1) Contrary to popular (on this site, at least) belief, the command prompt in Windows 2000 and XP is just as powerful and scriptable as Bash. (Remember, batch files still work just fine and Microsoft adds new commands to it every revision.)
2) MacOS is highly scriptable without leaving the GUI using AppleScript. AppleScript can 'record' the actions taken by applications like a macro and produce a script automatically. (Of course, you can also write a script manually, or edit a recorded script to make it more useful.) Given, AppleScript *is* slow, but it works.
Other than being slow, I would argue that AppleScript is as good as a Unix scripting language. It's powerful enough to do all the repetitive file-related tasks you need, has the ability to talk to applications and even the greenest user can hit 'record' and make a simple script with it.
One of the problems here is that everyone things "Windows = GUI" and "Unix = CLI." There are better GUIs than Windows, and better CLIs than Unix out there.
Guess what? Silicon Valley is on the west coast, also, and Apple's located in Cupertino. Oh, and look, the Seattle has Amazon.com (Linux users), Boeing (Unix users), and Nintendo (God knows, but not Microsoft) located here.
Believe me, I live close to Redmond and to say that people in the Seattle area bootlick Microsoft just proves that you've never spent a lot of time in this area. Is Microsoft a large chunk of the economy? Compared to Boeing and Georgia Pacific, they're nothing.
Syberia and Drake: something something both came out for XBox recently. Both also have PC ports. In addition, Beyond Good and Evil seems to be more similar to an adventure game than a platformer to me. Of course, "The Longest Journey" is probably one of the best adventure games ever, and it came out in... what? 1998? 1999? Myst III and Uru: Age of Myst are still on store shelves, as is the Myst Collection which contains all the games.
They're out there. If you want to see more, *buy them* and give the companies that put them out some encouragement.
These British people show up on every damned thread about voting about how 'strange' and 'odd' our process is.
This is a message board based in the US which talks about US issues. I'm sure you can find one in the UK that has all kinds of things the UK is terrible at (but the US does well) which I can then visit and make posts like:
"As an American, this is very odd to me. What's wrong with doing it this way?"
If nothing else, Moderators, these posts are "redundant!" You've read it a dozen times before in every thread about elections.
The Korean War was declared a war by Congress... that's why it's the "Korean War" and "Vietnam Conflict"... war is declared, conflicts aren't.
The first Iraq war was (not 100% sure) declared by Congress. I remember hearing the announcement of it at school, but my memory might not be exact. In any case, we call it the "Gulf War" so if we go by the same semantic argument they do with Korea, there you go.
Uh. Timed "jumping puzzles" is pretty much all Prince of Persia is... not just the new one, but both the older games as well. (Ignoring that terrible PoP 3D.) I had the exact opposite opinion: Screw the swordfights, I want to solve another "jumping puzzle." The swordfights were boring in my opinion.
3) Reveal Codes. I've heard MS Word is trying to implement this feature, but WordPerfect's had it forever, and it's sensational. Have you ever used a WYSIWYG wordprocessor, and all of a sudden wondered why your text at a certain point has the formatting go to hell? And the only way to fix things is to delete a chunk of your text?
Uh. Microsoft Word has had this since at least version 97 and probably in 95 or earlier... just click the button in the toolbar that looks like the paragraph symbol and it'll 'show invisibles' as Word calls it.
Yeah, my point is that this is exactly Microsoft's problem... they need a dirt-cheap device that can hold 4 gigs or so for less than the cost of a HD. A device like this doesn't exist now, and likely won't exist when the XBox 2 actually comes out, so it's probable that they'll just put in the same drive they put in the XBox now, or one only slightly improved.
I really don't give a crap whether the console is 'hackable' or not, I just use it to play games. That's a complete non-issue for me and, I think, the vast majority of XBox owners.
Gameboy did well, Atari 7800 sunk, Playstation 2 did well. Seems to me the odds are good for backwards compatibility. Also, the main reason the 7800 sunk (IMO) is that Atari sat on the hardware for 2-3 years and let Nintendo get a toehold before releasing it... the 7800 hardware is as good as the NES', if not slightly better.
RAM is volatile. Where do the Morrowind saves go when you turn off the console? Do you have to re-download the MechAssault maps from Live every time you reload the game?
RAMDisk is a solution for backwards compatibility *only* for those games that didn't take advantage of the drive in the first place. Which are mostly ports from other consoles. Games like Morrowind, Knights of the Old Republic, upcoming games like Sudeki and Fable, will all be useless with no drive.
Nah, I didn't chip mine because I love XBox Live. Plus, I have no reason to... anything a chipped XBox can do I can just do with my PC or my Dish Network PVR box.
You also have to remember that Slashdot is a very small minority in the console market. I would bet 95-97% of the XBoxes out there are running on the original, non-chipped, hardware.
Your friends must be exceedingly geeky if they all own XBoxes and no games, but modded it for a bigger drive. (Or was that just so they could store pirated games on the drive itself?)
Me and two of my friends, on the other hand, use the drive for XBox Live content downloads, shuttling save games back and forth, ripping music tracks and playing them during SegaGT, etc. The exact purposes Microsoft put it in there for. We buy games for the XBox, because we don't *need* cheap servers or do-it-yourself PVRs or whatever your friends are doing with theirs.
I would assume that the vast, vast majority of XBox owners haven't modded their machine or, if they have, had modded it only so they could play pirated games (which can still use the drive for the purposes listed above.)
I think the problem Microsoft has is that the 8 gig drive inside the XBox is great... but it's actually about 4 gigs bigger than 99% of their users need. (All of my friends and I, even with many CDs ripped, tons of saved games, and pretty much every free content download on Live downloaded, still see "50,000+ blocks free" when saving anything.) What they really need is a drive that provides about half the storage for about half (or less) the price... I can completely see the argument that the drive is too expensive. Flash isn't going to work... I would guess that this deal is just to make memory cards for the machine, not to make some kind of internal flash storage device. I would also bet that if Microsoft doesn't find their cheaply small HD, they'll default to putting in another 10 gig or 20 gig drive.
The problem is that because Marathon I came out for Macintosh only (and Marathon II had a crappy version for Win95 that no one's heard of), it's generally ignored by the gaming press.
Yes, Marathon did everything Half-Life did, but better, and years earlier. But because none of the reviewers, judges, etc. owned Macintosh computers at the time it came out, it gets snubbed by the press. What's odd/stupid, though, is that Gamespy will write stories for years about all the great games that came out for Saturn or MegaDrive (or some other gaming system that no one bought) about how great they were, but they completely ignore games like Marathon which *anyone* can *easily* emulate and play on any modern PC or Macintosh.
There are other excellent games in the same position, like Mission: Thunderbolt.
There's a very good, and extremely clever, reason.
The MPAA owns the trademarks on PG, G, R, etc. To maintain those trademarks, they are legally obligated to *enforce* them, that is, take legal action against any other company that would use the same trademarks.
Why does the MPAA maintain these trademarks? Because otherwise, there would be nothing, legally, to stop a movie like Scary Movie from putting a huge "rated G" on the movie posted without *any* endorsement from the MPAA. If they try, the MPAA could sue them for trademark violation.
Some years back, I believe Marvel Comics tried to make use of the MPAA's rating system, and were sued by the MPAA for this very reason.
Is this post traveling through a time warp from like 2 years ago?
Look, here's the deal:
Firstly: XBox, while it does not have a LOT of RPGs, has very GOOD ones. Morrowind and Knights of the Old Republic, for instance. (Morrowind was a launch title, so I don't know how your friends said there was no good RPG on XBox if they hadn't even bothered to pick up about the only RPG that was even available at all.)
Secondly: The large controllers are not only not sold *with* the machine anymore, they're actually not even *made* anymore. Why gripe about a controller that basically no longer exists? The controller-S was available about, what, a month after launch, and since then Microsoft has basically pretended the larger controller never existed.
Thirdly: If you don't own an XBox, why are you even posting? Man, if I posted on every topic that 'my buddy said that...' or 'I heard in a cafe that...', I'd have a million posts by now. Post what you know. If you don't know, say nothing.
This post is off-topic. The poster ADMITS it's off-topic. And it's +4 Interesting?
Holy crap, Slashdot, what the hell is wrong with you? I guess all you have to do to earn karma is post glowing GameCube reviews in a topic about SCO and watch them get moderated up the wazzoo.
I have the Atari stick in my house, and I agree the emulation isn't perfect, but the sound and speed of it are pretty exact to the Atari's. (And yes, I also have an Atari 2600 sitting right next to it. I can put the same game in both and compare.)
The problem is that some of the programs were edited before they were inserted into the emulator. The most mutilated is Adventure, which suffered numerous color changes (one of the dragons is a different color from the original), and the famous 'first easter-egg ever' is completely wrong. (The 'invisible' pixel is quite visible on the screen, and the message has been changed to the word 'text'... as if they forgot to type it in!)
Then again, I can cart this over to a friends house and play in no time at all. The original Atari, *if* they even have an antenna connector, is a pain in the butt to haul around. And it won't plug into my TV without a quality-reducing adaptor because of the antenna connector issue.
Memepool used to be like a full month and a half ahead of the curve. Look at how they were the first ones to find Animutations and they had the best coverage of 'all your base' before it was big.
Now you're lucky if they even UPDATE twice a week. They used to have more links in a single day then they now have in an entire week. I don't know what happened with that site.
Well, you have to remember that there are some people who, genetically, simply *cannot* grow a beard... and those are typically the same kind of people who get mistaken for kids all the time.
I have the same problem, and growing a beard is not an option. The best I can manage is peachfuzz which would make me look *even younger*.
Your advice about grey color... hmm. Might be something to think about, or it might just make me look strange.
HIPPA is a good idea with terrible, terrible execution. We just had a discussion at the hospital I work at with a company installing some VPN software about the level of encryption HIPPA requires... of the four people there who work with medical computer systems, not one actually knew what level of encryption was required, and guesses ranged from 24 bits to 128 bits.
From what I've heard, the main enforcement of HIPPA right now is 'try to make it secure'. That is, at least lock the door to the file cabinets and turn the monitors so the people in the waiting room can't see what's on the screen, and turn the screen saver to 1 minute instead of 10.
Slashdot Mirror
Two points:
1) Contrary to popular (on this site, at least) belief, the command prompt in Windows 2000 and XP is just as powerful and scriptable as Bash. (Remember, batch files still work just fine and Microsoft adds new commands to it every revision.)
2) MacOS is highly scriptable without leaving the GUI using AppleScript. AppleScript can 'record' the actions taken by applications like a macro and produce a script automatically. (Of course, you can also write a script manually, or edit a recorded script to make it more useful.) Given, AppleScript *is* slow, but it works.
Other than being slow, I would argue that AppleScript is as good as a Unix scripting language. It's powerful enough to do all the repetitive file-related tasks you need, has the ability to talk to applications and even the greenest user can hit 'record' and make a simple script with it.
One of the problems here is that everyone things "Windows = GUI" and "Unix = CLI." There are better GUIs than Windows, and better CLIs than Unix out there.
That's bullshit.
Guess what? Silicon Valley is on the west coast, also, and Apple's located in Cupertino. Oh, and look, the Seattle has Amazon.com (Linux users), Boeing (Unix users), and Nintendo (God knows, but not Microsoft) located here.
Believe me, I live close to Redmond and to say that people in the Seattle area bootlick Microsoft just proves that you've never spent a lot of time in this area. Is Microsoft a large chunk of the economy? Compared to Boeing and Georgia Pacific, they're nothing.
Syberia and Drake: something something both came out for XBox recently. Both also have PC ports. In addition, Beyond Good and Evil seems to be more similar to an adventure game than a platformer to me. Of course, "The Longest Journey" is probably one of the best adventure games ever, and it came out in... what? 1998? 1999? Myst III and Uru: Age of Myst are still on store shelves, as is the Myst Collection which contains all the games.
They're out there. If you want to see more, *buy them* and give the companies that put them out some encouragement.
Item d on your list is well-known as a completely fake urban legend. See this Snopes page:
http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp
None of the lawsuits in that story have any truth to them.
These British people show up on every damned thread about voting about how 'strange' and 'odd' our process is.
This is a message board based in the US which talks about US issues. I'm sure you can find one in the UK that has all kinds of things the UK is terrible at (but the US does well) which I can then visit and make posts like:
"As an American, this is very odd to me. What's wrong with doing it this way?"
If nothing else, Moderators, these posts are "redundant!" You've read it a dozen times before in every thread about elections.
The Korean War was declared a war by Congress... that's why it's the "Korean War" and "Vietnam Conflict"... war is declared, conflicts aren't.
The first Iraq war was (not 100% sure) declared by Congress. I remember hearing the announcement of it at school, but my memory might not be exact. In any case, we call it the "Gulf War" so if we go by the same semantic argument they do with Korea, there you go.
Uh. Timed "jumping puzzles" is pretty much all Prince of Persia is... not just the new one, but both the older games as well. (Ignoring that terrible PoP 3D.) I had the exact opposite opinion: Screw the swordfights, I want to solve another "jumping puzzle." The swordfights were boring in my opinion.
3) Reveal Codes. I've heard MS Word is trying to implement this feature, but WordPerfect's had it forever, and it's sensational. Have you ever used a WYSIWYG wordprocessor, and all of a sudden wondered why your text at a certain point has the formatting go to hell? And the only way to fix things is to delete a chunk of your text?
Uh. Microsoft Word has had this since at least version 97 and probably in 95 or earlier... just click the button in the toolbar that looks like the paragraph symbol and it'll 'show invisibles' as Word calls it.
Yeah, my point is that this is exactly Microsoft's problem... they need a dirt-cheap device that can hold 4 gigs or so for less than the cost of a HD. A device like this doesn't exist now, and likely won't exist when the XBox 2 actually comes out, so it's probable that they'll just put in the same drive they put in the XBox now, or one only slightly improved.
I really don't give a crap whether the console is 'hackable' or not, I just use it to play games. That's a complete non-issue for me and, I think, the vast majority of XBox owners.
What other consoles?
Gameboy and Atari 7800.
Gameboy did well, Atari 7800 sunk, Playstation 2 did well. Seems to me the odds are good for backwards compatibility. Also, the main reason the 7800 sunk (IMO) is that Atari sat on the hardware for 2-3 years and let Nintendo get a toehold before releasing it... the 7800 hardware is as good as the NES', if not slightly better.
RAM is volatile. Where do the Morrowind saves go when you turn off the console? Do you have to re-download the MechAssault maps from Live every time you reload the game?
RAMDisk is a solution for backwards compatibility *only* for those games that didn't take advantage of the drive in the first place. Which are mostly ports from other consoles. Games like Morrowind, Knights of the Old Republic, upcoming games like Sudeki and Fable, will all be useless with no drive.
Nah, I didn't chip mine because I love XBox Live. Plus, I have no reason to... anything a chipped XBox can do I can just do with my PC or my Dish Network PVR box.
You also have to remember that Slashdot is a very small minority in the console market. I would bet 95-97% of the XBoxes out there are running on the original, non-chipped, hardware.
Your friends must be exceedingly geeky if they all own XBoxes and no games, but modded it for a bigger drive. (Or was that just so they could store pirated games on the drive itself?)
Me and two of my friends, on the other hand, use the drive for XBox Live content downloads, shuttling save games back and forth, ripping music tracks and playing them during SegaGT, etc. The exact purposes Microsoft put it in there for. We buy games for the XBox, because we don't *need* cheap servers or do-it-yourself PVRs or whatever your friends are doing with theirs.
I would assume that the vast, vast majority of XBox owners haven't modded their machine or, if they have, had modded it only so they could play pirated games (which can still use the drive for the purposes listed above.)
I think the problem Microsoft has is that the 8 gig drive inside the XBox is great... but it's actually about 4 gigs bigger than 99% of their users need. (All of my friends and I, even with many CDs ripped, tons of saved games, and pretty much every free content download on Live downloaded, still see "50,000+ blocks free" when saving anything.) What they really need is a drive that provides about half the storage for about half (or less) the price... I can completely see the argument that the drive is too expensive. Flash isn't going to work... I would guess that this deal is just to make memory cards for the machine, not to make some kind of internal flash storage device. I would also bet that if Microsoft doesn't find their cheaply small HD, they'll default to putting in another 10 gig or 20 gig drive.
The problem is that because Marathon I came out for Macintosh only (and Marathon II had a crappy version for Win95 that no one's heard of), it's generally ignored by the gaming press.
Yes, Marathon did everything Half-Life did, but better, and years earlier. But because none of the reviewers, judges, etc. owned Macintosh computers at the time it came out, it gets snubbed by the press. What's odd/stupid, though, is that Gamespy will write stories for years about all the great games that came out for Saturn or MegaDrive (or some other gaming system that no one bought) about how great they were, but they completely ignore games like Marathon which *anyone* can *easily* emulate and play on any modern PC or Macintosh.
There are other excellent games in the same position, like Mission: Thunderbolt.
Please see this comment:
i d=8317249
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=97271&c
There's a very good, and extremely clever, reason.
The MPAA owns the trademarks on PG, G, R, etc. To maintain those trademarks, they are legally obligated to *enforce* them, that is, take legal action against any other company that would use the same trademarks.
Why does the MPAA maintain these trademarks? Because otherwise, there would be nothing, legally, to stop a movie like Scary Movie from putting a huge "rated G" on the movie posted without *any* endorsement from the MPAA. If they try, the MPAA could sue them for trademark violation.
Some years back, I believe Marvel Comics tried to make use of the MPAA's rating system, and were sued by the MPAA for this very reason.
I don't give a shit what you think about your karma, the SIMPLE FACT is that that post was off-topic, and it wasn't moderated off-topic. Period.
What is the POINT of the moderation system if it's abused like this? It's infuriating.
Say it with me: XBoxes.
The plural of "box" is "boxes."
Is this post traveling through a time warp from like 2 years ago?
Look, here's the deal:
Firstly: XBox, while it does not have a LOT of RPGs, has very GOOD ones. Morrowind and Knights of the Old Republic, for instance. (Morrowind was a launch title, so I don't know how your friends said there was no good RPG on XBox if they hadn't even bothered to pick up about the only RPG that was even available at all.)
Secondly: The large controllers are not only not sold *with* the machine anymore, they're actually not even *made* anymore. Why gripe about a controller that basically no longer exists? The controller-S was available about, what, a month after launch, and since then Microsoft has basically pretended the larger controller never existed.
Thirdly: If you don't own an XBox, why are you even posting? Man, if I posted on every topic that 'my buddy said that...' or 'I heard in a cafe that...', I'd have a million posts by now. Post what you know. If you don't know, say nothing.
This post is off-topic. The poster ADMITS it's off-topic. And it's +4 Interesting?
Holy crap, Slashdot, what the hell is wrong with you? I guess all you have to do to earn karma is post glowing GameCube reviews in a topic about SCO and watch them get moderated up the wazzoo.
Uh. You need to play longer.
I have the Atari stick in my house, and I agree the emulation isn't perfect, but the sound and speed of it are pretty exact to the Atari's. (And yes, I also have an Atari 2600 sitting right next to it. I can put the same game in both and compare.)
The problem is that some of the programs were edited before they were inserted into the emulator. The most mutilated is Adventure, which suffered numerous color changes (one of the dragons is a different color from the original), and the famous 'first easter-egg ever' is completely wrong. (The 'invisible' pixel is quite visible on the screen, and the message has been changed to the word 'text'... as if they forgot to type it in!)
Then again, I can cart this over to a friends house and play in no time at all. The original Atari, *if* they even have an antenna connector, is a pain in the butt to haul around. And it won't plug into my TV without a quality-reducing adaptor because of the antenna connector issue.
Memepool used to be like a full month and a half ahead of the curve. Look at how they were the first ones to find Animutations and they had the best coverage of 'all your base' before it was big.
Now you're lucky if they even UPDATE twice a week. They used to have more links in a single day then they now have in an entire week. I don't know what happened with that site.
Well, you have to remember that there are some people who, genetically, simply *cannot* grow a beard... and those are typically the same kind of people who get mistaken for kids all the time.
I have the same problem, and growing a beard is not an option. The best I can manage is peachfuzz which would make me look *even younger*.
Your advice about grey color... hmm. Might be something to think about, or it might just make me look strange.
HIPPA is a good idea with terrible, terrible execution. We just had a discussion at the hospital I work at with a company installing some VPN software about the level of encryption HIPPA requires... of the four people there who work with medical computer systems, not one actually knew what level of encryption was required, and guesses ranged from 24 bits to 128 bits.
From what I've heard, the main enforcement of HIPPA right now is 'try to make it secure'. That is, at least lock the door to the file cabinets and turn the monitors so the people in the waiting room can't see what's on the screen, and turn the screen saver to 1 minute instead of 10.