Anybody who brings up Microsoft Bob in a Linux vs. Windows discussion not only instantly ends the discussion, but loses whatever their point of view is. Blakey Rat's Law.
Holy shit, you just complained that a product that was on the market for maybe a year and a half a *decade* ago, and intended for children and neophytes on a single-user machine, has bad security because it doesn't enforce passwords strictly? Are you serious?
Are you so divorced from common everyday experience that you: 1) Are still obsessed over Microsoft Bob a decade after it failed and everybody else has forgotten it? 2) Think enough other people are still obsessed over Microsoft Bob that using it in an argument would support your point? 3) That a security hole in Microsoft Bob is even a valid argument?
The saddest part is that I agree with your basic argument. Security on computers, until about Windows 2000, was completely crappy across the board. It wasn't until the 21st century that people really started looking at it and figuring out ways to improve it... and I think that people are still looking in the wrong direction. (We know how to secure computers, more or less, let's work on social engineering.)
Oh well, at least people like you keep Slashdot interesting... but, man, get a grip on reality and hang on for dear life.
They have copy protection because Wal-Mart, GameStop, etc require copy protection before they sell the games as a way to reduce returns (which they can't take anyway.) Sometimes the publisher requires it, but usually it's the retailers. The developers typically would rather not have copy protection if they had a choice, but they don't.
Amazon, at least for people in Washington State, usually ships with plain ol' US Mail. This is great for me because it means that I can recieve packages during the day when I'm at work and not able to sign-- US Mail doesn't require a signature and I've instructed my postal carrier on where to leave it.
Then one day I bought a video game from Amazon. I didn't realize it at the time, but I wasn't buying *from* Amazon, I was buying from J&B Computer Crap or some company like that I've never ever heard of before. Amazon did not provide sufficient warning that I wasn't buying a product from them. And when J&B shipped it, they shipped it FedEx. Great!
So I come home and instead of my game, there's a damned Post-It on my door that says that the game requires a signature. I can't sign for it, because I'm at work when it gets delivered, so I have to drive to the local FedEx office, about 25 miles away, wait in their crappy-ass waiting room for a half-hour until the truck on my route comes back, then finally sign and get my package. What a huge waste of my time!
I wrote Amazon a really angry letter after that. They seem to do a better job now of telling you when you're ordering from a company other than Amazon, but screw that... if I'm at Amazon.com, the product I buy should come from Amazon.com. And if they allow other companies, they should at LEAST make sure that the other companies use the same type of shipping. There wasn't (and still isn't, as far as I know) any warning whatsoever that the shipping was going to be from FedEx and not US Mail.
Amazon, when making this business decision, utterly ignored the fact that some people (myself, at least) choose who they order from by what type of shipping they use. If they use US Mail shipping, I'll order... if not, I'll just get in my car and drive somewhere because it's quicker than waiting to sign for FedEx or UPS. I hope they get rid of those non-Amazon stores and just sell their own products again.
... but they've already made Homeworld. And an expansion. And Homeworld 2.
The FPS zero-g capture the flag game would be an interesting idea, but a pain in the rear-end to develop controls for. You'd have to do it from a third person perspective, so that the player can see how far his legs are from the wall, and then you'd have to let the camera pass through walls transparently but still give a good look at where the wall is. (Bloodrayne 2 does that rather gracefully, actually.) I guess it wouldn't be too difficult... but it just seems like the implementation would be harder than a world with gravity, and you wouldn't be able to make it first-person.
You should look into the MUD world. There are tons of MUDs that cater more to RP than to combat. Try Eternal Struggle, Armageddeon, Shadow Siege for instance... or see www.mudconnector.com and find your own.
Try MUDs. There are tons of MUDs out there that don't require a huge time investment, have mature codebases, and are based around social interaction. Look into Eternal Struggle, Armageddeon, Shadow Siege... there are many others, as well.
I really enjoyed Ender's Game series, and so I looked up some others of his. His Wyrms was a terrible, terrible fantasy-sci-fi novel, and his Redemption of Christopher Columbus was a terrible time travel novel. After those two, I gave up.
I was also annoyed by the Ender's Game series. He has this habit of coming up with great sci-fi ideas, then ignoring them so he can talk about fundamentalist Catholics and long-winded funerals, as if I cared. Let's talk about the alien species that terraforms planets by shooting DNA at them. Let's talk about the ansible technology that enables FTL communication, if not travel. And what technology, exactly, did they use to accelerate their spacecraft to near light speed? He comments that it can be done, but doesn't say how it's done.
I also hate how his main characters always tend to be supergeniuses with no character flaws, or AI constructs with (what amounts to) superpowers and other stuff like that.
$400 is pretty much just normal inflation price increases. Almost every other new console for years and years has come out for $300. Since the industry waits for 'even hundreds' before they'll change the price point, I think $400 is quite reasonable... at least the $400 you pay for your XBox 2 today is worth the $300 you paid for your Playstation in 1996, right?
I would say a safe bet, but I bet it's at least 50/50 odds for it.
The current plan Microsoft has, I think, will be to release one XBox 2 Home (or whatever) with no HD and no backwards compatibility, and one XBox 2 Pro (or whatever) for more money (hopefully this is the $400 one) that will have both a HD and backwards compatibility.
But they've been very hush-hush about the whole affair. Who knows?
Re:Great just what the gaming industry needs
on
Xbox 2 for $400?
·
· Score: 1
Then you should know the default reply by now:
If you don't like it, don't buy it.
That said, the price of games is actually going up slower than I would expect, given inflation and that many NES games were $60 at release. Look at current PC games... Warcraft III was $60, Doom III was $55 at launch, and yet those are the exceptions. Tons of killer games that launched at $40... Unreal 2004 was better than both of those, and launched at $40. $40 PC games are actually quite a bit cheaper than when I started getting into PC gaming and $50 was the standard.
That said, console games are more expensive than PC games generally, but they still are staying relatively cheap given inflation. In any case, I'm sure at $400, the Xbox 2 will still sell like hotcakes, and those $60 games will sell at least as well as Warcraft III and Doom III... do you have any friends who held off buying Warcraft III because of the price?
In Windows 2000 and Windows XP (and Server 2003), anything you can configure with the GUI you can also configure with the command line. (Given, in previous versions that was not true.) Just because you don't know how to do it does not mean it can't be done... Microsoft made a great effort to implement that in Windows 2000.
It's hard enough to convince corporations to buy RB considering the game-related built-in classes they refuse to hide/remove. Imagine trying to convince them to use a piece of software with such juvenile jokes in it.
Use RealBasic. Programs developed with RealBasic are just one single application file, no.dll or.shlibs or.whatever required. And it's been around for years, and it's already at version 5.5, and their website doesn't have juvenile 'burning Windows logo' images on it.
Insightful? What insight am I supposed to glean from this post, that the poster really hates marketing people? I don't get what the moderator is trying to tell me...
OpenOffice.org sucks ass on OS X. That would be a bad idea. I can just imagine the computer buying public sitting around going, "THIS piece of shit software is from Apple? What happened to them?"
100% agree. The grandparent also has to remember that for every neighborhood where the crime rate increased, there has also been a neighborhood where it's gone way down. The *average* is that the crime rate has been going down for some time, which means that the grandparent's neighborhood is a minority, not a majority.
You constantly read these posts on Slashdot... oh, video games were better when Pac-Man was state-of-the-art. Oh, computers were better back when there was no GUI and people had to be smart to use them. All the time.
Coupled with the insane amounts of paranoia on this site (like the big deal about RFID tags which are actually no worse than barcodes we already have), it means that the readers have a very fractured sense of reality.
So please, make sure you're thinking clearly before you post, and not just spouting nostalgia or paranoia. It'll make Slashdot a better place.
Complaining about Microsoft because of Bob is like complaining about Apple because of the Apple III. It happened ages ago, the product failed, and everybody except Slashdotters hasn't been obsessing over it for the last 20 years. Get over it already.
Tip: It's stupid to buy PC parts online because of the high rate of failure. Find a nice local PC parts store and become a customer... that way when you have a defective part, it's easy to return and they might even be nice enough to test it for you. PCClub is great if you live near one.
"is the most painful and poorly-designed piece of software I've ever had the misfortune of having to deal with."
Has some warts, Christ. Until version 6, you couldn't have multiple Notes users on the same machine (and the installer still defaults to single-user-per-machine). You still can't run Notes as a normal user account, without adding permissions to some other directories. You need hundreds of megabytes of RAM to even get the email client started in a reasonable amount of time, and it memory-leaks probably another megabyte every ten minutes. Guh. Just talking about Lotus Notes makes me angry. Whoever invented that address book screen needs to be killed.
My favorite was the one where Intel basically claimed that the Pentium IV processor would make your photos look better. They also had one that basically claimed that it would make the Internet faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I'm going to create a new rule:
Anybody who brings up Microsoft Bob in a Linux vs. Windows discussion not only instantly ends the discussion, but loses whatever their point of view is. Blakey Rat's Law.
Holy shit, you just complained that a product that was on the market for maybe a year and a half a *decade* ago, and intended for children and neophytes on a single-user machine, has bad security because it doesn't enforce passwords strictly? Are you serious?
Are you so divorced from common everyday experience that you:
1) Are still obsessed over Microsoft Bob a decade after it failed and everybody else has forgotten it?
2) Think enough other people are still obsessed over Microsoft Bob that using it in an argument would support your point?
3) That a security hole in Microsoft Bob is even a valid argument?
The saddest part is that I agree with your basic argument. Security on computers, until about Windows 2000, was completely crappy across the board. It wasn't until the 21st century that people really started looking at it and figuring out ways to improve it... and I think that people are still looking in the wrong direction. (We know how to secure computers, more or less, let's work on social engineering.)
Oh well, at least people like you keep Slashdot interesting... but, man, get a grip on reality and hang on for dear life.
They have copy protection because Wal-Mart, GameStop, etc require copy protection before they sell the games as a way to reduce returns (which they can't take anyway.) Sometimes the publisher requires it, but usually it's the retailers. The developers typically would rather not have copy protection if they had a choice, but they don't.
I hate those third party stores.
Amazon, at least for people in Washington State, usually ships with plain ol' US Mail. This is great for me because it means that I can recieve packages during the day when I'm at work and not able to sign-- US Mail doesn't require a signature and I've instructed my postal carrier on where to leave it.
Then one day I bought a video game from Amazon. I didn't realize it at the time, but I wasn't buying *from* Amazon, I was buying from J&B Computer Crap or some company like that I've never ever heard of before. Amazon did not provide sufficient warning that I wasn't buying a product from them. And when J&B shipped it, they shipped it FedEx. Great!
So I come home and instead of my game, there's a damned Post-It on my door that says that the game requires a signature. I can't sign for it, because I'm at work when it gets delivered, so I have to drive to the local FedEx office, about 25 miles away, wait in their crappy-ass waiting room for a half-hour until the truck on my route comes back, then finally sign and get my package. What a huge waste of my time!
I wrote Amazon a really angry letter after that. They seem to do a better job now of telling you when you're ordering from a company other than Amazon, but screw that... if I'm at Amazon.com, the product I buy should come from Amazon.com. And if they allow other companies, they should at LEAST make sure that the other companies use the same type of shipping. There wasn't (and still isn't, as far as I know) any warning whatsoever that the shipping was going to be from FedEx and not US Mail.
Amazon, when making this business decision, utterly ignored the fact that some people (myself, at least) choose who they order from by what type of shipping they use. If they use US Mail shipping, I'll order... if not, I'll just get in my car and drive somewhere because it's quicker than waiting to sign for FedEx or UPS. I hope they get rid of those non-Amazon stores and just sell their own products again.
... but they've already made Homeworld. And an expansion. And Homeworld 2.
The FPS zero-g capture the flag game would be an interesting idea, but a pain in the rear-end to develop controls for. You'd have to do it from a third person perspective, so that the player can see how far his legs are from the wall, and then you'd have to let the camera pass through walls transparently but still give a good look at where the wall is. (Bloodrayne 2 does that rather gracefully, actually.) I guess it wouldn't be too difficult... but it just seems like the implementation would be harder than a world with gravity, and you wouldn't be able to make it first-person.
You should look into the MUD world. There are tons of MUDs that cater more to RP than to combat. Try Eternal Struggle, Armageddeon, Shadow Siege for instance... or see www.mudconnector.com and find your own.
Try MUDs. There are tons of MUDs out there that don't require a huge time investment, have mature codebases, and are based around social interaction. Look into Eternal Struggle, Armageddeon, Shadow Siege... there are many others, as well.
I really enjoyed Ender's Game series, and so I looked up some others of his. His Wyrms was a terrible, terrible fantasy-sci-fi novel, and his Redemption of Christopher Columbus was a terrible time travel novel. After those two, I gave up.
I was also annoyed by the Ender's Game series. He has this habit of coming up with great sci-fi ideas, then ignoring them so he can talk about fundamentalist Catholics and long-winded funerals, as if I cared. Let's talk about the alien species that terraforms planets by shooting DNA at them. Let's talk about the ansible technology that enables FTL communication, if not travel. And what technology, exactly, did they use to accelerate their spacecraft to near light speed? He comments that it can be done, but doesn't say how it's done.
I also hate how his main characters always tend to be supergeniuses with no character flaws, or AI constructs with (what amounts to) superpowers and other stuff like that.
$400 is pretty much just normal inflation price increases. Almost every other new console for years and years has come out for $300. Since the industry waits for 'even hundreds' before they'll change the price point, I think $400 is quite reasonable... at least the $400 you pay for your XBox 2 today is worth the $300 you paid for your Playstation in 1996, right?
I would say a safe bet, but I bet it's at least 50/50 odds for it.
The current plan Microsoft has, I think, will be to release one XBox 2 Home (or whatever) with no HD and no backwards compatibility, and one XBox 2 Pro (or whatever) for more money (hopefully this is the $400 one) that will have both a HD and backwards compatibility.
But they've been very hush-hush about the whole affair. Who knows?
Then you should know the default reply by now:
If you don't like it, don't buy it.
That said, the price of games is actually going up slower than I would expect, given inflation and that many NES games were $60 at release. Look at current PC games... Warcraft III was $60, Doom III was $55 at launch, and yet those are the exceptions. Tons of killer games that launched at $40... Unreal 2004 was better than both of those, and launched at $40. $40 PC games are actually quite a bit cheaper than when I started getting into PC gaming and $50 was the standard.
That said, console games are more expensive than PC games generally, but they still are staying relatively cheap given inflation. In any case, I'm sure at $400, the Xbox 2 will still sell like hotcakes, and those $60 games will sell at least as well as Warcraft III and Doom III... do you have any friends who held off buying Warcraft III because of the price?
I like how Fark jokes get reposted on Slashdot. No, wait... I think that's annoying.
And yet... what type of plane does not change the story at all whatsoever. Your correction misses the forest for the trees.
In Windows 2000 and Windows XP (and Server 2003), anything you can configure with the GUI you can also configure with the command line. (Given, in previous versions that was not true.) Just because you don't know how to do it does not mean it can't be done... Microsoft made a great effort to implement that in Windows 2000.
MacOS X, for the record, is the same way.
It's hard enough to convince corporations to buy RB considering the game-related built-in classes they refuse to hide/remove. Imagine trying to convince them to use a piece of software with such juvenile jokes in it.
Use RealBasic. Programs developed with RealBasic are just one single application file, no .dll or .shlibs or .whatever required. And it's been around for years, and it's already at version 5.5, and their website doesn't have juvenile 'burning Windows logo' images on it.
Insightful? What insight am I supposed to glean from this post, that the poster really hates marketing people? I don't get what the moderator is trying to tell me...
OpenOffice.org sucks ass on OS X. That would be a bad idea. I can just imagine the computer buying public sitting around going, "THIS piece of shit software is from Apple? What happened to them?"
Uh. How many of those games are from Commodore and not, say EA, Broderbund, Epyx, etc?
100% agree. The grandparent also has to remember that for every neighborhood where the crime rate increased, there has also been a neighborhood where it's gone way down. The *average* is that the crime rate has been going down for some time, which means that the grandparent's neighborhood is a minority, not a majority.
You constantly read these posts on Slashdot... oh, video games were better when Pac-Man was state-of-the-art. Oh, computers were better back when there was no GUI and people had to be smart to use them. All the time.
Coupled with the insane amounts of paranoia on this site (like the big deal about RFID tags which are actually no worse than barcodes we already have), it means that the readers have a very fractured sense of reality.
So please, make sure you're thinking clearly before you post, and not just spouting nostalgia or paranoia. It'll make Slashdot a better place.
Guess why we hate British people?
Got it yet?
That's right! That goddamned 'holier-than-thou' attitude. Fuck off.
Let's join the 21st century, ok?
Complaining about Microsoft because of Bob is like complaining about Apple because of the Apple III. It happened ages ago, the product failed, and everybody except Slashdotters hasn't been obsessing over it for the last 20 years. Get over it already.
Apple licensed the GUI technologies they used from Xerox. There was no stealing going on, not in the sense that Microsoft stole GUI elements.
Tip: It's stupid to buy PC parts online because of the high rate of failure. Find a nice local PC parts store and become a customer... that way when you have a defective part, it's easy to return and they might even be nice enough to test it for you. PCClub is great if you live near one.
"has some warts?"
How about:
"is the most painful and poorly-designed piece of software I've ever had the misfortune of having to deal with."
Has some warts, Christ. Until version 6, you couldn't have multiple Notes users on the same machine (and the installer still defaults to single-user-per-machine). You still can't run Notes as a normal user account, without adding permissions to some other directories. You need hundreds of megabytes of RAM to even get the email client started in a reasonable amount of time, and it memory-leaks probably another megabyte every ten minutes. Guh. Just talking about Lotus Notes makes me angry. Whoever invented that address book screen needs to be killed.
My favorite was the one where Intel basically claimed that the Pentium IV processor would make your photos look better. They also had one that basically claimed that it would make the Internet faster.