was predictable and loaded with cliches. But there are good ones out there, and you're doing the genre a disservice by dismissing it out of hand. There are a lot of really terrible monster movies out there, too, but for every "The Relic" there's a "Alien."
you too will develop this completely healthy and rational hatred of their bullshit antics and tactics?
But there is more than enough reason to at least dislike Microsoft and think that doing business with them is exclusively for the stupid, if not to be planning firebombings.
Oh yes, how did I forget that it's entirely healthy and rational to plot firebombing Microsoft. Wow, you've convinced me that you're entirely healthy and rational and not at all some kind of crazy loon who thinks it's ok to literally destroy property and put people's lives at risk because of a computer operating system. You've sure convinced me.
I reserve the word "hate" for things like, say, genocides or dictators who cause genocides. The activity of a software company just doesn't even come close to "hate." Maybe "mild annoyance."
Essentially, under the agreement Linspire software is almost unusable: 'You can't share the software with others, pass it on with the patent promise, modify your own copy, or even use it for an "unauthorized" purpose,
Wow, it's unusable. The only thing you can do is... use it. WTF?
New functionality means you lose your coverage or presumably must pay again.
New functionality presumably must pay again? How does a software upgrade pay a bill?
First of all, despite the rhyming, your comment is unnecessarily hostile. Linspire adoption is a good thing for Linux, and Linspire itself is a good thing for Linux-- right now Linspire is the easiest way to get a legal MP3 or DVD player for your Linux computer and that's unlikely to change in the near future.
Secondly, the market that Linspire is aiming towards doesn't give a flying crap about: 1) software licenses 2) patents 3) irrational hatred of Microsoft
Leave those three particular concerns to every other Linux distro.
Almost every country with more infrastructure than Liberia. But to give a more specific brief list off the poster on the wall at the last place I worked (helpfully provided by Fluke Electronics): USA, Japan, France, Germany.
Maybe it's about reducing cost so they can, you know, stay in business? So that rabid foaming-mouth open source zealots like you have wireless cards at all.
Sure they COULD make a different card model for each country and ship each model only to that country. But when their competitors don't, they'd go out of business. This is called "reality"... you might want to get in touch with it.
If artificial lighting for a business that's open 24 hours a day is a conspiracy, then almost every Wal-Mart and grocery store in the US is involved in some kind of huge conspiracy!
Of course, it would be unthinkable to a conspiracy theorist that they might, you know, keep the lights on so people could see what they're doing? Nah, must be a conspiracy-- any normal business would turn off their lights when the sun went down, even if they were still open!
Slashdot Mirror
Can't they just have parental lockout for games with a certain rating, just like DVR's and TV's do now?
Uh, yeah. They already do, way ahead of you there. But much like the V-Chip required in every TV, it does nothing to prevent busy-bodies from trying to censor everything they don't like.
IIRC, Zelda 2 was actually $60, at first at least.
At that time, I was mostly gaming on my Commodore 64 which had thousands of games and was being surpassed by other systems, so that you could frequently find C-64 games on sale at Toys Backwards-R Us for dirt cheap. (I remember at one point I bought Sigma 7, and Force 7 for C-64 for $7 each. Both decent games, too.)
Why are you going to Iraq? To defend the American way of life? Why would you also do something that's destructive to American businesses and American citizens from whom you're stealing?
Strikes me as hypocrisy, unless you're specifically going to Iraq for something completely unrelated to national defense... perhaps getting college money and screw everything else. In which case, you don't get off the hook by saying you're a soldier, sorry.
You mean honest about being dishonest. People like the grandparent are *why* game prices are going up-- jerks who want everything for free.
A lot of Slashdotters are Luddites, period. Look at, for instance, the whining when Microsoft changed the Office interface... despite their having solid scientific evidence that the new interface is better than the old.
Microsoft surely knows how to write applications using their own APIs on the operating system *they* developed.
What makes you think there's any overlap in the IE team and the Windows team? Out of curiosity. I think people who say things like this don't realize how huge Microsoft is. They have something like 70,000+ employees.
Then IE 3.0 came out, was totally free, and even had the IEAK which allowed us to pre-set bookmarks, brand it, etc. It also supported a sign-up server allowing us to just distribute the disks with "insert this disk to sign up!" on them, and it would connect up to our systems and walk the users through creating their accounts, after I wrote some custom C code. This was HUGE for us. No more stopping into the office to sign up, no more paperwork.
I find it interesting that you say Netscape was better in the first paragraph, then spend the second paragraph outlining all the various ways that IE was better. (At least, from a business standpoint.) Did you mean that Netscape was better for the end-user?
Obligatory Harrison Bergeron link: http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html
We were talking about the iPhone's touchscreen interface... but, you know, just go ahead with your paranoid rant about drug companies. We'll wait for you to finish.
I know that most MST3K fans disagree with me, but personally I loved the season which introduced Pearl, Brain Guy and Prof. Bobo and had kind of the continuing storyline. The host segments had some hilarious moments, especially the ones set in... Emperor: "Welcome... to Roman Times!" I also enjoyed the episodes where the host segments were part of an actual storyline instead of just random skits, like in Time Chasers where Croooow goes back in time to "save" Mike from being stuck in space.
Corel owns it. http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Produ ct/1152105038419
It's still used in a few fields where Word hasn't completely taken hold. I used to work at a hospital, and our Medical Coders preferred it to Word. I hear that the legal profession also is still mostly WordPerfect users.
Safeway and (some) Albertsons still do this. The problem is that people simply aren't that interested in it... while you like the idea, obviously a lot of people don't or my local Albertsons would have to buy another truck. That's not to say that Webvan couldn't make it work; if they had partnered with a big grocery store chain that already had the warehouses (stores), they probably could have been much more successful.
I agree with you, and I offer a bit of evidence in the form of a control group.
Everyone knows that Netscape lost to IE on the Windows platform, because of Microsoft bundling IE with the OS for free. What's interesting to me is that Netscape also lost on the Macintosh platform, despite the fact that Apple included both Netscape and IE for free with the OS. Even though I'm sure I'll get flamed by Slashdotters, IE was simply a better product at the time.
The sad truth is that Netscape killed themselves with a horribly bloated and buggy product. IE may not have been the golden standard, but Netscape crashed every hour and ran slow because of the included email/IRC/kitchen sink that were bundled with the product, despite the fact that virtually nobody used or wanted them.
(Before I made the leap to IE on my Mac, I had to dig through the Netscape.com FTP site to find the old 4.0.8 version-- the last stand-alone version they made before shoveling the crap in, and the last one that could run longer than an hour without crashing.)
In Pod People
Members of a really crappy rock band try to contact the outside world (from memory):
Singer 1: "The TV's not working!"
Singer 2: "The radio's making a funny noise, too."
Bots: "It's called MUSIC!"
Also, in The Atomic Brain (again, from memory):
Housekeeper 1 (with a really bad fake European accent): "Oh, leave without me, I won't make it!"
Housekeeper 2: "Don't talk like that!"
Bots: "We've been saying that the WHOLE MOVIE!"
Flamebait? Really? Good job, moderators.
Fair enough. I wasn't really trying to single you out, but it seems that there's a lot of people who talk crap about games when they have very little experience with them.
Marathon runs good on Macs using the Aleph One open source engine, and I think the Map, Sound, Physics, etc files were made free some time ago. (At least, I downloaded them for free from a Bungie site, but I don't know if they are still up, or if it was a limited-time thing.) I haven't tried it on Windows.
Ok, before you say ANYTHING about story in FPS games, you need to play Marathon, System Shock 2, Chronicles of Riddick, Thief, or anything more substantial than Half-Life and Halo. (To pre-empt the obvious question: the Chronicles of Riddick videogame is about 10 times better than the movie, which sucked.)
You're basically sitting here telling us that all movies are terrible, but all you've ever seen is Weekend At Bernie's. Watch some Kubrick films, then come back and tell me all movies are terrible, and I might lend your opinion a little weight.
All this means is that you've never played:
Pathways Into Darkness
Marathon series
System Shock 2
Thief series
Halo/Halo 2 (especially Halo 2)
Now, you're right that most FPS games have crummy stories. Gears of War and Half-Life 2 disappointed me, since they tell you basically nothing about how the world you're in came to be. The story of Lost Planet was predictable and loaded with cliches. But there are good ones out there, and you're doing the genre a disservice by dismissing it out of hand. There are a lot of really terrible monster movies out there, too, but for every "The Relic" there's a "Alien."
you too will develop this completely healthy and rational hatred of their bullshit antics and tactics?
But there is more than enough reason to at least dislike Microsoft and think that doing business with them is exclusively for the stupid, if not to be planning firebombings.
Oh yes, how did I forget that it's entirely healthy and rational to plot firebombing Microsoft. Wow, you've convinced me that you're entirely healthy and rational and not at all some kind of crazy loon who thinks it's ok to literally destroy property and put people's lives at risk because of a computer operating system. You've sure convinced me.
I reserve the word "hate" for things like, say, genocides or dictators who cause genocides. The activity of a software company just doesn't even come close to "hate." Maybe "mild annoyance."
Essentially, under the agreement Linspire software is almost unusable: 'You can't share the software with others, pass it on with the patent promise, modify your own copy, or even use it for an "unauthorized" purpose,
Wow, it's unusable. The only thing you can do is... use it. WTF?
New functionality means you lose your coverage or presumably must pay again.
New functionality presumably must pay again? How does a software upgrade pay a bill?
First of all, despite the rhyming, your comment is unnecessarily hostile. Linspire adoption is a good thing for Linux, and Linspire itself is a good thing for Linux-- right now Linspire is the easiest way to get a legal MP3 or DVD player for your Linux computer and that's unlikely to change in the near future.
Secondly, the market that Linspire is aiming towards doesn't give a flying crap about:
1) software licenses
2) patents
3) irrational hatred of Microsoft
Leave those three particular concerns to every other Linux distro.
What countries? Name them.
Almost every country with more infrastructure than Liberia. But to give a more specific brief list off the poster on the wall at the last place I worked (helpfully provided by Fluke Electronics): USA, Japan, France, Germany.
Maybe it's about reducing cost so they can, you know, stay in business? So that rabid foaming-mouth open source zealots like you have wireless cards at all.
Sure they COULD make a different card model for each country and ship each model only to that country. But when their competitors don't, they'd go out of business. This is called "reality"... you might want to get in touch with it.
If artificial lighting for a business that's open 24 hours a day is a conspiracy, then almost every Wal-Mart and grocery store in the US is involved in some kind of huge conspiracy!
Of course, it would be unthinkable to a conspiracy theorist that they might, you know, keep the lights on so people could see what they're doing? Nah, must be a conspiracy-- any normal business would turn off their lights when the sun went down, even if they were still open!