I hope you don't consider this a "flame", but have you USE an XBox with Live service?
I mean, say what you want about Microsoft, but there is NO console ANYWHERE that offers an online experience half as good as XBox Live. HALO might be the most high-profile game on the system, but it's certainly not the only one. There are dozens of good titles-- at least as many as the Gamecube.
No joke. It's bad enough that some Nintendo games require you to use Gameboys as $80 controllers instead of the $25 ones that come with the system.
Now you have to buy, what, 8 $250 DS handhelds PLUS a Nintendo Revolution system and a TV, and the TV isn't even USED for anything but spectator mode? Yikes.
The problem, or at least the thing that makes it different from everything else, is that in the world of gaming video cards, NOBODY has any customer loyalty. Gamer A doesn't care if ATI has always provided them a solid package if NVidia's new whiz-bang card is.04% faster at some benchmark that doesn't have anything to do with real gameplay.
I buy ATI because I like the company and because I didn't like how NVidia basically killed of 3DFX. Does that mean I sometimes get video cards that aren't as fast as I could be getting? Most likely. Does that.04% of FPS loss bother me? Not at all.
I live about 45 miles from Seattle, about 12 miles frmo Everett, Washington, and I get, with a HUGE antenna, 3 HD channels that cut-out frequently. And one of those is PBS which I never watch. I gave up, took down the antenna and just watch the 480i feed from Dish Network now.
I don't know where the hell you think "podunkville" is, but it must be like within 10 miles of Chicago or something.
BTW, pretty much all XBox games (excepting a few) output in 480p, and there are three at the moment (Enter the Matrix, Dragon's Lair, and Syberia) that output in 1080i. (Of course, Syberia is the only one that's any good, but eh.)
So if you're itching to use that setup for HD games you can do it already. A few Gamecube titles support 480p also, but I don't own one so I can't really speak for it.
In South Korea? Did they? I've seen stories about US record labels suing their 'customers,' and I've seen some stories about European and Canadian record companies suing their 'customers,' but I've never read anything about South Korean record companies doing the same.
Do you know something I don't?
I put customers up there in quotes because, although I know it's an unpopular viewpoint to take on/., I think the record companies are perfectly within their right to sue people who illegally distribute materials they don't have the right to distribute. Now, suing P2P software-- that was wrong-- but that's also been ruled illegal.
You could just use... BOTH computers. I have a Windows XP machine for games and a OS X machine for actual work.
I hate that term "switch." It's not like buying a Mac will suddenly cause the other computers in your house to stop working or anything. If you want one, get one, if not, don't... if you want a Mac and want to play games... well, you already have a PC that can play games, so just buy the Mac. Makes sense?
It might be a contraversal statement, but I think (and I'm ignoring the technology here-- pre-emptive, cooperative, virtual memory, whatever), I think honestly that MacOS 9 is easier to use than MacOS X. Most of this is because MacOS 9 had a truly spatial Finder, while OS X's Finder barely even bothers to pretend to be spatial. In addition, OS X removed the single most time-saving feature I used in OS 9-- tabbed folders! How Apple could actually *remove* a feature from the OS and not have an uprising is a mystery to me.
Ok, but what about other browsers that aren't Firefox but are mostly, or completely, compliant?
What about MacIE 5.x? What about Safari, or other KHTML browsers? What about Opera?
Maybe you'd be better off putting a "Best viewed in anything other than Windows IE. Mac IE is fine" label on the site. Or maybe, like everyone else is saying, you should just freakin' code to standards and not pollute your website with dumb slogans.
It's not IE vs. Firefox, you know. IE runs on two platforms, and the Mac version does very well, thank-you-very-much. Safari is the standard browser on OS X, and Opera has been compliant for longer than Firefox has even existed.
MacOS Classic used *only* CR with no linefeed at all, and to my knowledge the only program in Windows that uses CRLF is Notepad (for backwards-combatibility with DOS text files), meaning the splitup is more like:
Considering the newest versions of the platforms are Linux (LF), OS X (LF) and Windows (LF) it looks like we finally have some sort of standard going on. Woot.
It takes a lot of work to correctly mirror Slashdot, but not only do they seem to have been able to mirror Slashdot's terrible colorscheme, they went above and beyond to make it even MORE unreadable and annoying! Brilliant.
Not to mention Apple used voice synth in its first demo of the Macintosh in 1983, and it's been a standard piece of equipment in MacOS since System 7 I believe. (What was that, 1991? The only reason it wasn't in earlier versions was because of disk space restrictions... 7 was the first version to really require a HD.)
Microsoft is just a teeny bit behind the ball here. Hell, in 1999 I was having AOL Instant Messenger speak my messages out loud for me, and I still can't do it in the Windows version. (Or, for that matter, in Apple's iChat.)
I just timed my machine. It's not a powerhouse, just a standard issue Work machine.
Microsoft Word XP: 9 seconds.
OpenOffice.org 1.1.1: 24 seconds. It took 9 seconds just to see the splash screen. (However, I don't keep the 'quicklaunch' systemtray application running, so with that it might be a bit faster.)
The difference is that Fable is a Peter Molyneux game. He's famous for promising features and not delivering (look at Dungeon Keeper I or Black and White). Bungie always delivers exactly what's expected of them. (Not as good as the Unreal team, which always delivers MORE than what's expected, but a hell of a lot better than Molyneux.)
Ever played Marathon? Bungie invented MOST of the conventions of the FPS genre back in 1995. Hell, Marathon even had real-time VOICE CHAT in networked games!
It's not "just another FPS" it's like if Lord British said they were making another Ultima, or if Blizzard was working on a brand new RTS. Even if the genre and theme is repetitive, it's going to be great and you know it. It's Bungie, it has to be!
The difference is that in Doom 3 you get attacked by zombies that look like aliens because "they're evil" with no other story or reason given.
In Marathon, you're being attacked by a race of slavers attempting to enslave your colony ship built inside a hollowed-out asteroid while one of the ship's built-in AIs has gone insane (more or less) and is using the teleporters to jot you from place to place to do his bidding. You're stuck in the middle... the aliens are a threat but then again, so is the Marathon rogue AI (Durandel) seeing as he wants to survive until the end of time where he can basically shield himself from the Big Crunch and become a God in the next universe that forms. Your job is to save as many colonists as possible while staying alive yourself.
Doom 3 has missions where you run around and kill aliens. Marathon has missions where you have to rescue colonists, or where you have to activate a specific machine or device on the ship, or where you're teleported to the alien ship and have to scout out its layout and their weapons. Hell, the game doesn't even really end all that well... it's not a happy cheerful "look the colonists are all ok" ending, it's more of a Empire Strikes Back bittersweet ending.
You're talking Apples and Oranges here. The Marathon universe, where HALO and HALO 2 take place, is a real breathing science fiction world where all the races and characters have actual motivations for what they do.
id demonstrated with Doom, Doom II and Doom III that they can build a graphics engine and populate it with monsters. Bungie demonstrated that they can create a living, breathing world and an intense story, plop you down in the middle of it, and marvel at what transpires.
It's not the point of view that upsets me, it's the "I, for one" meme. You missed the point of my rant, I'm afraid... I could not care less whether you or your friends like or dislike OS X, but when you say "I, for one" you sound like a jerk, and it's becoming more and more common on messageboards like this one.
It doesn't on MacOS... I've never used Photoshop on Windows. But of course this entire discussion is kind of worthless until we know which version of Photoshop and which platform we're talking about.
I own an old copy of Photoshop 5.5 for my Macintosh. I don't want to pay for an upgrade, but I'd gladly try GIMP if I didn't have to run X-Windows to use it. Non-native ports suck ass, especially on MacOS.
I use thousands of copper cents. Works better than the red ones because you don't have to answer questions about their odd color, but it seems to really piss off the clerks at Fry's.
Hah, no doubt! The vast majority of Linux users I've met and seen are Linux users because they're cheapskates.
Of course there are the "all information must be free!" people who refuse to use commercial software, but the vast majority of people who use Linux use it because it's cheap as hell. "I don't need to buy a DVD player, I can use deCSS and a free video player instead! Hey, let's mod my XBox to run Linux, then I can rent games from Blockbuster, copy them to the harddrive, and play them forever! Look how easy it is to pirate Windows programs using my pirated Crossover Office copy!"
Those types outnumber the "information must be free" types by at least 2:1 and probably closer to 4:1. Hate to say it, grandparent, but you're in the minority.
Ok, this "I, for one" crap is starting to piss me off. Just say, "I do not quite like the interface..." See? It's easy, you save words, and you don't hint pretentiously that you may be speaking for dozens of other people instead of just yourself.
I didn't notice this when posting the questions, but isn't the one about copyright a little misleading?
Under current law it is illegal to watch CSS encoded DVDs under Linux or any other Open Source operating system.
To be fair, any Linux software developer has as much ability as a software developer for Windows or OS X to license the CSS decoder and write a DVD viewing application for Linux. The difference between Linux and Windows and OS X is that no company has stepped-up to do so.
I mean, people using Linux get so upset over this issue all the time... so how come not a SINGLE person or company to date has just licensed the technology and make the damned DVD player? It can't be THAT hard, could it?
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you don't consider this a "flame", but have you USE an XBox with Live service?
I mean, say what you want about Microsoft, but there is NO console ANYWHERE that offers an online experience half as good as XBox Live. HALO might be the most high-profile game on the system, but it's certainly not the only one. There are dozens of good titles-- at least as many as the Gamecube.
No joke. It's bad enough that some Nintendo games require you to use Gameboys as $80 controllers instead of the $25 ones that come with the system.
Now you have to buy, what, 8 $250 DS handhelds PLUS a Nintendo Revolution system and a TV, and the TV isn't even USED for anything but spectator mode? Yikes.
The problem, or at least the thing that makes it different from everything else, is that in the world of gaming video cards, NOBODY has any customer loyalty. Gamer A doesn't care if ATI has always provided them a solid package if NVidia's new whiz-bang card is .04% faster at some benchmark that doesn't have anything to do with real gameplay.
.04% of FPS loss bother me? Not at all.
I buy ATI because I like the company and because I didn't like how NVidia basically killed of 3DFX. Does that mean I sometimes get video cards that aren't as fast as I could be getting? Most likely. Does that
The whole industry needs to get a grip.
Where the hell is your Podunkville?
I live about 45 miles from Seattle, about 12 miles frmo Everett, Washington, and I get, with a HUGE antenna, 3 HD channels that cut-out frequently. And one of those is PBS which I never watch. I gave up, took down the antenna and just watch the 480i feed from Dish Network now.
I don't know where the hell you think "podunkville" is, but it must be like within 10 miles of Chicago or something.
BTW, pretty much all XBox games (excepting a few) output in 480p, and there are three at the moment (Enter the Matrix, Dragon's Lair, and Syberia) that output in 1080i. (Of course, Syberia is the only one that's any good, but eh.)
So if you're itching to use that setup for HD games you can do it already. A few Gamecube titles support 480p also, but I don't own one so I can't really speak for it.
None of them have a "witty" one, although sometimes there are noble efforts.
In South Korea? Did they? I've seen stories about US record labels suing their 'customers,' and I've seen some stories about European and Canadian record companies suing their 'customers,' but I've never read anything about South Korean record companies doing the same.
/., I think the record companies are perfectly within their right to sue people who illegally distribute materials they don't have the right to distribute. Now, suing P2P software-- that was wrong-- but that's also been ruled illegal.
Do you know something I don't?
I put customers up there in quotes because, although I know it's an unpopular viewpoint to take on
You could just use ... BOTH computers. I have a Windows XP machine for games and a OS X machine for actual work.
I hate that term "switch." It's not like buying a Mac will suddenly cause the other computers in your house to stop working or anything. If you want one, get one, if not, don't... if you want a Mac and want to play games... well, you already have a PC that can play games, so just buy the Mac. Makes sense?
It might be a contraversal statement, but I think (and I'm ignoring the technology here-- pre-emptive, cooperative, virtual memory, whatever), I think honestly that MacOS 9 is easier to use than MacOS X. Most of this is because MacOS 9 had a truly spatial Finder, while OS X's Finder barely even bothers to pretend to be spatial. In addition, OS X removed the single most time-saving feature I used in OS 9-- tabbed folders! How Apple could actually *remove* a feature from the OS and not have an uprising is a mystery to me.
Ok, but what about other browsers that aren't Firefox but are mostly, or completely, compliant?
What about MacIE 5.x? What about Safari, or other KHTML browsers? What about Opera?
Maybe you'd be better off putting a "Best viewed in anything other than Windows IE. Mac IE is fine" label on the site. Or maybe, like everyone else is saying, you should just freakin' code to standards and not pollute your website with dumb slogans.
It's not IE vs. Firefox, you know. IE runs on two platforms, and the Mac version does very well, thank-you-very-much. Safari is the standard browser on OS X, and Opera has been compliant for longer than Firefox has even existed.
MacOS Classic used *only* CR with no linefeed at all, and to my knowledge the only program in Windows that uses CRLF is Notepad (for backwards-combatibility with DOS text files), meaning the splitup is more like:
*nix: LF
DOS: CRLF
MacOS Classic: CR
Windows (except Notepad): LF
MacOS X: LF
Considering the newest versions of the platforms are Linux (LF), OS X (LF) and Windows (LF) it looks like we finally have some sort of standard going on. Woot.
Moderated as "Interesting?" How is that "Interesting?" Man, if there was an option for it, I'd moderate it as "inane."
No joke...
It takes a lot of work to correctly mirror Slashdot, but not only do they seem to have been able to mirror Slashdot's terrible colorscheme, they went above and beyond to make it even MORE unreadable and annoying! Brilliant.
Not to mention Apple used voice synth in its first demo of the Macintosh in 1983, and it's been a standard piece of equipment in MacOS since System 7 I believe. (What was that, 1991? The only reason it wasn't in earlier versions was because of disk space restrictions... 7 was the first version to really require a HD.)
Microsoft is just a teeny bit behind the ball here. Hell, in 1999 I was having AOL Instant Messenger speak my messages out loud for me, and I still can't do it in the Windows version. (Or, for that matter, in Apple's iChat.)
I just timed my machine. It's not a powerhouse, just a standard issue Work machine.
Microsoft Word XP: 9 seconds.
OpenOffice.org 1.1.1: 24 seconds. It took 9 seconds just to see the splash screen. (However, I don't keep the 'quicklaunch' systemtray application running, so with that it might be a bit faster.)
That's an eternity in computer-use-time.
The difference is that Fable is a Peter Molyneux game. He's famous for promising features and not delivering (look at Dungeon Keeper I or Black and White). Bungie always delivers exactly what's expected of them. (Not as good as the Unreal team, which always delivers MORE than what's expected, but a hell of a lot better than Molyneux.)
Ever played Marathon? Bungie invented MOST of the conventions of the FPS genre back in 1995. Hell, Marathon even had real-time VOICE CHAT in networked games!
It's not "just another FPS" it's like if Lord British said they were making another Ultima, or if Blizzard was working on a brand new RTS. Even if the genre and theme is repetitive, it's going to be great and you know it. It's Bungie, it has to be!
Fable was a huge dissapointment for me. I was waiting for it since last christmas, and was sick of it in a week. No where near as epic as I expected.
So... it's like every other Peter Molyneux game ever made... good to know.
The difference is that in Doom 3 you get attacked by zombies that look like aliens because "they're evil" with no other story or reason given.
In Marathon, you're being attacked by a race of slavers attempting to enslave your colony ship built inside a hollowed-out asteroid while one of the ship's built-in AIs has gone insane (more or less) and is using the teleporters to jot you from place to place to do his bidding. You're stuck in the middle... the aliens are a threat but then again, so is the Marathon rogue AI (Durandel) seeing as he wants to survive until the end of time where he can basically shield himself from the Big Crunch and become a God in the next universe that forms. Your job is to save as many colonists as possible while staying alive yourself.
Doom 3 has missions where you run around and kill aliens. Marathon has missions where you have to rescue colonists, or where you have to activate a specific machine or device on the ship, or where you're teleported to the alien ship and have to scout out its layout and their weapons. Hell, the game doesn't even really end all that well... it's not a happy cheerful "look the colonists are all ok" ending, it's more of a Empire Strikes Back bittersweet ending.
You're talking Apples and Oranges here. The Marathon universe, where HALO and HALO 2 take place, is a real breathing science fiction world where all the races and characters have actual motivations for what they do.
id demonstrated with Doom, Doom II and Doom III that they can build a graphics engine and populate it with monsters. Bungie demonstrated that they can create a living, breathing world and an intense story, plop you down in the middle of it, and marvel at what transpires.
It's not the point of view that upsets me, it's the "I, for one" meme. You missed the point of my rant, I'm afraid... I could not care less whether you or your friends like or dislike OS X, but when you say "I, for one" you sound like a jerk, and it's becoming more and more common on messageboards like this one.
It doesn't on MacOS... I've never used Photoshop on Windows. But of course this entire discussion is kind of worthless until we know which version of Photoshop and which platform we're talking about.
I own an old copy of Photoshop 5.5 for my Macintosh. I don't want to pay for an upgrade, but I'd gladly try GIMP if I didn't have to run X-Windows to use it. Non-native ports suck ass, especially on MacOS.
I use thousands of copper cents. Works better than the red ones because you don't have to answer questions about their odd color, but it seems to really piss off the clerks at Fry's.
Hah, no doubt! The vast majority of Linux users I've met and seen are Linux users because they're cheapskates.
Of course there are the "all information must be free!" people who refuse to use commercial software, but the vast majority of people who use Linux use it because it's cheap as hell. "I don't need to buy a DVD player, I can use deCSS and a free video player instead! Hey, let's mod my XBox to run Linux, then I can rent games from Blockbuster, copy them to the harddrive, and play them forever! Look how easy it is to pirate Windows programs using my pirated Crossover Office copy!"
Those types outnumber the "information must be free" types by at least 2:1 and probably closer to 4:1. Hate to say it, grandparent, but you're in the minority.
Ok, this "I, for one" crap is starting to piss me off. Just say, "I do not quite like the interface..." See? It's easy, you save words, and you don't hint pretentiously that you may be speaking for dozens of other people instead of just yourself.
Worst meme ever.
I didn't notice this when posting the questions, but isn't the one about copyright a little misleading?
Under current law it is illegal to watch CSS encoded DVDs under Linux or any other Open Source operating system.
To be fair, any Linux software developer has as much ability as a software developer for Windows or OS X to license the CSS decoder and write a DVD viewing application for Linux. The difference between Linux and Windows and OS X is that no company has stepped-up to do so.
I mean, people using Linux get so upset over this issue all the time... so how come not a SINGLE person or company to date has just licensed the technology and make the damned DVD player? It can't be THAT hard, could it?