Uh... huh? Which Dragonball Z did you watch? In the one I saw, most episodes consisted of characters hovering in place for about 20 minutes jawing at each other, then the other two minutes consisted of "fighting" which was about 6 frames of animation played in an annoyingly fast loop over and over again. Angles are usually chosen to minimize lipsync.
The only show I've seen with worse animation has to be.hack//sign (or whatever) which has at least a few episodes in which *no characters move at all*.
There's not a shadow of doubt that 8-figure-and-rising development costs per game are utterly unsustainable. The question is, what can be done about it?
Not a shadow of doubt? I doubt it. What makes it unsustainable? The movie industry has been in the 8 digits since the 80s, and it's doing alright, isn't it?
In any case, I think your bazaar already exists. Modders are all over the place, forming teams to make total conversions every time a new game engine comes out. How many free total conversions were there for the Unreal Tourney 2004 engine? A dozen? More?
I guess it's a valid thing to talk about, but look at where we are right now: Video games are actually semi-cool now - they're no longer limited to a nerd's basement
I dunno, games were pretty damn cool when the Atari crashed. Pac-Man Fever was on the top-10 charts, and Pac-Man himself had a saturday morning cartoon. Also, the Atari seemed to appeal more towards famlies/people of all ages than the later consoles (such as the Nintendo and Genesis) did. You found a lot of adults playing Pong or Combat on Atari.
Who can blame them? When a truly original film comes out of nowhere, how does it do in the box office? Almost always, it does poorly. Take Dark City, or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
The problem isn't the suits, but the huge mass of moviegoers who don't want to take the risk. The business is just following their customers.
If I were a big-time game dev CEO (Ryan, you listening?), I'd be looking at creating an engine that could be used to create many games of different genres & styles... then I'd save on dev costs and be able to focus on content & gameplay. And, be able to license the engine for a long tail.
I agree with you entirely, *but* there seems a lot of reluctance in the game industry to re-use engines. (Which a few exceptions; the Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance engine was used for several games, Unreal engines usually are used for a couple games, Halo's engine was re-used for Stubb's the Zombie.) Generally, companies want to make their own engine from scratch so they can add in whatever artistic effects/features they need to, that are unique to their game. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing-- look at the engine used on Paper Mario 2, for instance. It needs to do a ton of things that normal graphic engines never encounter, and it made for a more unique gaming experience as a result. Or look at the destructable terrain used in the Red Faction engine. That game required destructable objects and terrain, and no other engine provided it at the time, so writing from scratch is what they did.
In short:
1) Engines already exist that are flexible enough to write almost any kind of game with. Unreal has one, for instance. The Tribes 2 engine is available, and has a ton of features useful for any game genre.
2) Developers generally want their own engines because they want to add their own features to make their game more unique.
(from memory) Kryten (as human): "I can't seem to activate my 'zoom' function. How can I bring a distant object into sharp focus?" Lister: "Uh. You just move your head closer to the object." Kryten: "What about other optical effects? Slow-motion? Split-screen? Quantel?"
Yeah, but that's not what I'm looking for. I want to slide my DVD in the drive while typing in Pages or doing some task in Excel and have the DVD start playing, automatically, in a window at the corner of my screen.
Apple's DVD Player can't do this because it steals focus and interrupts my typing. VLC can't do this because I have to switch to it and select a menu option (whether I use the keyboard or not), and it interrupts my typing.
I don't think it's an unreasonable request to have a computer that can just play a DVD automatically without getting in my way.
Thanks, zootm, exactly what I was thinking but phrased probably more polite than I would have.:)
There are two factors to the "why don't I fix it" puzzle:
1) I haven't programmed anything since college. It would take me probably a year to learn enough about mplayer, and enough of the OS X API, to be able to make the changes that need to be made.
2) VLC already exists, and it already works just perfect. So I just use it. If these were commercial programs, sold to OS X users, the business that put out mplayer would long since be bankrupt because, for the average user, VLC is better in every way.
The OS X gui just happens to make it easier for people who are too dumb to type "mplayer Movie.file".
Because I don't automatically think of using a *text based* interface to play *multimedia* (you know, that thing where there's lots of pictures and sounds but no text), that makes me dumb?
That point aside, the OS X GUI doesn't make it easier whatsoever, which is basically my point. The most basic task a program can perform is quitting itself, and mplayer doesn't even make that easy. (Well, didn't, to be fair, some posters are telling me the new version is better.)
VLC has a bloated GUI that makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks impossible.
I'm calling you out on this one. What "easy task" does VLC make hard?
If there's something more that you want, then code it yourself. That's the point of OSS... you can code the features you want. Bitching and whining like a fucking crybaby is not part of the deal.
I expect the original coders to take enough pride in their work to make sure it fits the OS X guidelines. If they don't care, why should I? (I've worked for people who don't care before, believe me, it's a losing proposition. I'm sure it's even worse when the work is volunteer, like in open source.)
Plus, and this may surprise you, but I'm not very likely to spend months learning the mplayer code just so I can add a few enhancements when VLC already does what I want. And that's if I could understand the code at all which, likely as not, I wouldn't be able to. (But, of course, if I can't work on a huge project, I must be dumb to you, right?)
BTW, you could have saved yourself hours of randomly hitting keys (like a monkey trying to reproduce Shakespeare) if you had read the fucking manual.
So now I have to read the manual to quit a program? Uh... no. How about I just use the competition which does not suck?
I think what we've learned from this post is that you are a complete idiot. Please turn in your computer at the nearest police station... or something.
You're the one poring over a complex manual to quit a program instead of just downloading VLC, and I'm the complete idiot? Might want to re-examine that.
As for trying the new version... maybe. What the open source community needs to learn is that once people are burned by crappy software, they'll usually avoid that software in the future. Maybe a few years from now *if* I need something that VLC doesn't already do and *if* I can't find any other program to do it, I *might* try mplayer again. Maybe. But after struggling with that horrible crap, sorry, no thanks.
(How many people here avoid RealPlayer because of their really crappy earlier versions even though the new version actually behaves nicely and works well? Same thing applies to open source software.)
Does it still use 2 Dock icons instead of one? That right there is enough for me to not use it.
Like most OS X apps it stays in memory even after you quit the last app window.
I don't think you understand how OS X works. You don't "quit" windows, you quit applications. That is, if you select Quit, *all* the windows close because the application unloads itself from memory and goes away. If you close the window, all you've done is close the window. (Most) OS X applications don't automatically quit when you close the last window because 1) historically, they've never done it that way since 1984 2) that's goofy as hell. Have you ever finished working on one project in Word, then wanted another one? So you hit close on the open document you no longer need, and hit the Word icon to create a new one. But Word unloaded itself from memory, so you have to wait for the whole beast to boot up again... what a pain! (Of course, you quickly learn to create the new document before closing the old, but why should you have to?)
Anyway, OS X's memory management is designed to basically assume you keep all your applications running all the time. In fact, just to make things quicker, I usually start up most of my apps after rebooting the computer, just so they're available.
But you know, the good thing about mplayer is that it's available for so many platforms. I have a Mac, a Windows PC and a Linux box
And VLC isn't?
You may disagree (probably because you're not used to it, took me a while to get to like it too), but that doesn't make it a "horrible" interface.
Any interface in which Command-Q doesn't quit the application is a horrible interface. You're not going to talk me out of that one, regardless of how similar the keyboard shortcuts are between platforms. Command-Q quits every other application ported from Windows or Linux.
My main gripe with VLC right now is that if you set the DVD Autorun to start VLC instead of DVD Player, VLC starts but it won't automatically start playing the DVD. Apple's DVD Player steals focus about 5 times during the process of inserting a DVD, and it's a real pain in the ass... I'd prefer to avoid it entirely if at all possible, but starting up the DVD in VLC every time is a pain in the ass too. Right now, going with the 'stealing focus' pain in the ass beats out the 'choosing File-Open Disk, Ok' pain in the ass.
Of course, if Apple would fix their goddamned software, none of this would be an issue. A software program that steals focus and hasn't been fixed during the ENTIRE HISTORY OF OS X? What happened to your QA department, Apple? They all on sabbatical or something?
The GUI to mplayer on OS X is SO BAD it took me over a half hour to figure out how to quit the program. You click the movie window to bring it to the front, hit Command-Q, nothing happens. That's weird. You scrub the menus. No Quit option. Hmm. Let's try making the window bigger... Command-0, nothing. Command-1, nothing. (In pretty much every media player, Command-1 is half-size, Command-2 is normal-size, Command-3 is double-size, and Command-0 is full-screen. VLC is a bit different, but not so much that it's too confusing.)
Of course since I don't keep my Dock open all the time, little did I know that mplayer isn't ONE program, it's TWO programs... and the program that actually plays the movie doesn't quit. At all. It can't quit. But if you quit the *other* program, then it automatically goes away. I guess the "designer" of the GUI didn't know you could hide the Dock. Of course, even if he didn't, there's no excuse for putting two icons on it, one of which doesn't (for all practical purposes) work when you could use one in the first place.
Whoever "designed" this interface obviously had never used a Mac before or, possibly, even a GUI before. It's terrible. It's horrible. It violates almost every rule of good GUI design, and, as a result, it's a pain in the ass to use. I'm sorry. It's an F in my book.
VLC might not have all the codecs or whatever, that mplayer has, but you know what? It has a GUI that wasn't designed by an alien from the planet Weebo who's never seen a computer before, so it gets my download every time.
Oh, of course. How silly of me to doubt a doctor would be the perfect person to outline all of our BIOS settings. For a minute there I was thinking a engineer would be a better choice.
Uh, the entire point of Xbox Live Arcade is to allow indie games to be played on the Xbox 360. I don't know how they expect people to write these, perhaps they plan to just sell dev kits for cheap, but it's not like Microsoft is dead-set against indie games right now.
Not to mention that iTunes *constantly* bothers you to back up, and makes back ups brain-dead simple. (You can just set the CD burning to "music files", hit select all, and hit burn. It'll fill each CD/DVD with as many tracks as fit and ask for the next one in turn. Or, even easier, just copy your ~/music/itunes directory onto an external HD or DVD.
Oh, well, with such a mature and intelligent correction to your original post, how could I possibly doubt you? I'm sure anybody who uses the phrase "lick my hairy nut sac" is an expert on console marketing, so I'll just concede this one to you.
This has really flopped into a yawner for a lot of folks. Launch titles that can be counted on one hand,
What kind of freaky-ass mutant hand do you have?
Add to this the MASSIVE problems, not small scale as MS is stating,
It's only "massive" because everybody with a defective one is posting it to their blog and every messageboard they can think of. Now I'm not saying that all the consoles are in tip-top shape, but you have to realize that any new product is likely to have a failure rate from 2-5%. The only difference with the Xbox 360 is that there's so much more communication via the internet than there have been in previous years, and so you hear about it more.
The average return rate right now of defective units from EB is almost 30% and in some stores nearing 50%... that isn't small scale problems. At a Gamestop near my house they have 7 defective units back right now.
Citation? Article? Reference? Or are these numbers coming right out of your ass?
The funny thing is that no one is touching upon the fact that the Japanese could care even less about the 360... that's a nail in the coffin right there.
1) It's not even released in Japan, how could you possibly know how they will react to it?
2) Why is this a nail in the coffin? Sure Japan has a lot of game consumers. So does Europe. Why does everybody assume that Japan has to be into a game system for it to be successful? The Atari 2600 was pretty successful, and I'm not sure that was even released in Japan. If anything, I'm glad Microsoft has broken the Japanese chokehold on the entire industry... finally I can buy an American console from an American company with primarily American-developed games. You might not care about that, but I do.
Also the average Joe is staying away like the plague now with all the coverage of problems.
Source? Or is this just more ass-pulling?
If the average Joe is staying away for any reason, it's that you literally cannot buy one for less than $1200 right now.
Next time you write a Slashdot post, you might want to consider putting some facts in it. Or at least labelling your suppositions as such.
And wait until the PS3 get closer. It'll have at least as many Slashdot articles, and probably more because I think more Slashdot users are PS2 fans than Xbox fans. It's just pointless griping.
I don't even know what a FTI is. Or how you "FTI" something. And Lotus Notes' "Help" file, a huge WTF by itself, has no entry for it. But I no longer care anyway; I figured out how to just forward everything to Gmail which actually works.
Slashdot Mirror
The art and animation are high quality
.hack//sign (or whatever) which has at least a few episodes in which *no characters move at all*.
Uh... huh? Which Dragonball Z did you watch? In the one I saw, most episodes consisted of characters hovering in place for about 20 minutes jawing at each other, then the other two minutes consisted of "fighting" which was about 6 frames of animation played in an annoyingly fast loop over and over again. Angles are usually chosen to minimize lipsync.
The only show I've seen with worse animation has to be
There's not a shadow of doubt that 8-figure-and-rising development costs per game are utterly unsustainable. The question is, what can be done about it?
Not a shadow of doubt? I doubt it. What makes it unsustainable? The movie industry has been in the 8 digits since the 80s, and it's doing alright, isn't it?
In any case, I think your bazaar already exists. Modders are all over the place, forming teams to make total conversions every time a new game engine comes out. How many free total conversions were there for the Unreal Tourney 2004 engine? A dozen? More?
I guess it's a valid thing to talk about, but look at where we are right now: Video games are actually semi-cool now - they're no longer limited to a nerd's basement
I dunno, games were pretty damn cool when the Atari crashed. Pac-Man Fever was on the top-10 charts, and Pac-Man himself had a saturday morning cartoon. Also, the Atari seemed to appeal more towards famlies/people of all ages than the later consoles (such as the Nintendo and Genesis) did. You found a lot of adults playing Pong or Combat on Atari.
Who can blame them? When a truly original film comes out of nowhere, how does it do in the box office? Almost always, it does poorly. Take Dark City, or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
The problem isn't the suits, but the huge mass of moviegoers who don't want to take the risk. The business is just following their customers.
If I were a big-time game dev CEO (Ryan, you listening?), I'd be looking at creating an engine that could be used to create many games of different genres & styles... then I'd save on dev costs and be able to focus on content & gameplay. And, be able to license the engine for a long tail.
I agree with you entirely, *but* there seems a lot of reluctance in the game industry to re-use engines. (Which a few exceptions; the Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance engine was used for several games, Unreal engines usually are used for a couple games, Halo's engine was re-used for Stubb's the Zombie.) Generally, companies want to make their own engine from scratch so they can add in whatever artistic effects/features they need to, that are unique to their game. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing-- look at the engine used on Paper Mario 2, for instance. It needs to do a ton of things that normal graphic engines never encounter, and it made for a more unique gaming experience as a result. Or look at the destructable terrain used in the Red Faction engine. That game required destructable objects and terrain, and no other engine provided it at the time, so writing from scratch is what they did.
In short:
1) Engines already exist that are flexible enough to write almost any kind of game with. Unreal has one, for instance. The Tribes 2 engine is available, and has a ton of features useful for any game genre.
2) Developers generally want their own engines because they want to add their own features to make their game more unique.
Damnit, I hadn't played it yet, and you've totally ruined the whole plot! How about a spoiler warning? ;)
Obligatory Red Dwarf quote?
(from memory)
Kryten (as human): "I can't seem to activate my 'zoom' function. How can I bring a distant object into sharp focus?"
Lister: "Uh. You just move your head closer to the object."
Kryten: "What about other optical effects? Slow-motion? Split-screen? Quantel?"
Yeah, but that's not what I'm looking for. I want to slide my DVD in the drive while typing in Pages or doing some task in Excel and have the DVD start playing, automatically, in a window at the corner of my screen.
Apple's DVD Player can't do this because it steals focus and interrupts my typing. VLC can't do this because I have to switch to it and select a menu option (whether I use the keyboard or not), and it interrupts my typing.
I don't think it's an unreasonable request to have a computer that can just play a DVD automatically without getting in my way.
Thanks, zootm, exactly what I was thinking but phrased probably more polite than I would have. :)
There are two factors to the "why don't I fix it" puzzle:
1) I haven't programmed anything since college. It would take me probably a year to learn enough about mplayer, and enough of the OS X API, to be able to make the changes that need to be made.
2) VLC already exists, and it already works just perfect. So I just use it. If these were commercial programs, sold to OS X users, the business that put out mplayer would long since be bankrupt because, for the average user, VLC is better in every way.
The OS X gui just happens to make it easier for people who are too dumb to type "mplayer Movie.file".
Because I don't automatically think of using a *text based* interface to play *multimedia* (you know, that thing where there's lots of pictures and sounds but no text), that makes me dumb?
That point aside, the OS X GUI doesn't make it easier whatsoever, which is basically my point. The most basic task a program can perform is quitting itself, and mplayer doesn't even make that easy. (Well, didn't, to be fair, some posters are telling me the new version is better.)
VLC has a bloated GUI that makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks impossible.
I'm calling you out on this one. What "easy task" does VLC make hard?
If there's something more that you want, then code it yourself. That's the point of OSS... you can code the features you want. Bitching and whining like a fucking crybaby is not part of the deal.
I expect the original coders to take enough pride in their work to make sure it fits the OS X guidelines. If they don't care, why should I? (I've worked for people who don't care before, believe me, it's a losing proposition. I'm sure it's even worse when the work is volunteer, like in open source.)
Plus, and this may surprise you, but I'm not very likely to spend months learning the mplayer code just so I can add a few enhancements when VLC already does what I want. And that's if I could understand the code at all which, likely as not, I wouldn't be able to. (But, of course, if I can't work on a huge project, I must be dumb to you, right?)
BTW, you could have saved yourself hours of randomly hitting keys (like a monkey trying to reproduce Shakespeare) if you had read the fucking manual.
So now I have to read the manual to quit a program? Uh... no. How about I just use the competition which does not suck?
I think what we've learned from this post is that you are a complete idiot. Please turn in your computer at the nearest police station... or something.
You're the one poring over a complex manual to quit a program instead of just downloading VLC, and I'm the complete idiot? Might want to re-examine that.
The shortcut for Quit on OS X is *command*-Q.
As for trying the new version... maybe. What the open source community needs to learn is that once people are burned by crappy software, they'll usually avoid that software in the future. Maybe a few years from now *if* I need something that VLC doesn't already do and *if* I can't find any other program to do it, I *might* try mplayer again. Maybe. But after struggling with that horrible crap, sorry, no thanks.
(How many people here avoid RealPlayer because of their really crappy earlier versions even though the new version actually behaves nicely and works well? Same thing applies to open source software.)
Does it still use 2 Dock icons instead of one? That right there is enough for me to not use it.
Like most OS X apps it stays in memory even after you quit the last app window.
I don't think you understand how OS X works. You don't "quit" windows, you quit applications. That is, if you select Quit, *all* the windows close because the application unloads itself from memory and goes away. If you close the window, all you've done is close the window. (Most) OS X applications don't automatically quit when you close the last window because 1) historically, they've never done it that way since 1984 2) that's goofy as hell. Have you ever finished working on one project in Word, then wanted another one? So you hit close on the open document you no longer need, and hit the Word icon to create a new one. But Word unloaded itself from memory, so you have to wait for the whole beast to boot up again... what a pain! (Of course, you quickly learn to create the new document before closing the old, but why should you have to?)
Anyway, OS X's memory management is designed to basically assume you keep all your applications running all the time. In fact, just to make things quicker, I usually start up most of my apps after rebooting the computer, just so they're available.
But you know, the good thing about mplayer is that it's available for so many platforms. I have a Mac, a Windows PC and a Linux box
And VLC isn't?
You may disagree (probably because you're not used to it, took me a while to get to like it too), but that doesn't make it a "horrible" interface.
Any interface in which Command-Q doesn't quit the application is a horrible interface. You're not going to talk me out of that one, regardless of how similar the keyboard shortcuts are between platforms. Command-Q quits every other application ported from Windows or Linux.
My main gripe with VLC right now is that if you set the DVD Autorun to start VLC instead of DVD Player, VLC starts but it won't automatically start playing the DVD. Apple's DVD Player steals focus about 5 times during the process of inserting a DVD, and it's a real pain in the ass... I'd prefer to avoid it entirely if at all possible, but starting up the DVD in VLC every time is a pain in the ass too. Right now, going with the 'stealing focus' pain in the ass beats out the 'choosing File-Open Disk, Ok' pain in the ass.
Of course, if Apple would fix their goddamned software, none of this would be an issue. A software program that steals focus and hasn't been fixed during the ENTIRE HISTORY OF OS X? What happened to your QA department, Apple? They all on sabbatical or something?
Are you joking?
The GUI to mplayer on OS X is SO BAD it took me over a half hour to figure out how to quit the program. You click the movie window to bring it to the front, hit Command-Q, nothing happens. That's weird. You scrub the menus. No Quit option. Hmm. Let's try making the window bigger... Command-0, nothing. Command-1, nothing. (In pretty much every media player, Command-1 is half-size, Command-2 is normal-size, Command-3 is double-size, and Command-0 is full-screen. VLC is a bit different, but not so much that it's too confusing.)
Of course since I don't keep my Dock open all the time, little did I know that mplayer isn't ONE program, it's TWO programs... and the program that actually plays the movie doesn't quit. At all. It can't quit. But if you quit the *other* program, then it automatically goes away. I guess the "designer" of the GUI didn't know you could hide the Dock. Of course, even if he didn't, there's no excuse for putting two icons on it, one of which doesn't (for all practical purposes) work when you could use one in the first place.
Whoever "designed" this interface obviously had never used a Mac before or, possibly, even a GUI before. It's terrible. It's horrible. It violates almost every rule of good GUI design, and, as a result, it's a pain in the ass to use. I'm sorry. It's an F in my book.
VLC might not have all the codecs or whatever, that mplayer has, but you know what? It has a GUI that wasn't designed by an alien from the planet Weebo who's never seen a computer before, so it gets my download every time.
Oh, of course. How silly of me to doubt a doctor would be the perfect person to outline all of our BIOS settings. For a minute there I was thinking a engineer would be a better choice.
Uh, the entire point of Xbox Live Arcade is to allow indie games to be played on the Xbox 360. I don't know how they expect people to write these, perhaps they plan to just sell dev kits for cheap, but it's not like Microsoft is dead-set against indie games right now.
Online, CDBaby [cdbaby.com] nearly outsells Amazon.com, yet it's nowhere to be seen in this chart.
Uh. Do you have any particular reason that I should believe you more than this chart?
Not to mention that iTunes *constantly* bothers you to back up, and makes back ups brain-dead simple. (You can just set the CD burning to "music files", hit select all, and hit burn. It'll fill each CD/DVD with as many tracks as fit and ask for the next one in turn. Or, even easier, just copy your ~/music/itunes directory onto an external HD or DVD.
They should play OG Tribes. Rock on.
(and the system actually being better capabiliy wise than either the Xbox of PS2)
Wha-huh? More capability than the Xbox? Or PS2? It can't even play DVDs.
Like... ?
Oh, well, with such a mature and intelligent correction to your original post, how could I possibly doubt you? I'm sure anybody who uses the phrase "lick my hairy nut sac" is an expert on console marketing, so I'll just concede this one to you.
This has really flopped into a yawner for a lot of folks. Launch titles that can be counted on one hand,
What kind of freaky-ass mutant hand do you have?
Add to this the MASSIVE problems, not small scale as MS is stating,
It's only "massive" because everybody with a defective one is posting it to their blog and every messageboard they can think of. Now I'm not saying that all the consoles are in tip-top shape, but you have to realize that any new product is likely to have a failure rate from 2-5%. The only difference with the Xbox 360 is that there's so much more communication via the internet than there have been in previous years, and so you hear about it more.
The average return rate right now of defective units from EB is almost 30% and in some stores nearing 50%... that isn't small scale problems. At a Gamestop near my house they have 7 defective units back right now.
Citation? Article? Reference? Or are these numbers coming right out of your ass?
The funny thing is that no one is touching upon the fact that the Japanese could care even less about the 360... that's a nail in the coffin right there.
1) It's not even released in Japan, how could you possibly know how they will react to it?
2) Why is this a nail in the coffin? Sure Japan has a lot of game consumers. So does Europe. Why does everybody assume that Japan has to be into a game system for it to be successful? The Atari 2600 was pretty successful, and I'm not sure that was even released in Japan. If anything, I'm glad Microsoft has broken the Japanese chokehold on the entire industry... finally I can buy an American console from an American company with primarily American-developed games. You might not care about that, but I do.
Also the average Joe is staying away like the plague now with all the coverage of problems.
Source? Or is this just more ass-pulling?
If the average Joe is staying away for any reason, it's that you literally cannot buy one for less than $1200 right now.
Next time you write a Slashdot post, you might want to consider putting some facts in it. Or at least labelling your suppositions as such.
And wait until the PS3 get closer. It'll have at least as many Slashdot articles, and probably more because I think more Slashdot users are PS2 fans than Xbox fans. It's just pointless griping.
I don't even know what a FTI is. Or how you "FTI" something. And Lotus Notes' "Help" file, a huge WTF by itself, has no entry for it. But I no longer care anyway; I figured out how to just forward everything to Gmail which actually works.