How about the Nintendo DS? Speaking from personal experience here--I've written (or ported) several DS homebrew projects.
Sure, there's plenty of emulators, and ports of popular (and less popular) classic games. And the obligatory linux port, not that it's useful for much besides bash and ssh.
But there's plenty of original games too. There's also ebook readers, music and movie players, utilities to backup retail game saves, drawing/coloring apps*, music creation tools, and more.
* One of these, Colors!, later became a rather successful commercial title for the 3DS.
I had the same reaction to Unity as most people... at first. When I first upgraded to 11.04, I found Unity annoying to use, even on my touchscreen laptop.
However, they've been steadily improving it, and to be perfectly honest I rather like Unity as of 12.04. The Dash is slick, the HUD is a great new feature, and I've always been a fan of the more minimalist window managers anyway. My only significant complaint is that I refuse to give up sloppy mouse focus, which renders the global menubar completely useless (so I reverted to the old menubars).
In an era of "Secret Questions" and facebook, we really don't need to worry about passwords. Those SQs are the bigger problem
This. I will occasionally put in long strings of random characters for websites that ask these questions, and just accept that if I ever legitimately forget my password, the account is gone forever.
That's a great way to describe the situation. Wish I had some mod points.
My personal machines are all named after characters from the Commander Keen series.
At my last job we used Warcraft III heroes. At my current job I used Transformers, until we hired a full-time linux admin who rotated those out in favor of boring functional names.
ubuntu is to debian as firefox is to gecko
Nobody uses Gecko directly. Debian isn't just a good base for building an operating system, it's a pretty good one already.
Turns out the AI didn't and can't. From a different article on the tournament:
The showcase game of the competition was a bot versus human match. In the exhibition match, =DoGo=, a World Cyber Games 2001 competitor played against the top ranking bot of the competition. The result was an exciting man versus machine match highlighting the state of the art in real-time strategy game AI.
It's also worth noting that this =DoGo= isn't really the top-tier player the article makes him out to be. WCG wasn't a huge deal back in 2001, and =DoGo= went 1-5 in his group then. I'm not sure how much he's played recently either.
First, make a homebrew/hobby developer package and sell it. . . . Say, $1500-2500 or so. [The] release mechanism . . . shouldn't be free. . . . Homebrew releases should be prevented from generating profit for the programmer. . . . The homebrew developer would pay Sony's QA costs
Yeah, I can't imagine why anyone would try to jailbreak your system if this alternative were available.
There's also a small, but very dedicated community of MOO2 players. Check out #moo2 on irc.quakenet.org
There's nothing to stop companies using phones as a wireless controller with a built in display, and built in storage. You can use the phone to display game elements distinct to your character, and to store your save games.
Sounds an awful lot like a Dreamcast VMU.
I thought with the Wii you needed to know a person in order to play against them (I don't have a Wii, so I don't know). But I thought you had to get someone's ID# in some fashion (generally -- by corresponding w/ them) to add them and you couldn't just do a "find me a random opponent"....so if you are playing against people w/ hacked games, just go to their house and tell them to stop.
You can play against random opponents just fine. What you can't do is chat with, message, or "friend" another player unless you have exchanged Friend Codes with out-of-band.
Sure they could: banks don't need to allow overdrafts at all. If there's $80 in my account and I write a check for $100, the bank doesn't need to take $20 out of their own funds to pay the check -- they can return it unpaid and let me deal with the consequences. But they'd rather loan me the $20 so they can charge hefty overdraft fees on top.
But allowing you to overdraft your account is a valuable service. If my balance is $20 short to cover my rent check, I'd sure as hell rather the bank pay it anyway and charge me an overdraft fee, rather then bounce the check and get nailed with a late fee + bounced check fee + hassle from my landlord.
Insurance has unfortunately morphed into something where the routine medical procedures (cleanings/checkups) are covered instead of just the major things that happen to us every so often.
The reason for this is that, if insurance didn't cover you going in for a checkup and other routine maintenance, people would tend to stop going in for checkups rather than pay for them out of pocket. This could very well lead to a serious health problem, which would cost serious money to correct. Whereas if it was caught and/or treated earlier, the costs might be vastly less. As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a friggin' truckload of cure.
You're giving the game far too much credit. Master of Orion was a fantastic game (MOO2 even more so), but the AI was not its strong point.
The main difficulty in the game came from the AI's massive advantage (read: cheating) in production. Or from map position (if you got unlucky and started somewhere without many good planets nearby, you're in trouble).
MOO2 also suffered from poor AI, as well as several crash bugs. It also included deeper gameplay in many areas, and IMHO most significantly, multiplayer capability.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken
