Spyro isn't Sony, is it? Spyro's last game had an Xbox port, and it wouldn't be like Sony to port anything to Xbox... that said, I don't remember which company made it.
I don't consider Master Chief the Xbox mascot. Halo *was* their "mascot game" if there is such a thing, but Xbox has pretty much always been marketed without one. And, frankly, so has the Playstation and PS2 and Dreamcast. (If you consider Master Chief the Xbox mascot, then wouldn't "That Oblivion Armored Guy" be the Xbox 360 mascot?)
IBM's current status quo seems to be selling really really shitty software (like Lotus Notes) for twice the cost of the Microsoft alternative, then when that shitty software doesn't work correctly, they sell you "consultants" for $175 an hour to fix the broken product they sold you in the first place.
The only part of IBM I still respect is hardware, and half of that is crap. (It's taken years, but their Infoprints are now almost as reliable as HP equivalents.)
The new version of Adium doesn't use libgaim anymore, as libgaim doesn't support Direct Connect or file transfers (using AOL's proxy) correctly. I think when 2.0 of Adium comes out, it officially is no longer a "derivative of GAIM."
You live in a fantasy world. ICQ's software sucked ass (the Mac version triply-so), and from my experience almost everyone using it switched to either AIM or MSN Messenger as soon as they became available. I hear ICQ was bigger in Europe, but here in the US it was on its way downhill long before AOL bought them.
It doesn't really answer your question, but Windows XP Pro (not sure about Home) has a pretty comprehensive Compatibility Mode that works with most games. Right-click the game's icon, select "Compatibility", then select Windows 98 or Windows 95. If those don't work, try Windows 2000 before giving up.
Using this technique, I can run *most* of my Windows 95/98 games in XP. The one I've never gotten to work right is Dungeon Keeper II... it runs for a few minutes, then crashes no matter what compatibility mode it's in.
Read the rest of the interview. In short, Japanese Sega became jealous of the American division (which at that time was doing much better; Sonic was a hero in America, and not very popular in Japan), and their executives began to sabotage all of American Sega's plans. For instance, the hardware that became the Nintendo 64 was offered to Sega first, but the Japanese Sega executives turned it down, despite American Sega's recommendation. Ditto with the hardware that became the Sony Playstation.
I don't know if it's the hardware or the development team, but the Genesis version of "Jurassic Park" is also amazing compared to the SNES version. There's no doubt that the SNES had a lot of good games, and probably more good games than Genesis, but don't sell the Genesis hardware short-- it was damn good hardware.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I'm starting to think that all these fines the EU levies against Microsoft are the result of some kind of governmental jealousy. After-all, does the EU have any software companies that can compete on an even footing against Microsoft? No? Well, we can't beat them... so let's fine them.
I just don't see the point in people writing these big long rants about features that they aren't forced to use. If Microsoft *forced* you to only buy Xbox Live Arcade games, then yeah, rant on. But they don't. So just live and let live, that's my philosophy.
Let's say Notes is stable. Rock-solid... the horrible quality of the UI and slowness of the product would still make it a worse email client than Microsoft's Outlook or Entourage and Apple's Mail.app. (And possibly whatever the hell Novell's using now.)
Oh, and BTW, it crashes as much in MacOS X as well. So it can't be my "Windows setup" that is "screwed."
I'm sorry, the only thing I admit about Notes is that it's secure. Other than that, it's just a huge chunk of crap as far as I'm concerned.
What's your interest in defending Notes? Do you genuinely believe it's a good product? If so, have you ever spent a significant amount of time using a competitor's product? Or do you have a vested interested in Notes' success?
1) I'm not a "fanboy" of anything. I am anti-FUD and I'm a happy Xbox 360 owner, yes. As the 360 is the only next-gen console actually in living rooms, maybe the fact that I own one makes me biased, but whatever. When the PS3 and Wii actually exist in living rooms, I'll be able to give them a fair hearing as well.
2) You don't need a HDTV to play XBox 360. It'll play on a regular SDTV, a HDTV, or even any VGA computer monitor (with an optional adaptor.) In any case, I owned a HDTV before I bought the Xbox 360... the original Xbox could do 1080i, and defaulted to 480p.
3) I didn't buy the Xbox 360 to play Frogger.
4) Even within Xbox Live Arcade, the best games aren't the "classics." For instance, Marble Blast is a hell of a lot of fun and it's a modern game.
1) The game purchase is attached to your *profile*, not your hardware. This means that if you copy your profile onto a different Xbox, you can download all the games you've purchased at no charge.
2) If you don't like it, just don't buy it. The Xbox 360 works just fine with good old fashioned disk-based games too, you know. However, I *do* like it, so let me have the choice to buy Live Arcade games if I want. Everybody wins.
I'm guessing that you were really excited when Nintendo announced that their download service for the Wii would allow people to download and play NES, SNES and Nintendo 64 games, right? But when the Xbox 360 has the same capability, suddenly it's cliched joke time, right?
I wonder if it's actually "integrated" with the OS X spell-checker? Or am I going to have to enter all my custom words in YET ANOTHER SPELLING DICTIONARY!?
Not to mention, you won't be able to play it on a Mac.
Gripe all you want, Slashdot hordes, about Apple's DRM, but at least Apple's is cross-platform. Microsoft hasn't even bothered to try to port theirs to OS X.
The group of people who are running Windows 98 and don't give a crap whether it's supported are the same group of people who won't pay for security/bug fixes. Even if Microsoft offered such a service, at great expense to themselves, who would pay for it? Nobody. In fact, even worse, they'd probably just get bad PR from people complaining that the updates weren't free.
As other posters have pointed out, you missed the critical piece of information: The computer was not on a network. Synaptic is almost 100% useless without an Internet connection.
As for your rant on how Windows isn't perfect... who gives a crap? We all know Windows isn't perfect, that has nothing to do with how good the Ubuntu experience on a computer with no Internet connection is. Let's say that again because it's so important: when talking about improving the quality of Linux, the quality if Windows is irrelevant!
If all the Linux community ever does is fix things until they are at about the same quality level of Windows, Linux can never be better than Windows. Do you understand? Good.
(And for the record, HP drivers suck ass, at least for cheap consumer-grade crap.)
Notes crashed on me just an hour ago and I had to use Kill Notes to get it going again, lest I get the red rectangle of death. Or whatever IBM calls that thing. I wasn't using any databases except the ones IBM ships with the product to run their email system. Why did it crash? I had the pure audacity to click a file attachment-- can you believe that ballsy move?
There's nothing wrong with the architecture, it just CRASHES EVERY GODDAMNED DAY!
All the people who come out of the woodwork to defend Lotus Notes must either thrive on bloated software with horrible UIs, or be Notes developers. I'm guessing the latter.
1) Windows does use multiple streams; for instance, Explorer.exe stores icon previews in them
2) They were created (I believe) for compatibility with Apple's 2-stream files (or 3 streams, if you count the metadata as a stream)
3) There's no decent protocol for transmitting multiple-stream files over the Internet. Why do you think Mac users have to use MacBinary or BinHex encoding schemes when sending emails?
4) Container file formats, like AVI and Quicktime, already exist to solve the movie/audio problem, so there's no point in re-solving it using streams. Especially considering streams don't transfer over the Internet without encoding of some sort.
Except IBM *sells* it as a mail solution. And it's TERRIBLE as a mail solution.
For mail, use Outlook... it might be bad, but it's leaps and bounds better than Notes. For everyone else, use either web-apps or Filemaker. Nobody should be using Notes for anything.
But stable? Come on. Lotus has, on their website, a program called "Kill Notes" (or something similar) because when Lotus Notes crashes (and it does, about every couple of hours) it leaves behind ghost processes and won't restart itself until those processes are killed. The code is bloated beyond belief, the user interface is a crime against users.
Every county in Utah has repressive liquor laws, much more so than anywhere in the rest of the US. And, guess what, those effect *everybody*, not just Mormons. Don't pretend that Mormons aren't interested in controlling people's lives.
Welcome to Mac OS, circa 1984. Apple's never really gone for that whole "shared library" thing, and I personally agree with them... it causes more problems than it solves.
Of course, it also helped that that 1984 Mac had its OS libraries burned into ROM so you could guarantee they wouldn't change... Linux doesn't have that going for it, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Spyro isn't Sony, is it? Spyro's last game had an Xbox port, and it wouldn't be like Sony to port anything to Xbox... that said, I don't remember which company made it.
I don't consider Master Chief the Xbox mascot. Halo *was* their "mascot game" if there is such a thing, but Xbox has pretty much always been marketed without one. And, frankly, so has the Playstation and PS2 and Dreamcast. (If you consider Master Chief the Xbox mascot, then wouldn't "That Oblivion Armored Guy" be the Xbox 360 mascot?)
IBM's current status quo seems to be selling really really shitty software (like Lotus Notes) for twice the cost of the Microsoft alternative, then when that shitty software doesn't work correctly, they sell you "consultants" for $175 an hour to fix the broken product they sold you in the first place.
The only part of IBM I still respect is hardware, and half of that is crap. (It's taken years, but their Infoprints are now almost as reliable as HP equivalents.)
Why would it mean anything to GAIM and Trillian? When AIM and ICQ became interoperable, did it mean anything for GAIM and Trillian?
The new version of Adium doesn't use libgaim anymore, as libgaim doesn't support Direct Connect or file transfers (using AOL's proxy) correctly. I think when 2.0 of Adium comes out, it officially is no longer a "derivative of GAIM."
You live in a fantasy world. ICQ's software sucked ass (the Mac version triply-so), and from my experience almost everyone using it switched to either AIM or MSN Messenger as soon as they became available. I hear ICQ was bigger in Europe, but here in the US it was on its way downhill long before AOL bought them.
It doesn't really answer your question, but Windows XP Pro (not sure about Home) has a pretty comprehensive Compatibility Mode that works with most games. Right-click the game's icon, select "Compatibility", then select Windows 98 or Windows 95. If those don't work, try Windows 2000 before giving up.
Using this technique, I can run *most* of my Windows 95/98 games in XP. The one I've never gotten to work right is Dungeon Keeper II... it runs for a few minutes, then crashes no matter what compatibility mode it's in.
Read the rest of the interview. In short, Japanese Sega became jealous of the American division (which at that time was doing much better; Sonic was a hero in America, and not very popular in Japan), and their executives began to sabotage all of American Sega's plans. For instance, the hardware that became the Nintendo 64 was offered to Sega first, but the Japanese Sega executives turned it down, despite American Sega's recommendation. Ditto with the hardware that became the Sony Playstation.
I don't know if it's the hardware or the development team, but the Genesis version of "Jurassic Park" is also amazing compared to the SNES version. There's no doubt that the SNES had a lot of good games, and probably more good games than Genesis, but don't sell the Genesis hardware short-- it was damn good hardware.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I'm starting to think that all these fines the EU levies against Microsoft are the result of some kind of governmental jealousy. After-all, does the EU have any software companies that can compete on an even footing against Microsoft? No? Well, we can't beat them... so let's fine them.
I just don't see the point in people writing these big long rants about features that they aren't forced to use. If Microsoft *forced* you to only buy Xbox Live Arcade games, then yeah, rant on. But they don't. So just live and let live, that's my philosophy.
Let's say Notes is stable. Rock-solid... the horrible quality of the UI and slowness of the product would still make it a worse email client than Microsoft's Outlook or Entourage and Apple's Mail.app. (And possibly whatever the hell Novell's using now.)
Oh, and BTW, it crashes as much in MacOS X as well. So it can't be my "Windows setup" that is "screwed."
I'm sorry, the only thing I admit about Notes is that it's secure. Other than that, it's just a huge chunk of crap as far as I'm concerned.
What's your interest in defending Notes? Do you genuinely believe it's a good product? If so, have you ever spent a significant amount of time using a competitor's product? Or do you have a vested interested in Notes' success?
1) I'm not a "fanboy" of anything. I am anti-FUD and I'm a happy Xbox 360 owner, yes. As the 360 is the only next-gen console actually in living rooms, maybe the fact that I own one makes me biased, but whatever. When the PS3 and Wii actually exist in living rooms, I'll be able to give them a fair hearing as well.
2) You don't need a HDTV to play XBox 360. It'll play on a regular SDTV, a HDTV, or even any VGA computer monitor (with an optional adaptor.) In any case, I owned a HDTV before I bought the Xbox 360... the original Xbox could do 1080i, and defaulted to 480p.
3) I didn't buy the Xbox 360 to play Frogger.
4) Even within Xbox Live Arcade, the best games aren't the "classics." For instance, Marble Blast is a hell of a lot of fun and it's a modern game.
1) The game purchase is attached to your *profile*, not your hardware. This means that if you copy your profile onto a different Xbox, you can download all the games you've purchased at no charge.
2) If you don't like it, just don't buy it. The Xbox 360 works just fine with good old fashioned disk-based games too, you know. However, I *do* like it, so let me have the choice to buy Live Arcade games if I want. Everybody wins.
I'm guessing that you were really excited when Nintendo announced that their download service for the Wii would allow people to download and play NES, SNES and Nintendo 64 games, right? But when the Xbox 360 has the same capability, suddenly it's cliched joke time, right?
Freakin' Slashdot.
I wonder if it's actually "integrated" with the OS X spell-checker? Or am I going to have to enter all my custom words in YET ANOTHER SPELLING DICTIONARY!?
Not to mention, you won't be able to play it on a Mac.
Gripe all you want, Slashdot hordes, about Apple's DRM, but at least Apple's is cross-platform. Microsoft hasn't even bothered to try to port theirs to OS X.
The group of people who are running Windows 98 and don't give a crap whether it's supported are the same group of people who won't pay for security/bug fixes. Even if Microsoft offered such a service, at great expense to themselves, who would pay for it? Nobody. In fact, even worse, they'd probably just get bad PR from people complaining that the updates weren't free.
As other posters have pointed out, you missed the critical piece of information: The computer was not on a network. Synaptic is almost 100% useless without an Internet connection.
As for your rant on how Windows isn't perfect... who gives a crap? We all know Windows isn't perfect, that has nothing to do with how good the Ubuntu experience on a computer with no Internet connection is. Let's say that again because it's so important: when talking about improving the quality of Linux, the quality if Windows is irrelevant!
If all the Linux community ever does is fix things until they are at about the same quality level of Windows, Linux can never be better than Windows. Do you understand? Good.
(And for the record, HP drivers suck ass, at least for cheap consumer-grade crap.)
Notes crashed on me just an hour ago and I had to use Kill Notes to get it going again, lest I get the red rectangle of death. Or whatever IBM calls that thing. I wasn't using any databases except the ones IBM ships with the product to run their email system. Why did it crash? I had the pure audacity to click a file attachment-- can you believe that ballsy move?
There's nothing wrong with the architecture, it just CRASHES EVERY GODDAMNED DAY!
All the people who come out of the woodwork to defend Lotus Notes must either thrive on bloated software with horrible UIs, or be Notes developers. I'm guessing the latter.
1) Windows does use multiple streams; for instance, Explorer.exe stores icon previews in them
2) They were created (I believe) for compatibility with Apple's 2-stream files (or 3 streams, if you count the metadata as a stream)
3) There's no decent protocol for transmitting multiple-stream files over the Internet. Why do you think Mac users have to use MacBinary or BinHex encoding schemes when sending emails?
4) Container file formats, like AVI and Quicktime, already exist to solve the movie/audio problem, so there's no point in re-solving it using streams. Especially considering streams don't transfer over the Internet without encoding of some sort.
Except IBM *sells* it as a mail solution. And it's TERRIBLE as a mail solution.
For mail, use Outlook... it might be bad, but it's leaps and bounds better than Notes. For everyone else, use either web-apps or Filemaker. Nobody should be using Notes for anything.
You got to give him secure.
But stable? Come on. Lotus has, on their website, a program called "Kill Notes" (or something similar) because when Lotus Notes crashes (and it does, about every couple of hours) it leaves behind ghost processes and won't restart itself until those processes are killed. The code is bloated beyond belief, the user interface is a crime against users.
Oh please.
Every county in Utah has repressive liquor laws, much more so than anywhere in the rest of the US. And, guess what, those effect *everybody*, not just Mormons. Don't pretend that Mormons aren't interested in controlling people's lives.
Welcome to Mac OS, circa 1984. Apple's never really gone for that whole "shared library" thing, and I personally agree with them... it causes more problems than it solves.
Of course, it also helped that that 1984 Mac had its OS libraries burned into ROM so you could guarantee they wouldn't change... Linux doesn't have that going for it, either.