There is a good chance people in 2-3 years be buying their Wii2s much like people suddenly started trading up to the DS Light in mass. I think Japan pushed back HDTV requirements until 2010. Nintendo, the Japan centric company that it is, is probably laughing at your comment.
I was tickled pink when I discovered that my latest page displays correctly in IE8b2 with absolutely no tweaks. It's a strange feeling having the page display the same (with the same code!) in all major browsers.
Zak and Wiki was an excellent game but it got overshadowed by 1st party games.
Blame the retailers. 1st party games remain king but they won't keep cool looking games like Zak and Wiki because they want to try out shovelwares (possibly to prove they're shovelware).
And don't forget that Zak and Wiki was not advertised to speak of. Most titles you can't release with minimal marketing and expect it to do well; especially titles without famous franchise characters.
That being said, the Strong Bad games being released on Wiiware will likely do very well. They are point and click aventures, but the well known name will pull people in like a hyphen.
The summary is horrible, but that is expected on slashdot. Riiiiight? The first two paragraphs of TFA pretty much sums it up and pretty much parallels what you had said.
In 2005, Lee Seung Seop of South Korea died after playing StarCraft for 50 hours. In 2007, Xu Yan of northeastern China died after playing various online games for 7 days. Just six months later, an unidentified 30-year-old in Guangzhou province died after playing in an Internet café for three straight days. Addiction to videogames: It's happening to them, and it could be happening to you, too!
Well, OK, not really. Game addiction is a term that's thrown around pretty liberally these days. Horror stories of people spending their entire lives in front of World of WarCraft are even making it to the TV news. But for most of us, gaming's just a hobby -- even if it's a hobby that we tend to take rather seriously. The line between hobby and habit is a blurry one, though, and it's not easily understood. When it comes to doing something you enjoy, how much is too much?
This is in no way a new thing. This is caused by most Americans not giving a rats-ass about the quality of their food and a government that is bent on protecting farmers over the consumers.
A while ago some local dairy farmers started marking their milk cartons to tell the public that their milk does not come from cows that receive hormone injections to increase yields. Farmers are not allowed to do this by the government for the same reasons as the mad cow testing here.
Our government has something against informed consumers when it comes to food me thinks.
For the same placement, that's "AOE" for dvorak users. When the bindings are not changed, we have to deal with what would be ",a;h" on a qwerty keyboard. Another words the buttons are all over the map with no logical sense....
I don't know much about the extension. The feature was originally planned for FF3 so there is a good change they sliced it off as an extension for now, which would explain why it has been around for a bit.
I only wish that MS Office 2007 would run on Linux, I would pay for it and use it in a heartbeat. But I am not about to use MS's bloated, insecure operating system to get it.
..that will definitely be craved by many Slashdot users, and not because of the gift shopping or use of public terminals. Question is how long it will take before Firefox sees its market share diminish because of this feature, and, consequently, how long it will take Firefox to include it in an update.
Considering that private browsing appears to already be included with 3.1 and the betas were around Sept 9th the last time I checked, I don't think the Moz folks are quaking in their boots yet. The feature is likely to hit both browsers roughtly at the same time.
The problem isn't taxing smoking per se. The problem is that when you add a tax on something like smoking the state now spends that new revenue. What happens when people stop smoking because the tax is so high? What do you do when you lose that revenue that you've become accustomed to spending (and we all know that the goal of government is to spend every penny it receives)?
Speed up the timer on traffic lights and install light/speeding cameras? Is this a trick question?
New York, in particular, is disgusting. They have a tax policy that reflects decades of liberal orthodoxy and the stupidity of the results just staggers the mind. I mean, they raise taxes on cigarettes, and are suddenly horrified to find that people do not buy cigarettes in New York. Now, what do you think the enlightened liberals do up there? Do you think they set the tax at a more reasonable level? No... they call out the cops and pass even -more- laws designed to try and ban people from cigarettes from out of state.
I was always under the impression that it was just a part of a greater anti-cigarette campaign. (No smoking in bars etc included.) It's almost guaranteed that health insurance companies are taking a large roll in all of this too. The interesting thing is rising taxes on cigarettes is actually a worldwide phenomenon. Just check out http://www.earth-policy.org/Alerts/Alert2.htm or google some articles.
That the clone Mac were competitive is really more an indicator of Apple's mid 90s lack on innovation.
Not exactly. But you aren't totally out in left field either. The clones were supposedly free-riding on Apple's R&D for mother board designs etc. Apple later figured out they weren't recouping the costs from licensing and the clone makers sold cheaper/faster hardware than Apple because they didn't have to reinvent the wheel. (Remember, this was when Apple was the holy grail of "Not Invented Here")
Read up some more on "Mac clones nearly killed Apple" at wikipedia.
I don't get it. If they say they're compatible with Firefox - as in web browser - why does that browser need to run on a particular operating system? Since invention of flash video we are free from unnecessary plugins and related burden. Just enter address, and let it play.
But I guess politicians never opt for easy solutions.
Or the fact that Safari is not supported on Windows?
And whenever there is a touch panel it will also be clogged by the dirty fingers people have.
Just take a look at some people's keyboards where a large amount of brownish residue of unknown origin is accumulated.
Many remotes also have an accumulation of some residue that you probably don't want to examine further, and by having a touch display you will get that residue even more visible.
While mostly true, the major point that you are missing is is that touch screens, unlike keyboards and remotes, are easily cleanable to a mostly presentable state. People with glasses probably already know the drill.
Pick up glasses
Huff on the glass/plastic (optional)
Rub with excess T-Shirt
Repeat as needed
:%s/glasses/device with touch screen
If you're at a public terminal and have disinfecting wipes, a touchscreen might actually be preferable, as strange as that sounds.
There is two versions of Flash decoding libraries, one called Gnash and another called Swfdec. I still wonder why they don't work together, but hey, they are open source and both has kinda different visions how to deal with Flash proprietary stuff.
LWN: Some LWN readers have complained that having two projects aimed at implementing Flash is divisive and wasteful. How would you respond to those readers?
Benjamin: The optimal number of projects for a given project space sounds like a good PhD thesis topic. Having multiple projects in a space, or multiple solutions to a problem is simply how things work in the community. Any non-trivial bug or project space has multiple solutions, and often one cannot determine which is the best solution until all have been tried. Also, people working on these projects are real people with real interests and complex motivations for working on particular projects. Simplifying it into "you currently work on A, so you'd instead like working on B in the same project space" is unrealistic. And IMO, divisiveness between similar projects often has more to do with fanboys than it has to do with developers, who obviously share interests and experiences.
the Wii is stuck somewhere between 1.5x-2.0x times more powerful then the Gamecube and quite a bit of that additional power is already eaten up by 16:9/480p output vs 4:3/480i output that the Gamecube did.
If you're going to beat Nintendo up on it's lack of effort on high definition gaming, at least use some facts. The GameCube supports 480p as long as you buy the digital out port. Getting the cable for the digital port required ordering it directly from Nintendo by mail. Many games did not support progressive scan because support was not mandatory for GameCube games and getting the cable was difficult. To load a Gamecube game in progressive scan mode you hold down the b button while it turns on if I remember. Later in the GameCube's life cycle, Nintendo removed the digital out port to cut costs.
The difference is *FAR* bigger then just HD. For one very important thing there is anti-aliasing, which the Wii doesn't do and causes all Wii games look pretty sucky on a big screen.
Antialiasing is usually used for textures in the game, not for upscaling the resolution. The Wii is oblivious to HD (it has no hdmi port), so it can't upscale anything itself. It's all left to the TV. (I hope your TV has good upscaling algorithms! If they used Antialiasing, then it will be nice and blurry....)
Completely wrong, I guess that myth will never die. Its pretty much equally powerful then the stuff from the last generation, its hardware can't even run some effects that the Xbox1 could do, due to the lack of shader, so you won't see a game like Riddick on the Wii ever.
The Wii does not natively support some of the shaders the orginal XBox had. The PS2 did not natively support antialiasing in the hardware like the GameCube and the Xbox did. But many games emulated antialiasing in software, sometimes getting better results than the hardware algorithms. If some enterprising developers tried to use that extra %50 horse power, it _may_ be possible. ( http://wii.ign.com/articles/867/867498p1.html ) The Conduit may be that kind of game.
So another words, the blue screen was caused by a faulty driver produced by a chinese company that makes a US company look bad (through a knee-jerk reaction)? I sense a conspiracy here...
Slashdot Mirror
There is a good chance people in 2-3 years be buying their Wii2s much like people suddenly started trading up to the DS Light in mass. I think Japan pushed back HDTV requirements until 2010. Nintendo, the Japan centric company that it is, is probably laughing at your comment.
I was tickled pink when I discovered that my latest page displays correctly in IE8b2 with absolutely no tweaks. It's a strange feeling having the page display the same (with the same code!) in all major browsers.
Zak and Wiki was an excellent game but it got overshadowed by 1st party games.
Blame the retailers. 1st party games remain king but they won't keep cool looking games like Zak and Wiki because they want to try out shovelwares (possibly to prove they're shovelware).
And don't forget that Zak and Wiki was not advertised to speak of. Most titles you can't release with minimal marketing and expect it to do well; especially titles without famous franchise characters.
That being said, the Strong Bad games being released on Wiiware will likely do very well. They are point and click aventures, but the well known name will pull people in like a hyphen.
Personal opinion, but games are so much more satisfying when they end.
In 2005, Lee Seung Seop of South Korea died after playing StarCraft for 50 hours. In 2007, Xu Yan of northeastern China died after playing various online games for 7 days. Just six months later, an unidentified 30-year-old in Guangzhou province died after playing in an Internet café for three straight days. Addiction to videogames: It's happening to them, and it could be happening to you, too!
Well, OK, not really. Game addiction is a term that's thrown around pretty liberally these days. Horror stories of people spending their entire lives in front of World of WarCraft are even making it to the TV news. But for most of us, gaming's just a hobby -- even if it's a hobby that we tend to take rather seriously. The line between hobby and habit is a blurry one, though, and it's not easily understood. When it comes to doing something you enjoy, how much is too much?
You know what else never ends? A hamster wheel. The inability to win, beat the game, or just finish is the reason MMOs never interested me.
That is also the reason that most Atari 2600 games never interesting me.
This is in no way a new thing. This is caused by most Americans not giving a rats-ass about the quality of their food and a government that is bent on protecting farmers over the consumers.
A while ago some local dairy farmers started marking their milk cartons to tell the public that their milk does not come from cows that receive hormone injections to increase yields. Farmers are not allowed to do this by the government for the same reasons as the mad cow testing here.
Our government has something against informed consumers when it comes to food me thinks.
You just have to add an awkward pause before you say it. :-p
For the same placement, that's "AOE" for dvorak users. When the bindings are not changed, we have to deal with what would be ",a;h" on a qwerty keyboard. Another words the buttons are all over the map with no logical sense....
In short, my grandmother who has voted Democrat for the last 50 or 60 years will now almost certainly vote Republican.
I just shat my pants. I was just thinking the exact same thing. Props for insightfulness.
Remove the crappy software, raise the price, and sell the computer as a "premium" edition. People aren't going to stop buying computers.
Interesting idea. But it's a marketing nightmare.
Premium edition features:
-Less software
-More expensive
-No preinstalled spyware by us and our.."friends"
I don't know much about the extension. The feature was originally planned for FF3 so there is a good change they sliced it off as an extension for now, which would explain why it has been around for a bit.
I only wish that MS Office 2007 would run on Linux, I would pay for it and use it in a heartbeat. But I am not about to use MS's bloated, insecure operating system to get it.
Lock in. PWND.
..that will definitely be craved by many Slashdot users, and not because of the gift shopping or use of public terminals. Question is how long it will take before Firefox sees its market share diminish because of this feature, and, consequently, how long it will take Firefox to include it in an update.
Considering that private browsing appears to already be included with 3.1 and the betas were around Sept 9th the last time I checked, I don't think the Moz folks are quaking in their boots yet. The feature is likely to hit both browsers roughtly at the same time.
http://ostatic.com/168982-blog/are-you-ready-for-firefox-3-1
The problem isn't taxing smoking per se. The problem is that when you add a tax on something like smoking the state now spends that new revenue. What happens when people stop smoking because the tax is so high? What do you do when you lose that revenue that you've become accustomed to spending (and we all know that the goal of government is to spend every penny it receives)?
Speed up the timer on traffic lights and install light/speeding cameras? Is this a trick question?
New York, in particular, is disgusting. They have a tax policy that reflects decades of liberal orthodoxy and the stupidity of the results just staggers the mind. I mean, they raise taxes on cigarettes, and are suddenly horrified to find that people do not buy cigarettes in New York. Now, what do you think the enlightened liberals do up there? Do you think they set the tax at a more reasonable level? No... they call out the cops and pass even -more- laws designed to try and ban people from cigarettes from out of state.
I was always under the impression that it was just a part of a greater anti-cigarette campaign. (No smoking in bars etc included.) It's almost guaranteed that health insurance companies are taking a large roll in all of this too. The interesting thing is rising taxes on cigarettes is actually a worldwide phenomenon. Just check out http://www.earth-policy.org/Alerts/Alert2.htm or google some articles.
That the clone Mac were competitive is really more an indicator of Apple's mid 90s lack on innovation.
Not exactly. But you aren't totally out in left field either. The clones were supposedly free-riding on Apple's R&D for mother board designs etc. Apple later figured out they weren't recouping the costs from licensing and the clone makers sold cheaper/faster hardware than Apple because they didn't have to reinvent the wheel. (Remember, this was when Apple was the holy grail of "Not Invented Here")
Read up some more on "Mac clones nearly killed Apple" at wikipedia.
No no no. The Democratic Convention site says it only supports Safari 3 on Mac OS X.
I don't get it. If they say they're compatible with Firefox - as in web browser - why does that browser need to run on a particular operating system? Since invention of flash video we are free from unnecessary plugins and related burden. Just enter address, and let it play. But I guess politicians never opt for easy solutions.
Or the fact that Safari is not supported on Windows?
And whenever there is a touch panel it will also be clogged by the dirty fingers people have. Just take a look at some people's keyboards where a large amount of brownish residue of unknown origin is accumulated. Many remotes also have an accumulation of some residue that you probably don't want to examine further, and by having a touch display you will get that residue even more visible.
While mostly true, the major point that you are missing is is that touch screens, unlike keyboards and remotes, are easily cleanable to a mostly presentable state. People with glasses probably already know the drill.
:%s/glasses/device with touch screen
If you're at a public terminal and have disinfecting wipes, a touchscreen might actually be preferable, as strange as that sounds.
Because cheats impress babes. left-right-left-right-a-b-start! left-right-left-right-a-b-start! I think I feel tingley.
I mean...Foxfire 3 is still in experimental in a lot of distributions. What a way to annoy users into switching to Epiphany or Konqueuer/Dolphin.
There is two versions of Flash decoding libraries, one called Gnash and another called Swfdec. I still wonder why they don't work together, but hey, they are open source and both has kinda different visions how to deal with Flash proprietary stuff.
From http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/30 is a sorta answer:
LWN: Some LWN readers have complained that having two projects aimed at implementing Flash is divisive and wasteful. How would you respond to those readers?
Benjamin: The optimal number of projects for a given project space sounds like a good PhD thesis topic. Having multiple projects in a space, or multiple solutions to a problem is simply how things work in the community. Any non-trivial bug or project space has multiple solutions, and often one cannot determine which is the best solution until all have been tried. Also, people working on these projects are real people with real interests and complex motivations for working on particular projects. Simplifying it into "you currently work on A, so you'd instead like working on B in the same project space" is unrealistic. And IMO, divisiveness between similar projects often has more to do with fanboys than it has to do with developers, who obviously share interests and experiences.
the Wii is stuck somewhere between 1.5x-2.0x times more powerful then the Gamecube and quite a bit of that additional power is already eaten up by 16:9/480p output vs 4:3/480i output that the Gamecube did.
If you're going to beat Nintendo up on it's lack of effort on high definition gaming, at least use some facts. The GameCube supports 480p as long as you buy the digital out port. Getting the cable for the digital port required ordering it directly from Nintendo by mail. Many games did not support progressive scan because support was not mandatory for GameCube games and getting the cable was difficult. To load a Gamecube game in progressive scan mode you hold down the b button while it turns on if I remember. Later in the GameCube's life cycle, Nintendo removed the digital out port to cut costs.
The difference is *FAR* bigger then just HD. For one very important thing there is anti-aliasing, which the Wii doesn't do and causes all Wii games look pretty sucky on a big screen.
Antialiasing is usually used for textures in the game, not for upscaling the resolution. The Wii is oblivious to HD (it has no hdmi port), so it can't upscale anything itself. It's all left to the TV. (I hope your TV has good upscaling algorithms! If they used Antialiasing, then it will be nice and blurry....)
Completely wrong, I guess that myth will never die. Its pretty much equally powerful then the stuff from the last generation, its hardware can't even run some effects that the Xbox1 could do, due to the lack of shader, so you won't see a game like Riddick on the Wii ever.
The Wii does not natively support some of the shaders the orginal XBox had. The PS2 did not natively support antialiasing in the hardware like the GameCube and the Xbox did. But many games emulated antialiasing in software, sometimes getting better results than the hardware algorithms. If some enterprising developers tried to use that extra %50 horse power, it _may_ be possible. ( http://wii.ign.com/articles/867/867498p1.html ) The Conduit may be that kind of game.
So another words, the blue screen was caused by a faulty driver produced by a chinese company that makes a US company look bad (through a knee-jerk reaction)? I sense a conspiracy here...