It amazes me how much the proles gobble this shit up when *gasp* analog component video is perfectly capable of handling a high bandwith video without all the incremental upgrades to a poorly thought out spec.
The "proles" gobble up that one HDMI wire is neater and simple than Red-Blue-Green + optical, digital coax, or analog. Especially with the last choice, as you have five plugs all the same shape, going into five sockets right next to each other, and two of them are the exact same color.
Just because you think something sucks doesn't mean it's utterly without merit.
And really, do my speakers actually need to talk back to my receiver under any even remotely plausible scenario that doesn't scream "DRM, mother fucker, do you speak it?"
Off the top of my head, I imagine you could have a mic each speaker so the system can dynamically adjust for ambient noise, or something silly like a surround sound system pinging itself during setup to concentrate the "surround" effect on the desired area.
I also guess you could work this into some type of karaoke/Rock Band game.
Not at all. However, being a puzzle game, there a few downfalls.
-People are impatient nowadays. They'll just look up the solutions online when it gets too hard, or give up and never finish the game.
-It seems like your game doesn't really have any replayablity. Once you solve a level, going back to it isn't going to be any different, and thusly not any more fun. If you had a mode where it generated random (but still solvable) levels, then you would have a reason to play the game once in a while after beating the supplied levels.
-If you included 75 or however many "boring" levels, they may be a breeze for most players, maybe even a waste of time, but they still pad the amount of time needed to beat the game. Even if the "challenging" levels take more time to solve than all "boring" levels, the number of levels passed still makes players feel like they accomplished something.
Don't get me wrong, it looks like a worthwhile game, especially for just a dollar. I also understand that increasing the amount of work on your end would probably necessitate a higher price tag. However, looking at your product from the eyes of a customer, not simply as a player, could help you spot ways to get even more purchases.
Why would Sony make an open source MMO game? Someone could just take the code, host it on their own server, and now all the people they are expecting to pay $15 a month are now flocking to the free server instead.
Yeah, it's good for the players because their gameplay can't be cut off by the whims of a single company, but running the server, let alone developing the game (which is more important for MMOs than other types of games), costs money that a virtual "tip jar" isn't gonna cover.
There are open source games that are relatively popular, but I can't recall the last time any of them became profitable (or even had a revenue plan, for that matter). The biggest name I know of in that aspect is Second Life. While it has an open source client, which is a smart idea as it maximizes the amount of potential customers, that isn't the same making everything open source.
You know as much as it sounds cool to fly the bigger ship, I'm imagining it's kind of like one of those Battlefield games where you could drive the aircraft carrier around the island. Well it turns out that aircraft carriers are slow and they don't move very fast, and it's not that exciting a thing to do in an action game.
As far as military sci-fi goes, aren't capital space ships supposed to be responsible for coordinating the battle, kinda like a mobile HQ? If you want to make it exciting for people to choose the "slow" unit, give those players an expanded view of the battle field, the ability to give orders, coordinate supplies, handle communications, and other stuff that the fighter pilots wouldn't be interested in, or have the time to do.
There's more to do in a space battle than just fire lasers.
The year is 2009 and we have fat pipes, so you have little excuse for sticking to 1980s style text conversations.
Firstly, "we" may, but what about the countries mentioned in the summary under this embargo restriction?
Secondly, it's not a linear progression of technology, where more bandwidth corresponds with a better method of communication. Voice, video, and text (and even then, IM vs. SMS vs. e-mail and so on) each have their own benefits and downfalls.
One easy example is that for a webcam chat, you can more easily make sense of the person's tone and attitude, but with text you can read what the person said at your own pace, and go back and read it whenever you like.
But instead the proper trade name as assigned the Pluto brand planet is used with a piece of fiction in a manner that is not only confusing but dilutes the mark...
I'm sure that billions of Plutonians have been sharing your sentiments for years, and have been trying to organize a lawsuit due to the irreparable damage caused to their estates.
Really now? I guess the custom ringtone I'm using for my current phone must be a hallucination then.
I would make my own ring tone if I could! So why can't I then?
I thought it would be evident from my post above that you could do exactly that by following the steps I laid out, only that it's a bit of a process.
So you don't have a choice. If you don't pay, you don't get to have a ring tone.
All the phones I've previously used, along with all the phones of friends that I've helped out with using their ring tones, play.wav or.mp3 files as ring tones just fine. The only caveats sometimes encountered was that the files have to be have to be in a certain directory, or not too high in quality.
I can only think of Verizon as a company that restricts your ring tone selection through DRM. If you don't feel like paying for their official "Verizon Music Kit", stuff like Bitpim works nicely.
If you're really having the problem you described above, and not just ranting for the sake of an argument, tell us what phone you have so we can figure out how you can use your own ring tones.
And yet people happily pay $3.99 for a five second crappy quality clip of a pop song to use as their ring tone.
It's more like they're paying $3.99 to pay someone to find the right song, edit it to the appropriate part and length of the song, put it in the right file format and size, and make it available to your phone without having to mess with wires and memory cards, and put it in the right directory.
The standard cell phone user isn't going to bother with P2P networks, Audacity, USB cables, and phone connectivity software when someone else is offering to do all the work for them in a fraction of the time.
It seems to a be a natural product of competition. If your competitor is doing better than you, you're going to look at the situation and change things up.
The "market" of getting people to use your desktop environment is different than other products (for example, a user can switch between using one or another as often as desired with no downsides), but seeing how Gnome is currently more popular than KDE, its not surprising that they're brainstorming new features to get more users.
This probably accounts for the popularity of the Smash Brothers series. All moves are [hold directional stick in one direction] + [One of two attack buttons]. Any newbie can learn all of each character's moves in a minute, so its much more accessible than most fighting games where you have to make arcane circular motions on the d-pad for all of your good moves.
'You'll have to support two versions of Windows,' he said. 'Each needs to be secured, antivirused, firewalled and patched. If a company has 10,000 PCs, that's 20,000 instances of Windows.
Why does every user need two operating systems? That seems awfully wasteful.
One example of the Defense Department's new community-based approach to software development is Forge.mil, which was made generally available for unclassified use within the department in April.
So, unless you're at a terminal in the DoD, it's probably not gonna work for you.
'Software as a service' means that you think of a particular server as doing your computing for you. If that's what the server does, you must not use it! If you do your computing on someone else's server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server.
While there is helpful advice in his statement, such absolutes are indicitive of paranoia. You wouldn't let just anyone take care of your kid, but most people are okay with sending their children to school several hours a day.
Why bother with a separate cell phone when you're by your netbook all the time, be it on your desk or in a carrying case or backpack?
Yes, you could use Skype-Out or any of its competitor, but if you can tether 3G to your laptop over a phone, why not use voice through what is basically a microphone-less and speaker-less mobile? The network allows it, BTW. Stick the SIM card from your aircard into a phone, and enjoy overage charges on any voice minutes you use.
Also, since he says he uses it for his business, I'd be willing to bet AT&T has more professional plans and options than Skype.
The AG-Google agreement wouldn't affect Gutenberg at all. The Gutenberg Project only deals with works that are either public domain or works where the author gave permission for GP to use the works.
The reason the Author's Guild got upset with Google and eventually reached a settlement with them was because Google was dealing with "orphaned" works. These were books that, while restricted in distribution by copyright laws, were out of print for one reason or another. While Google saw this as part of their mission to increase the availiblity of information, the AG saw this as an encroachment on the rights of their members.
That does make a lot of sense, it is probably the most likely explanation next to "Oops, we made a typo."
It doesn't make sense that whitelisting Google still results in it being blocked, as the summary said.
I'd be very surprised if they block other search engines out of competitive reasons, because they've been getting hammered by the EU for various anti-compition violations over the past few years. In IE7, the startup wizard gave the user an easy way to select something besides Windows Live search as their default search engine if desired, so its not like these concerns are foreign to Microsoft.
I heard this "glitch" happened because they went after books with certain tags. I haven't used Amazon search in a while, but couldn't you simply include and exclude the tags you don't like (I don't know why someone'd be opposed to books from gays or lesbians, but whatever) during your search process? "-search term" works to exclude things in Google.
With regenerative healing in FPS games, the player is encouraged to take a preferred attitude towards how aggressive to be in battles.
In more realistic games where you die after being hit by 3 shots or less, like Rainbow Six, you pay very close attention to tactical implementations to keep your character alive, like cover, recon of enemy positions, and suppressive fire.
In traditional FPS games, where your health is measured as a number out of 100, and health packs are easily found or can be saved in your inventory, you can circle-strafe groups of enemies with machine guns blazing with little concern if you suffer a decent amount of damage.
In games with regenerative healing, they enforce upon the user an impression of how aggressive to be by making it known your shield can take so many hits, and it recovers after so long. If you judge you can fight the enemy easily and not take that many hits, you'd most likely jump in to the fray and take them out quickly. With a bunch of accurate, beefy enemies, you'd either handle them with long-range weapons, or use hit and run tactics.
While such behavior is seen and viable in many other games, shooters like Halo use this to prevent the user from being too cautious, or too aggressive. At least, as defined by the ideas of how the developers want the user to play.
It's easier to see this by recognizing a character's health as a resource, like in an RTS game. By making resources abundant or scarce, the player will accordingly be more aggressive or cautious in building and using units.
Why do you think Windows has woken up to the "cloud computing" craze with their Live brand of services? All Microsoft has to do is get a decent version of Internet Explorer running on Windows Mobile, and maybe tweak WM to expect a bit more generous system resources (netbooks vs. smartphones).
Thanks to everyone trying to make their programs server side nowadays, it doesn't matter what processor you're using; just as long as you have a net connection you can do anything you'd expect to do on an x86-based netbook.
I'm a bit disappointed that Safe Search defaults to max filtering mode, but it is very easy to turn it completely off.
Maybe it's different in your country/state/web browser/whatever, but officially Google defaults to "Moderate", which is in between "No filtering" and "Strict" filtering.
Slashdot Mirror
It amazes me how much the proles gobble this shit up when *gasp* analog component video is perfectly capable of handling a high bandwith video without all the incremental upgrades to a poorly thought out spec.
The "proles" gobble up that one HDMI wire is neater and simple than Red-Blue-Green + optical, digital coax, or analog. Especially with the last choice, as you have five plugs all the same shape, going into five sockets right next to each other, and two of them are the exact same color.
Just because you think something sucks doesn't mean it's utterly without merit.
And really, do my speakers actually need to talk back to my receiver under any even remotely plausible scenario that doesn't scream "DRM, mother fucker, do you speak it?"
Off the top of my head, I imagine you could have a mic each speaker so the system can dynamically adjust for ambient noise, or something silly like a surround sound system pinging itself during setup to concentrate the "surround" effect on the desired area.
I also guess you could work this into some type of karaoke/Rock Band game.
Is $0.99 for a few hours of fun expensive?
Not at all. However, being a puzzle game, there a few downfalls.
-People are impatient nowadays. They'll just look up the solutions online when it gets too hard, or give up and never finish the game.
-It seems like your game doesn't really have any replayablity. Once you solve a level, going back to it isn't going to be any different, and thusly not any more fun. If you had a mode where it generated random (but still solvable) levels, then you would have a reason to play the game once in a while after beating the supplied levels.
-If you included 75 or however many "boring" levels, they may be a breeze for most players, maybe even a waste of time, but they still pad the amount of time needed to beat the game. Even if the "challenging" levels take more time to solve than all "boring" levels, the number of levels passed still makes players feel like they accomplished something.
Don't get me wrong, it looks like a worthwhile game, especially for just a dollar. I also understand that increasing the amount of work on your end would probably necessitate a higher price tag. However, looking at your product from the eyes of a customer, not simply as a player, could help you spot ways to get even more purchases.
Why would Sony make an open source MMO game? Someone could just take the code, host it on their own server, and now all the people they are expecting to pay $15 a month are now flocking to the free server instead.
Yeah, it's good for the players because their gameplay can't be cut off by the whims of a single company, but running the server, let alone developing the game (which is more important for MMOs than other types of games), costs money that a virtual "tip jar" isn't gonna cover.
There are open source games that are relatively popular, but I can't recall the last time any of them became profitable (or even had a revenue plan, for that matter). The biggest name I know of in that aspect is Second Life. While it has an open source client, which is a smart idea as it maximizes the amount of potential customers, that isn't the same making everything open source.
You know as much as it sounds cool to fly the bigger ship, I'm imagining it's kind of like one of those Battlefield games where you could drive the aircraft carrier around the island. Well it turns out that aircraft carriers are slow and they don't move very fast, and it's not that exciting a thing to do in an action game.
As far as military sci-fi goes, aren't capital space ships supposed to be responsible for coordinating the battle, kinda like a mobile HQ? If you want to make it exciting for people to choose the "slow" unit, give those players an expanded view of the battle field, the ability to give orders, coordinate supplies, handle communications, and other stuff that the fighter pilots wouldn't be interested in, or have the time to do.
There's more to do in a space battle than just fire lasers.
The year is 2009 and we have fat pipes, so you have little excuse for sticking to 1980s style text conversations.
Firstly, "we" may, but what about the countries mentioned in the summary under this embargo restriction?
Secondly, it's not a linear progression of technology, where more bandwidth corresponds with a better method of communication. Voice, video, and text (and even then, IM vs. SMS vs. e-mail and so on) each have their own benefits and downfalls.
One easy example is that for a webcam chat, you can more easily make sense of the person's tone and attitude, but with text you can read what the person said at your own pace, and go back and read it whenever you like.
But instead the proper trade name as assigned the Pluto brand planet is used with a piece of fiction in a manner that is not only confusing but dilutes the mark...
I'm sure that billions of Plutonians have been sharing your sentiments for years, and have been trying to organize a lawsuit due to the irreparable damage caused to their estates.
I don't have your phone, so I can't guarantee it'll work, but this thread seems to have the answers you need: http://howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1331924
WRONG !
Really now? I guess the custom ringtone I'm using for my current phone must be a hallucination then.
I would make my own ring tone if I could! So why can't I then?
I thought it would be evident from my post above that you could do exactly that by following the steps I laid out, only that it's a bit of a process.
So you don't have a choice. If you don't pay, you don't get to have a ring tone.
All the phones I've previously used, along with all the phones of friends that I've helped out with using their ring tones, play .wav or .mp3 files as ring tones just fine. The only caveats sometimes encountered was that the files have to be have to be in a certain directory, or not too high in quality.
I can only think of Verizon as a company that restricts your ring tone selection through DRM. If you don't feel like paying for their official "Verizon Music Kit", stuff like Bitpim works nicely.
If you're really having the problem you described above, and not just ranting for the sake of an argument, tell us what phone you have so we can figure out how you can use your own ring tones.
And yet people happily pay $3.99 for a five second crappy quality clip of a pop song to use as their ring tone.
It's more like they're paying $3.99 to pay someone to find the right song, edit it to the appropriate part and length of the song, put it in the right file format and size, and make it available to your phone without having to mess with wires and memory cards, and put it in the right directory.
The standard cell phone user isn't going to bother with P2P networks, Audacity, USB cables, and phone connectivity software when someone else is offering to do all the work for them in a fraction of the time.
You're never going to be charged to watch a prairie dog turn around to dramatic sounding music.
Depends on someone convincing Youtube they own the copyright on that dramatic music, no?
It seems to a be a natural product of competition. If your competitor is doing better than you, you're going to look at the situation and change things up.
The "market" of getting people to use your desktop environment is different than other products (for example, a user can switch between using one or another as often as desired with no downsides), but seeing how Gnome is currently more popular than KDE, its not surprising that they're brainstorming new features to get more users.
This probably accounts for the popularity of the Smash Brothers series. All moves are [hold directional stick in one direction] + [One of two attack buttons]. Any newbie can learn all of each character's moves in a minute, so its much more accessible than most fighting games where you have to make arcane circular motions on the d-pad for all of your good moves.
'You'll have to support two versions of Windows,' he said. 'Each needs to be secured, antivirused, firewalled and patched. If a company has 10,000 PCs, that's 20,000 instances of Windows.
Why does every user need two operating systems? That seems awfully wasteful.
FTA
One example of the Defense Department's new community-based approach to software development is Forge.mil, which was made generally available for unclassified use within the department in April.
So, unless you're at a terminal in the DoD, it's probably not gonna work for you.
'Software as a service' means that you think of a particular server as doing your computing for you. If that's what the server does, you must not use it! If you do your computing on someone else's server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server.
While there is helpful advice in his statement, such absolutes are indicitive of paranoia. You wouldn't let just anyone take care of your kid, but most people are okay with sending their children to school several hours a day.
I think the bigger issue here is:
phone calls (via GSM or VoIP)
Why bother with a separate cell phone when you're by your netbook all the time, be it on your desk or in a carrying case or backpack?
Yes, you could use Skype-Out or any of its competitor, but if you can tether 3G to your laptop over a phone, why not use voice through what is basically a microphone-less and speaker-less mobile? The network allows it, BTW. Stick the SIM card from your aircard into a phone, and enjoy overage charges on any voice minutes you use.
Also, since he says he uses it for his business, I'd be willing to bet AT&T has more professional plans and options than Skype.
The AG-Google agreement wouldn't affect Gutenberg at all. The Gutenberg Project only deals with works that are either public domain or works where the author gave permission for GP to use the works.
The reason the Author's Guild got upset with Google and eventually reached a settlement with them was because Google was dealing with "orphaned" works. These were books that, while restricted in distribution by copyright laws, were out of print for one reason or another. While Google saw this as part of their mission to increase the availiblity of information, the AG saw this as an encroachment on the rights of their members.
That does make a lot of sense, it is probably the most likely explanation next to "Oops, we made a typo."
It doesn't make sense that whitelisting Google still results in it being blocked, as the summary said.
I'd be very surprised if they block other search engines out of competitive reasons, because they've been getting hammered by the EU for various anti-compition violations over the past few years. In IE7, the startup wizard gave the user an easy way to select something besides Windows Live search as their default search engine if desired, so its not like these concerns are foreign to Microsoft.
Opera is willing to support you guys left out in the cold with a modern browser, going all the way back to Windows 95.
I heard this "glitch" happened because they went after books with certain tags. I haven't used Amazon search in a while, but couldn't you simply include and exclude the tags you don't like (I don't know why someone'd be opposed to books from gays or lesbians, but whatever) during your search process? "-search term" works to exclude things in Google.
I would prefer it if they fixed Google Update instead of releasing the source.
Thanks to the source release, you now have more than just one "they" to look at.
With regenerative healing in FPS games, the player is encouraged to take a preferred attitude towards how aggressive to be in battles.
In more realistic games where you die after being hit by 3 shots or less, like Rainbow Six, you pay very close attention to tactical implementations to keep your character alive, like cover, recon of enemy positions, and suppressive fire.
In traditional FPS games, where your health is measured as a number out of 100, and health packs are easily found or can be saved in your inventory, you can circle-strafe groups of enemies with machine guns blazing with little concern if you suffer a decent amount of damage.
In games with regenerative healing, they enforce upon the user an impression of how aggressive to be by making it known your shield can take so many hits, and it recovers after so long. If you judge you can fight the enemy easily and not take that many hits, you'd most likely jump in to the fray and take them out quickly. With a bunch of accurate, beefy enemies, you'd either handle them with long-range weapons, or use hit and run tactics.
While such behavior is seen and viable in many other games, shooters like Halo use this to prevent the user from being too cautious, or too aggressive. At least, as defined by the ideas of how the developers want the user to play.
It's easier to see this by recognizing a character's health as a resource, like in an RTS game. By making resources abundant or scarce, the player will accordingly be more aggressive or cautious in building and using units.
Why do you think Windows has woken up to the "cloud computing" craze with their Live brand of services? All Microsoft has to do is get a decent version of Internet Explorer running on Windows Mobile, and maybe tweak WM to expect a bit more generous system resources (netbooks vs. smartphones).
Thanks to everyone trying to make their programs server side nowadays, it doesn't matter what processor you're using; just as long as you have a net connection you can do anything you'd expect to do on an x86-based netbook.
I'm a bit disappointed that Safe Search defaults to max filtering mode, but it is very easy to turn it completely off.
Maybe it's different in your country/state/web browser/whatever, but officially Google defaults to "Moderate", which is in between "No filtering" and "Strict" filtering.