First of all, this is a move by congress, no one is bashing "The Administration"
No harm, no foul, huh? How about the time it took to patch my file transfer program. I'm sure my employers don't appreciate the extra money spent. Not to mention tying up our IT staff trying to get time clocks/etc. fixed when the Windows patch f#$%ed up the time then fixed it again two days later. There's two days of pay for the IT staff, not to mention lost time where other things didn't get fixed.
And it's us who look like giant douches for complaining?!!
Well, the only bug I've had with remotely positive effects was a 2D graph control. Two properties I gave it were Vertical padding and horizantal padding (area of blank space around the plot for captions, etc.). The control plotted dissipation & static pressure vs. air flow. Of course, you have to scale the values into pixels on the screen, and the control was re-sizable. If your padding was high and your control size was small, the scale factor could end up negative and the whole thing would end up mirrored (both vertically and horizontally. Well, if you dragged the control around just right, it would appear it was rotating around on a 3D axis. Figuring I'd chew up some CPU time and give the engineers a bit of a show, I then had the curves rotate into place when they were initially displayed. Not much of a useful feature, but I guess its the only bug that wasn't really negative.
Xbox offers game demos at ~1 Gig each. They have an impressive & growing library of TV shows, Game & Movie Previews, and movies you can download as well. Much of it is offered in high def. High def video takes up some major disk space. I had 20 gigs filled on the Xbox very quickly. Since I don't have any hi def cable or disk drive, I'd like to download certain things just to check it out. However, I can't because I'd have to delete a bunch of stuff I don't want to.
The PS3 allows you to add any media you want to it. You can rip DVDs on the computer and put them right on the drive. (Xbox isn't as easy) Fills up pretty fast.
Also, the hard drive isn't exactly a very expensive part of the machine, no need to skimp on that, especially since a larger drive encourages users to download premium content.
This goes for both Sony and MS. Both machines are not only game consoles, but hi-def multi-media machines as well. Why in the world would they skimp on hard drive space to begin with. MS should be truly ashamed. You can't even find a 20 gig HDD anymore. They just aren't functional. And out of all the system components, the hard drive is one of the cheapest parts. It is especially bad considering that MS has a huge lineup of downloadable media and demos that are at minimum 250 MB each. I'd say it was a horrible move for both the PS3 & Xbox not have 100Gig+ right from the start. At very least Sony started with 3X more disk space than the Xbox.
Personally, I can't make any sense out of why either would sell with such small drives. There isn't much difference in price between to jump to a 120 Gig drive, and there isn't a shortage or lead time problem with making such a drive. All you are doing is pissing off customers and preventing people from downloading premium online content because they are out of disk space.
The Wii is fun, but It can't pull off a game like Oblivion, where half the experience is the visual world and characters around you drawing you into the game. It also doesn't have the power for an very immersive environment for an FPS. Although it is possible for a game to have weak graphics and still be more fun, thats up to the game developers. I'd rather have a syatem where they can have the potential to do both well, rather than one that can only do one of them.
Good point, although DVD vs. Blu-Ray isn't nearly the hurdle to developers as hard disk vs. no hard disk is. I agree in thinking that excluding the hard drive should not be an option, but I think the optical disk drive type being optional is more benign. I do see your point though.
Well, their most direct competitor is MS, who have done worse in one move (charging money for Windows ME) than anything Sony has done. So if the hardware is to be shunned due to the corporate policies of it's maker, the Wii is the only logical choice (as far as console gaming is concerned, btw - disclaimer to avoid the flaming from PC-only gamers). But the Wii just doesn't have the power and graphics to satify the gaming population. So if corporate policy is the basis, I then really don't see how Sony deserves to be such a villian by comparison.
I get it alot, and sometimes it is my fault. I don't always know alot about the program I am writing is used. Well, I know how it is used, I just don't know alot about the typical results are. I am happy to defer to their experience if they see strange results and want it checked out. Either you find some obscure bug and fix it, or you find a user error. Either way, you come out more confident in your program. Likely, you get paid either way, so there is no reason to be annoyed about it. Unless you are a flawless programmer that gets enough time to test every possible sequence of user actions and can predict any strange thing a user will input into a databse and account for it.
Well, now having a Xbox 360 and Wii, and a lot of playing time on thePS3, I'd have to say the PS3 gets a worse rap than it deserves. Well, at least it doesn't deserve the ire it is shown. They could have been more competetive by making the Blu-Ray optional (which there is little use for as of yet). As far as the interface goes, the PS3 is a bit more versatile than the 360, but the 360 is much easier. Combined with a PSP, it can do some pretty sweet stuff. I hear you can do some sweet stuff on the 360 if you have a Windows Media Center PC as well, but I don't know and won't find out.
The PS3 is quieter than the Xbox, and has a much better hard drive setup. However, for all it's much advertised power, I certainly haven't noticed it. It could be the games, but nothing I have seen would lead me to believe it is more powerful. Which, I guess, brings up games. So far PS3 is far behind the 360 in games. And that's saying alot with the 360 not having a super line-up yet.
But, I'm still waiting for my Xbox back from MS after the dvd drive crapped out. Just like the original xbox, the DVD drives seem to be good for about a year, while my original PS2 drive is still working.
Anyway, for the money, I'd take a 360 and a Wii over the PS3 anyday. The 360 for playing alone & online, and the Wii for when friends are over.
Hollywood stays away from anything else because that's the only proven seller. My guess is that Hitchhiker's Guide was made only because LOTR did so well. Thinking that the books had enough of a cult following (like LOTR), they went with it. It didn't make alot of money, so it just re-enforced the idea that you can't make a sci-fi space movie that's not an action thriller, even if you do spend the money on special effects.
Well, the Comedy Central site does have a pretty large amount of video up, with their own advertisements. That has to be pretty annoying to them, that they put up their own infrastructure for web video, yet everyone is watching the same clips on YouTube and Google is getting the advertising $.
Plus it's the same content they are trying to sell over Windows and Xbox Live.
How about locking the f***ing cabin door??!!! Doesn't cost anything, no one gets hijacked. Instead lets make a remote control terminal to fly the plane into a building. Only good old fat government defense contracts can bring us such stupidity. Heck, lets give the contract to Diebold and let the central control program be an Access VBA App on a Windows machine connected to the internet.
I've been a live member on the 360 for nearly a year now, and have really liked it. I play alot of games online and have never seen any serious issues. Every once in a while there might be a laggy session, but they seem few and far between. What I'm suprised at is how much content I have purchased via Live. Like this morning, Worms hit the Live arcade. I started the download as I walked out the door for work.
Live seems to encourage impulse buys. They make it easy to get points (just click confirm and they charge your credit card), so when you see the advertisement for your favorite South Park episode, it is a few button presses away. I've eneded up buying alot of stuff on there that you don't find at your local Wal Mart. At least not up here on the rural Canadian border. There just isn't enough interest in this area to keep Venture Bros, Harvey Birdman, Sealab, etc. in stock.
Plus I figure it's saved me money in the long run. Being able to demo most games is pretty sweet. For example, the classic arcade ridge racer games were always fun. I would have bought it at $50+ when it came out, were it not for the demo when I discovered you can drift the wrong way around a corner! There are a few other games I would normally just buy, were it not for finding a deal-breaking flaw in the demo.
Anyway, I'd say I'm very happy with Xbox live. Not so happy with the xbox 360 hardware issues I have had, but Live has been well worth it, IMO. So much so that I don't really want to send my box with the malfunctioning disc drive back, because I still have so many arcade and video titles to play with.
Not any I owned. Have replaced three original Xbox drives so far. However, I always bought the cheapest one. They were only $25, so that may have something to do with it. I did have to replace one PS2 drive right away, but that one has lasted a good 5 years now. I have yet to have any xbox drive last 2 years.
I have mine on the way back to MS right now. DVD drive went out completely after 8 months. Just like the Original Xbox. I actually consider myself lucky mine went out in time to be covered by the extended warranty. I think that will always be something Playstaion has up on the 360, hardware quality. Obviously MS learned nothing from the crappy xbox drives the first go round.
I'm anxiously waiting for my Wii Zapper. I think that will bring a whole new level of fun to muliplayer shooters. Before worrying about Wii 2.0, they need to get the zapper out and relase a new bond title for the Wii.
That line blaming video games stuck out like a sore thumb. For one, there is no game that is nearly as sick as these kids. Not even in GTA can you smash a homeless man's face in with a brick, rub your shit in his face, destroy his camp, beat him with his grill, and finally shove his head in the grill you beat him with earlier. Secondly, even if could do such a thing in a game, it's still an effing game! It's not the game's fault they have no concept of right vs. wrong or reality vs. fantasy.
Why do these things, or any creature that spend their lives at such depths have eyes and coloration? Granted, it doesn't appear that many of these creatures has evolved in a long time, but many cave dwelling creatures seem to loose their eyes and pigmentation relatively fast.
That would depend on who you ask. Among the accepted (well, widely debated) definitions of fascism, the common ground is an authoritarian government. Anything beyond that, the word has no universal definition and is really becomes just a political football. Some even say Fascism is not a generic term that can apply to anything but the Benito Mussolini regime.
Since it was being used in a general sense, I'd say the only common definition would be to assume it is synonymous with authoritarianism, and the opposite of anarchism.
Being fascist has nothing to do with which side of the economic scale you are on. You need not look far to find a fascist of liberal or conservative persuasion. The main difference between the two is why they demand control. A liberal would propose such measures to keep corporations from engaging in consumer fraud or astroturfing. A conservative may do so to allow corporations to better keep tabs on employee whistleblowers. When doing it in the interest of national security, left or right doesn't matter, both can be overly militaristic.
See Hitler and Stalin. Hitler was right-wing, Stalin was left-wing. Both were as militaristic and both were fascist.
Wherever these advanced users are at, please send some my way. As an R&D programmer and backup admin, I get hit by unskilled users twice. Users that manage to get a completely dumbed down interface wrong, or a user that wonders why they can view a PDF after deleting acrobat reader (only God knows why).
In our company, everyone who has any amount of talent on the computer becomes a part of IT at least in some small way. And I know we certainly wish we had more people we could trust with more responsibility. We only have one dedicated IT man for 7 servers, 75+ users and 4 plants connected over a VPN pipeline.
It all comes down to trust. In our case, we don't trust their abilities. It's not that we don't trust their motives. We wish we had users that were more advanced. If you do and look at it as anything other than a blessing, you have a serious problem and should really be looking into why you have users you can't (or refuse to) trust.
That's a pretty old idea. During WWII, the Allies first studied the practicality of strapping engines on icebergs and using them as aircraft carriers. Finding that unsuitable, a fleet of ships made of ice were actually commisioned. Well, technically the ships would be made of an ice/sawdust mix called picrete(sp?). That would have surely been a sight to see. But the project was scrapped when Canada couldn't build them as fast as they were needed (a near logistical impossibility).
So I don't know that driving icebergs is all that crackpot.
Slashdot Mirror
Give you some hints:
"Yeah, you betcha, eh." is an accepted common response to many questions, and Ronald Reagan never won an electoral vote here.
If you're still stumped, this magical land has 10,000 lakes, borders Canada, and is the source of the Mississippi river.
First of all, this is a move by congress, no one is bashing "The Administration"
No harm, no foul, huh? How about the time it took to patch my file transfer program. I'm sure my employers don't appreciate the extra money spent. Not to mention tying up our IT staff trying to get time clocks/etc. fixed when the Windows patch f#$%ed up the time then fixed it again two days later. There's two days of pay for the IT staff, not to mention lost time where other things didn't get fixed.
And it's us who look like giant douches for complaining?!!
Well, the only bug I've had with remotely positive effects was a 2D graph control. Two properties I gave it were Vertical padding and horizantal padding (area of blank space around the plot for captions, etc.). The control plotted dissipation & static pressure vs. air flow. Of course, you have to scale the values into pixels on the screen, and the control was re-sizable. If your padding was high and your control size was small, the scale factor could end up negative and the whole thing would end up mirrored (both vertically and horizontally. Well, if you dragged the control around just right, it would appear it was rotating around on a 3D axis. Figuring I'd chew up some CPU time and give the engineers a bit of a show, I then had the curves rotate into place when they were initially displayed. Not much of a useful feature, but I guess its the only bug that wasn't really negative.
Xbox offers game demos at ~1 Gig each. They have an impressive & growing library of TV shows, Game & Movie Previews, and movies you can download as well. Much of it is offered in high def. High def video takes up some major disk space. I had 20 gigs filled on the Xbox very quickly. Since I don't have any hi def cable or disk drive, I'd like to download certain things just to check it out. However, I can't because I'd have to delete a bunch of stuff I don't want to.
The PS3 allows you to add any media you want to it. You can rip DVDs on the computer and put them right on the drive. (Xbox isn't as easy) Fills up pretty fast.
Also, the hard drive isn't exactly a very expensive part of the machine, no need to skimp on that, especially since a larger drive encourages users to download premium content.
This goes for both Sony and MS. Both machines are not only game consoles, but hi-def multi-media machines as well. Why in the world would they skimp on hard drive space to begin with. MS should be truly ashamed. You can't even find a 20 gig HDD anymore. They just aren't functional. And out of all the system components, the hard drive is one of the cheapest parts. It is especially bad considering that MS has a huge lineup of downloadable media and demos that are at minimum 250 MB each. I'd say it was a horrible move for both the PS3 & Xbox not have 100Gig+ right from the start. At very least Sony started with 3X more disk space than the Xbox.
Personally, I can't make any sense out of why either would sell with such small drives. There isn't much difference in price between to jump to a 120 Gig drive, and there isn't a shortage or lead time problem with making such a drive. All you are doing is pissing off customers and preventing people from downloading premium online content because they are out of disk space.
The Wii is fun, but It can't pull off a game like Oblivion, where half the experience is the visual world and characters around you drawing you into the game. It also doesn't have the power for an very immersive environment for an FPS. Although it is possible for a game to have weak graphics and still be more fun, thats up to the game developers. I'd rather have a syatem where they can have the potential to do both well, rather than one that can only do one of them.
Good point, although DVD vs. Blu-Ray isn't nearly the hurdle to developers as hard disk vs. no hard disk is. I agree in thinking that excluding the hard drive should not be an option, but I think the optical disk drive type being optional is more benign. I do see your point though.
Well, their most direct competitor is MS, who have done worse in one move (charging money for Windows ME) than anything Sony has done. So if the hardware is to be shunned due to the corporate policies of it's maker, the Wii is the only logical choice (as far as console gaming is concerned, btw - disclaimer to avoid the flaming from PC-only gamers). But the Wii just doesn't have the power and graphics to satify the gaming population. So if corporate policy is the basis, I then really don't see how Sony deserves to be such a villian by comparison.
I get it alot, and sometimes it is my fault. I don't always know alot about the program I am writing is used. Well, I know how it is used, I just don't know alot about the typical results are. I am happy to defer to their experience if they see strange results and want it checked out. Either you find some obscure bug and fix it, or you find a user error. Either way, you come out more confident in your program. Likely, you get paid either way, so there is no reason to be annoyed about it. Unless you are a flawless programmer that gets enough time to test every possible sequence of user actions and can predict any strange thing a user will input into a databse and account for it.
Well, now having a Xbox 360 and Wii, and a lot of playing time on thePS3, I'd have to say the PS3 gets a worse rap than it deserves. Well, at least it doesn't deserve the ire it is shown. They could have been more competetive by making the Blu-Ray optional (which there is little use for as of yet). As far as the interface goes, the PS3 is a bit more versatile than the 360, but the 360 is much easier. Combined with a PSP, it can do some pretty sweet stuff. I hear you can do some sweet stuff on the 360 if you have a Windows Media Center PC as well, but I don't know and won't find out.
The PS3 is quieter than the Xbox, and has a much better hard drive setup. However, for all it's much advertised power, I certainly haven't noticed it. It could be the games, but nothing I have seen would lead me to believe it is more powerful. Which, I guess, brings up games. So far PS3 is far behind the 360 in games. And that's saying alot with the 360 not having a super line-up yet.
But, I'm still waiting for my Xbox back from MS after the dvd drive crapped out. Just like the original xbox, the DVD drives seem to be good for about a year, while my original PS2 drive is still working.
Anyway, for the money, I'd take a 360 and a Wii over the PS3 anyday. The 360 for playing alone & online, and the Wii for when friends are over.
Hollywood stays away from anything else because that's the only proven seller. My guess is that Hitchhiker's Guide was made only because LOTR did so well. Thinking that the books had enough of a cult following (like LOTR), they went with it. It didn't make alot of money, so it just re-enforced the idea that you can't make a sci-fi space movie that's not an action thriller, even if you do spend the money on special effects.
Well, the Comedy Central site does have a pretty large amount of video up, with their own advertisements. That has to be pretty annoying to them, that they put up their own infrastructure for web video, yet everyone is watching the same clips on YouTube and Google is getting the advertising $. Plus it's the same content they are trying to sell over Windows and Xbox Live.
User: UBL has requested control of this flight control terminal, cancel or allow?
How about locking the f***ing cabin door??!!! Doesn't cost anything, no one gets hijacked. Instead lets make a remote control terminal to fly the plane into a building. Only good old fat government defense contracts can bring us such stupidity. Heck, lets give the contract to Diebold and let the central control program be an Access VBA App on a Windows machine connected to the internet.
I've been a live member on the 360 for nearly a year now, and have really liked it. I play alot of games online and have never seen any serious issues. Every once in a while there might be a laggy session, but they seem few and far between. What I'm suprised at is how much content I have purchased via Live. Like this morning, Worms hit the Live arcade. I started the download as I walked out the door for work.
Live seems to encourage impulse buys. They make it easy to get points (just click confirm and they charge your credit card), so when you see the advertisement for your favorite South Park episode, it is a few button presses away. I've eneded up buying alot of stuff on there that you don't find at your local Wal Mart. At least not up here on the rural Canadian border. There just isn't enough interest in this area to keep Venture Bros, Harvey Birdman, Sealab, etc. in stock.
Plus I figure it's saved me money in the long run. Being able to demo most games is pretty sweet. For example, the classic arcade ridge racer games were always fun. I would have bought it at $50+ when it came out, were it not for the demo when I discovered you can drift the wrong way around a corner! There are a few other games I would normally just buy, were it not for finding a deal-breaking flaw in the demo.
Anyway, I'd say I'm very happy with Xbox live. Not so happy with the xbox 360 hardware issues I have had, but Live has been well worth it, IMO. So much so that I don't really want to send my box with the malfunctioning disc drive back, because I still have so many arcade and video titles to play with.
Not any I owned. Have replaced three original Xbox drives so far. However, I always bought the cheapest one. They were only $25, so that may have something to do with it. I did have to replace one PS2 drive right away, but that one has lasted a good 5 years now. I have yet to have any xbox drive last 2 years.
I have mine on the way back to MS right now. DVD drive went out completely after 8 months. Just like the Original Xbox. I actually consider myself lucky mine went out in time to be covered by the extended warranty. I think that will always be something Playstaion has up on the 360, hardware quality. Obviously MS learned nothing from the crappy xbox drives the first go round.
Zapper would give a more natural wrist angle
I'm anxiously waiting for my Wii Zapper. I think that will bring a whole new level of fun to muliplayer shooters. Before worrying about Wii 2.0, they need to get the zapper out and relase a new bond title for the Wii.
That line blaming video games stuck out like a sore thumb. For one, there is no game that is nearly as sick as these kids. Not even in GTA can you smash a homeless man's face in with a brick, rub your shit in his face, destroy his camp, beat him with his grill, and finally shove his head in the grill you beat him with earlier. Secondly, even if could do such a thing in a game, it's still an effing game! It's not the game's fault they have no concept of right vs. wrong or reality vs. fantasy.
Why do these things, or any creature that spend their lives at such depths have eyes and coloration? Granted, it doesn't appear that many of these creatures has evolved in a long time, but many cave dwelling creatures seem to loose their eyes and pigmentation relatively fast.
That would depend on who you ask. Among the accepted (well, widely debated) definitions of fascism, the common ground is an authoritarian government. Anything beyond that, the word has no universal definition and is really becomes just a political football. Some even say Fascism is not a generic term that can apply to anything but the Benito Mussolini regime. Since it was being used in a general sense, I'd say the only common definition would be to assume it is synonymous with authoritarianism, and the opposite of anarchism.
Being fascist has nothing to do with which side of the economic scale you are on. You need not look far to find a fascist of liberal or conservative persuasion. The main difference between the two is why they demand control. A liberal would propose such measures to keep corporations from engaging in consumer fraud or astroturfing. A conservative may do so to allow corporations to better keep tabs on employee whistleblowers. When doing it in the interest of national security, left or right doesn't matter, both can be overly militaristic.
See Hitler and Stalin. Hitler was right-wing, Stalin was left-wing. Both were as militaristic and both were fascist.
Wherever these advanced users are at, please send some my way. As an R&D programmer and backup admin, I get hit by unskilled users twice. Users that manage to get a completely dumbed down interface wrong, or a user that wonders why they can view a PDF after deleting acrobat reader (only God knows why).
In our company, everyone who has any amount of talent on the computer becomes a part of IT at least in some small way. And I know we certainly wish we had more people we could trust with more responsibility. We only have one dedicated IT man for 7 servers, 75+ users and 4 plants connected over a VPN pipeline.
It all comes down to trust. In our case, we don't trust their abilities. It's not that we don't trust their motives. We wish we had users that were more advanced. If you do and look at it as anything other than a blessing, you have a serious problem and should really be looking into why you have users you can't (or refuse to) trust.
That's a pretty old idea. During WWII, the Allies first studied the practicality of strapping engines on icebergs and using them as aircraft carriers. Finding that unsuitable, a fleet of ships made of ice were actually commisioned. Well, technically the ships would be made of an ice/sawdust mix called picrete(sp?). That would have surely been a sight to see. But the project was scrapped when Canada couldn't build them as fast as they were needed (a near logistical impossibility).
So I don't know that driving icebergs is all that crackpot.