If (the big if) the trigger is flashing lights, then there could be a good number of cases reported. The only thing I got from the doctors on the flashing light part was it is a trigger "sometimes".
And that really is a pretty big "if". The vast majority of people with seizure disorders are unaffected by flashing lights. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think the number who are is in the low single digit percents. And then even among those who are, different people are more or less sensitive and respond differently to different frequencies of flashing/strobing. I'm one of those lucky winners who's epileptic and has photosensitive seizures, and while some things cause problems (Times Square was a nightmare before I was properly medicated), I've never in my life had any reaction to any TV/monitor/projector/fluorescent lights/etc., aside from the usual headache most people would get using an interlaced CRT at 45 Hz (had one at work back in the day, and I don't think even any normal people could look at it without getting irritated). Some other people do, though. Anyway, point being that people with seizure disorders are a small subset of the population, and people who have photosensitive seizures are a small subset of that group, and people who have them triggered by any given frequency is a subset of that group, so it's not terribly likely, even though it does happen and can kind of suck when it does.
Aside from adding that, though, it's nice to see posts from someone about that where they actually know what they're talking about for a change, instead of the usual confused stereotypes, and in a way that people can easily understand and will hopefully learn something from. Only thing I'd really consider changing is that grand/petit mal are kind of going out of favor as terms these days, because they're a bit out of date and not as useful for categorizing things these days now that more is known how they work. Now they're tonic-clonic and absence seizures, both of which are generalized (i.e. involve the entire brain), and neither of which is actually all that common. Partial seizures (which have a focal point in a much smaller part of the brain and can be either simple or complex, depending on whether consciousness/awareness/memory is affected) are more common. Of course, now they're working to change those terms to split things up and rearrange them some more, too, but that's the current state of things. On the off chance anyone even reads this and is curious, I guess. Heh.
Also, just thought you might like to know... Et al. is short for et alii and translates literally as, "with others." etc. is short for et cetera and translates roughly as, "with other objects". There is a people/things distinction. So if the other stuff is people, "et al." and if the other stuff is things, "etc.".
It's probably more accurate to say "and" instead of "with" (which is where the ampersand came from; if you look at it, you can sort of see how it came from smooshing an e and t together, and you'll occasionally see "&c" as an abbreviation for "et cetera", usually in older documents), but yeah, that's a good distinction to at least be aware of (and which I sadly forget about and am not in the habit of using "et al." consistently).
It may be trivial, but it's still enough of an inconvenience that over the past year or two I've moved heavily away from using my Wii much to using my gaming/media center PC instead. They're hooked up to the same screen and speakers, so it's not like one is more accessible than the other. It's just that when I want to goof off for a bit with a game or movie or TV show, it's much easier to be able to get to it with a couple clicks than to have to go to the other side of the room, find the disc I want, and wait for the Wii to boot up and get through half a dozen warning screens about how we're all going to die if I don't read the safety information and wear my wrist strap.
It's not a horrible inconvenience, and I still use the Wii when there's something specific I want to do with it, but the PC offers much less "resistance", so it gets a lot more use these days both when I could do the same thing on either it or the Wii or when I'm looking for something to entertain myself with but am not sure yet what I have in mind and want to look at my options. The Wii would probably see more use if I could install everything and run without swapping discs (without having to mod it first) and it didn't have to basically reboot every time I go back to the main menu to switch tasks.
That same sort of thing does happen in limited parts of the US (mostly the northeast, which is older and denser, since larger amounts of the cities predate cars). I live in Boston, which is relatively compact, and you're likely to run into all sorts of people on the subway. Even more so in New York, and to some extent a few other places like Chicago.
On the other hand, I also have family in Detroit and Cleveland, and since I don't drive, I basically end up unable to leave the house and do anything without waiting for someone else to get a ride with them. Everything is enormously spread out, public transportation is nearly nonexistent, and most people wouldn't be caught dead on it if they had the choice.
Kind of a weird contrast. Not surprisingly, given my lack of driving, I prefer European-style cities (whether actually in Europe or not) to the newer car-based US type.
Sure they have. Look what they did with the record companies... remember when Amazon was fighting to price music at less than $0.99, they were fighting against Apple and the record companies Apple had brainwashed into selling all tracks for at least $0.99.
While I do agree with some parts of your post, this isn't quite accurate. Apple was refusing to let them sell anything for a different price from $0.99, i.e. they also refused to let them sell songs for more than that. They were enforcing constant, non-variable pricing for all songs, not a lower limit. At the same time, places like Wal-Mart had already been selling the same songs for $0.89 for a while already.
And as an added bonus, the 360 version has plenty of framerate issues on top of that. It's the very, very rare example (only one I can think of, actually) of a Squeenix game that runs better in the "crappy" PC port than the console version, which was unexpected considering their long and glorious history of atrocious PC ports (even Gyromancer, which is newer than TLR, is totally borked on the PC).
Except last time I checked, you could just pirate the DLC for the EA games, too, and if you do that you don't have to go through the hassle of creating an EA account and going through the clusterfuck that is trying to tie your EA and BioWare accounts together (and potentially Steam, too). Still ends up being less painful to just download it for free, at least for the single-player games they've been doing that with lately, like DA:O and ME2. I'm holding out in the hope that there'll eventually be some edition of them released in a year or two that I can buy with all the DLC and everything included that doesn't require me to go through all that crap, but the more time passes and the more stories I see about things like this, the less hopeful I am.
Just for the hell of it, I tried both on an ancient iMac, with all of a 500 MHz G3 in it and the latest Safari. They were both about the same speed: Flash was just over 2 fps, and HTML5 was just under 2 fps. I actually expected a lot worse. The Flash one scales to fit my relatively small window (the screen can only do 1024x768, after all), but the HTML5 one has scrollbars. No idea how/if that affects it, but I've seen stranger things make a noticeable difference. Also, the Flash one stutters and drops a lot in speed temporarily if I click on it, while the HTML5 one doesn't seem to mind at all. Considering other people are getting 10 fps with multi-core CPUs (even a single core of which is dramatically faster for just about anything than this is) I'm amazed this thing can pull off 2 fps. It can't even handle the low-res/low-quality videos on YouTube without choking and dying miserably.
There are a bunch of other games similar to those, too. However, they're all turn-based strategy, not RTS like he was talking about. While I and plenty of other people like those, there are a lot of people who don't like anything turn-based and think it's too slow and doesn't have enough action.
Whenever I think of switching to an intel cpu I give up since I cannot figure out how to compare them to an amd cpu
Look at benchmarks (preferably from multiple sources), particularly of things you actually tend to use the CPU for? There are plenty of people out there who've already figured out how whichever CPUs you're considering compare to each other for <insert purpose here>, whether it's compiling code, playing games, encoding video, running simulations, or whatever else. Works for me. This past fall, I found a few different ones in the price/performance range I was looking for, then poked around on places like Slickdeals to see if any of them were on sale, and now I have a shiny new CPU that I've been quite happy with.
Totally coincidentally, it involved me switching from AMD to Intel (and then a month or two later, my video card from Nvidia to ATI/AMD), because they happened to have what I wanted at the price I could afford at the time.
See also: Okami, where the entire game is based around the Shinto religion. Many of the characters, including the player character, are based on Shinto deities, and the plot is a mishmash of a bunch of myths and legends and references to a whole lot of different Shinto-related things, to the point that you'll miss half of what's going on if you're not at least vaguely familiar with the stories involved (and even if you're vaguely familiar with them, like I was, if you're not Japanese, you'll still end up looking stuff up on Wikipedia on a regular basis).
If you want a place where high-school history of their own nation is a complete and utter whitewash, look to the United States of America.
Yeah, we certainly have our share of that. A history grad student friend's pet peeve was how minimal to nonexistent the teaching of stuff like the Trail of Tears tends to be in the US.
Most of the world has a computer barely capable of 3D graphics. If you want a game like that, look into World of Goo, Braid, Mahjongg, a number of board games, or something similar.
While World of Goo fits in that category quite well (and is a whole lot of fun, too), Braid (which is also quite good), despite being entirely 2D, is actually brutal to run on even relatively new hardware. It does a lot of wacky shader stuff for all the visual effects and becomes nearly unplayable if it can't maintain a consistently high framerate. My Geforce 8600 GT couldn't even keep up with it until I manually edited some of the relatively undocumented hidden settings. It's not an especially fast card anymore these days, but it absolutely blows away any on-board stuff, so I don't see it working out terribly well for people without a fairly decent discrete video card unless it's been patched to let you disable more stuff (preferably in-game) and auto-detect what your hardware can do better. Most people aren't going to put up with fiddling with command line options just to get the thing to run.
Can you even name ONE adult female player character off the top of your head that doesn't fit this mold (must be human and not created by the player, sorry)?
Just glancing at the foot or so of my game shelf I can see from here that isn't blocked by my monitor, Jade from Beyond Good and Evil and Chell from Portal, who are each the main character in their respective games and look like normal people.
Of course, they're sitting next to P.N.03, which is pretty much the embodiment of that stereotype. Heh.
Please, just stop. It's crap like that and your original post that make people with Asperger's look bad, or at least silly through association with your blathering. As someone who's actually been officially diagnosed with it and who has as a result spent a good deal of time interacting with a number of other people both with official diagnoses and self-diagnosed via the Internet, you're just making yourself and all of us look bad, and I'm really getting tired of having to correct people's assumptions that we're all "my mommy says I'm special" like you and of being associated with people who run around making claims like that.
I don't know you or anything about you, but you come across as the stereotypical person who read about it online somewhere and identified with some of the things whatever article you found mentioned, then picked up on the bizarre subculture that seems to think everyone with Asperger's has magical powers and can do no wrong. I hate to break it to you, but it's just not true. Most of the crap you attribute to them/us in your post is completely nonsensical and unproven, and it makes you sound like some kind of aspie fanboy/zealot.
Just like any other group of people, we're all individuals with individual personalities. Last time I checked, exactly zero of the things you listed are included in the diagnostic criteria, and (probably not surprisingly, when you consider that) I've run into some people with those qualities and others with the exact opposites, in various combinations. Most of the ones you bring up aren't even stereotypically associated with it, outside of the Magical Aspie crowd.
It's just as bad as the people who think being bipolar gives you special powers and is universally a "good" thing with no downside, but that's an entirely different rant...
If you use the trip planner on mbta.com, it will actually pretend that the various subway trains are on a specific schedule and tell you when they're supposed to come. Obviously it's never actually right, but despite that, I've had pretty good luck with getting places on time by following the times it spits out at me, although that's probably mostly because it hugely overestimates how long it takes. It seems to assume that it takes ten minutes to walk 200 feet to transfer to a different train or bus, so even if everything's running way off schedule, it has enough built-in room for error that it'll still usually get you there early if you do what they tell you. Unless they spontaneously shut down the red line for several hours at a time again like kept happening last year, and then you're screwed.
Oh, and the thing about a train coming every five minutes reminds me of when I used to live on the 57 bus line. The schedule for that is similar, saying that during the busiest parts of the day, there's a bus every six minutes, or that they're less than ten minutes apart, or something like that. In theory, it's almost true, but in practice, not so much. There'll be no buses for 20 minutes, then three in a row will pass by within about 90 seconds; repeat until rush hour is over. On average, the wait between them is under ten minutes, but that doesn't really do you a whole lot of good when you're stuck standing there in the snow for almost 20 minutes. Heh.
Wait, what? I'm kind of confused. I realize Slashdot isn't a collective entity with a hive mind, but I can't figure out whether the comments on this story make me believe that more or less than usual. On one hand, all the ones that have been modded up so far say the same thing as each other, which is generally something along the lines of, "Boo hoo, Nintendo. Go cry some more. You're getting what you deserve," with a lot more consistency than usual. On the other hand, the stereotypical responses that usually show up on stories like this are missing. You guys are hurting my brain.
As you say providing Nintendo makes money on the device itself then they've really got nothing to complain about and aren't really acting any better than the RIAA/MPAA trying to force their ideal laws on foreign nations. Even if they didn't make money on the device I'm inclined to say more fool them for pursuing such a silly business model.
Speaking of hurting my brain...what does this even mean? Providing goods and/or services in exchange for money is a silly business model? What are they supposed to do, give the games away? Make paying for them completely voluntary? I don't know. Maybe that'd work. I'm guessing not terribly well, as it costs them money to make the games, and the third party companies don't get anything from the console sales, so I'm not sure how any games would get made in the first place if no one were paying for them...
Obviously someone needs to do something differently if people taking their stuff for free is causing a big problem, and bugging various governments about it may not be the right solution, but on a basic level their "silly business model" (make things people want, then sell them to people at a price that is greater than what they cost to produce but still low enough for a decent number of them to pay for them) seems pretty reasonable to me.
The other point is it's not like they even seemed to try hard to prevent piracy. Their systems are some of the most easily hackable out there so if they don't even invest in anti-piracy measures like Sony and Microsoft do then why should they expect anyone to help them if they wont help themselves?
Yes, please do encourage them to make it even more obnoxious to use various hardware/software. I never can get enough of people bitching about DRM and other types of copy protection and hardware lockouts and other crap. It's almost as much fun as when it directly affects me (Thanks, Steam, for failing to authenticate my account for ten minutes straight a couple days ago when I had exactly ten minutes to kill before I had to go do something else...I wish my Wii could do that, too).
Anyway, something that I'm really surprised that I haven't seen mentioned (at least in anything modded up that I skimmed through) is that a bunch of what Nintendo tends to complain about, at least based on what they've said in the past, is wide-scale for-profit piracy, not some guy in his basement soldering a mod chip on, particularly with places like China. I get just as irritated when people go after homebrew stuff or individual users (Hi, RIAA!), but I really have a hard time arguing with them when they say they have a problem with groups in China or Russia or wherever pressing their own copies of games/CDs/DVDs and selling them.
I'm not even sure where I'm heading with all this, but the comments today are enough sillier than usual that I had to boggle out loud at them.
FMV can make a a game's story feel disjointed from the actual gameplay.
Having just finished the PC version of Jade Empire and bitched about that exact issue, I agree wholeheartedly. The game was running at 1920x1440, all settings maxed out (on a mid-range computer, which is not hard considering it was originally an Xbox game), with AA and everything. Then it suddenly drops to a pre-rendered video at 640x480 with, aside from some of the smoke effects, generally worse quality even ignoring the drastically lower resolution, and on top of that, it was badly compressed. It's pretty jarring every single time it happens. I was kind of hoping by this point that things would be done in-engine all the time, because some games started doing that successfully years ago, but even things like Mass Effect have pre-rendered stuff in them. Someone please make it stop already?
Please, please, let me stop running into stuff like this that reminds me of how much "fun" I had repairing those over the years. I did it so many times that I was able to get it down to about 20 minutes start to finish for replacing the hard drive. After a while, you don't even have to think about it anymore, and it becomes mostly a matter of how fast you can move your fingers while still keeping them steady. The way I did it was always to set the bottom case next to the computer itself and lay the screws in the position on the case that matched up with where they went inside the computer, so everything always ends up exactly where it came from without having to remember or keep track of anything other than that. Words cannot express how relieved I am that my sister's old iBook died for good after she gave it to her boyfriend last year. With any luck, I may never see the inside of one again.
Thanks. That's a useful start, and it's interesting to see who uses it on how many games. EA is apparently the worst, to no one's surprise. The link to this page on there is good, too, which includes a bunch of StarForce and SafeDisc stuff, among other things.
I now read reviews first and foremost to find out what manner of fucktard-inspired DRM and compulsory tracking/on-line registration is involved.
I only wish reviewers included specific and exhaustive details of the DRM and on-line 'features' of every game they reviewed.
Along those lines, here's something I've been wondering about lately. With all the bitching that people do about DRM on PC games (and I've done my share of it, too), why isn't there some kind of site that lets you search for a game, and it'll tell you what kind of DRM/copy protection/other crap is included with it?
Before I buy games, I want to know if they have version x.y of SecuROM or StarForce or just require a SN be entered or a disc check or have a code wheel or make you look up the fourteenth word of the third paragraph of the twenty-ninth page of appendix H of the manual or install a keylogger that reports all your credit card data back to EA or whatever other crap might come along with it. I'd also like to be able to easily find out if a game doesn't have those things, like stuff from Stardock, and if there's a crack or patch to remove it (or preferably not install it in the first place) for ones that do, whether through GameCopyWorld or the developers, or maybe the Greatest Hits version doesn't include it in the first place. Not links to cracks or torrents of the games or even reviews or anything, just a quick and easy way to find out whether the publisher is evil or not.
Basically, it seems obvious to me that something like this should/would exist and be useful to a lot of people, judging by a lot of comments I see on here, but if it does, I can't find it, and if it doesn't, I'm not sure why. I would say I'd do it myself, but I don't have enough of the relevant data to start anything useful, and I don't trust my rather rusty web fu to do it right myself at the moment...
What are you trying to do, read a book in a room painted matte black with the light bulb on the other side of the room? I can feel 150 watt incandescent bulbs burning my retinas if I'm sitting near them or looking in their direction. I can quite comfortably read with a 25W bulb (also incandescent) in the lamp next to my bed. I tried a 15W bulb, too, but that's a bit low even for me. I realize my eyes are more sensitive to light than most people's, but the rest of my family has normal vision and generally doesn't use much more than 60W bulbs to read by. For overhead lighting, especially for a larger room, sure, you need more than that, but just to read a book... I think the only person I know who uses a lamp that bright to read by is my grandma, who's almost 90. Weird how much variation in vision and lighting preferences there is, just reading through this thread.
I have a Sansa that works like that, and I really, really wish it didn't. Trying to manage dozens of gigs of MP3s by hand and decide which ones I want to put on there is a disaster (not to mention the abortion of a UI the thing has, but that's another story entirely). Once the files are actually on it (and as long as I only want to listen to specific albums or put it on shuffle), it's fine, but it reminds me why I stopped manually organizing large numbers of files like that many years ago and never looked back. I definitely understand why some people like it in some situations, but if you're indecisive or like to change what you have on your MP3 player on a regular basis, it can be a royal pain in the ass and fairly time-consuming.
I do agree with your opinion of iTunes...on Windows. On OS X, it's rather nice and acts closer to how I want than anything else I've tried on any OS, which will come in handy with the used iPod I seem to be inheriting, although it's been getting a bit bloated in the past few releases. I refuse to install it on my PC, though, because I am in no mood to put up with all the crap you already mentioned.
Slashdot Mirror
If (the big if) the trigger is flashing lights, then there could be a good number of cases reported. The only thing I got from the doctors on the flashing light part was it is a trigger "sometimes".
And that really is a pretty big "if". The vast majority of people with seizure disorders are unaffected by flashing lights. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think the number who are is in the low single digit percents. And then even among those who are, different people are more or less sensitive and respond differently to different frequencies of flashing/strobing. I'm one of those lucky winners who's epileptic and has photosensitive seizures, and while some things cause problems (Times Square was a nightmare before I was properly medicated), I've never in my life had any reaction to any TV/monitor/projector/fluorescent lights/etc., aside from the usual headache most people would get using an interlaced CRT at 45 Hz (had one at work back in the day, and I don't think even any normal people could look at it without getting irritated). Some other people do, though. Anyway, point being that people with seizure disorders are a small subset of the population, and people who have photosensitive seizures are a small subset of that group, and people who have them triggered by any given frequency is a subset of that group, so it's not terribly likely, even though it does happen and can kind of suck when it does.
Aside from adding that, though, it's nice to see posts from someone about that where they actually know what they're talking about for a change, instead of the usual confused stereotypes, and in a way that people can easily understand and will hopefully learn something from. Only thing I'd really consider changing is that grand/petit mal are kind of going out of favor as terms these days, because they're a bit out of date and not as useful for categorizing things these days now that more is known how they work. Now they're tonic-clonic and absence seizures, both of which are generalized (i.e. involve the entire brain), and neither of which is actually all that common. Partial seizures (which have a focal point in a much smaller part of the brain and can be either simple or complex, depending on whether consciousness/awareness/memory is affected) are more common. Of course, now they're working to change those terms to split things up and rearrange them some more, too, but that's the current state of things. On the off chance anyone even reads this and is curious, I guess. Heh.
Also, just thought you might like to know... Et al. is short for et alii and translates literally as, "with others." etc. is short for et cetera and translates roughly as, "with other objects". There is a people/things distinction. So if the other stuff is people, "et al." and if the other stuff is things, "etc.".
It's probably more accurate to say "and" instead of "with" (which is where the ampersand came from; if you look at it, you can sort of see how it came from smooshing an e and t together, and you'll occasionally see "&c" as an abbreviation for "et cetera", usually in older documents), but yeah, that's a good distinction to at least be aware of (and which I sadly forget about and am not in the habit of using "et al." consistently).
It may be trivial, but it's still enough of an inconvenience that over the past year or two I've moved heavily away from using my Wii much to using my gaming/media center PC instead. They're hooked up to the same screen and speakers, so it's not like one is more accessible than the other. It's just that when I want to goof off for a bit with a game or movie or TV show, it's much easier to be able to get to it with a couple clicks than to have to go to the other side of the room, find the disc I want, and wait for the Wii to boot up and get through half a dozen warning screens about how we're all going to die if I don't read the safety information and wear my wrist strap.
It's not a horrible inconvenience, and I still use the Wii when there's something specific I want to do with it, but the PC offers much less "resistance", so it gets a lot more use these days both when I could do the same thing on either it or the Wii or when I'm looking for something to entertain myself with but am not sure yet what I have in mind and want to look at my options. The Wii would probably see more use if I could install everything and run without swapping discs (without having to mod it first) and it didn't have to basically reboot every time I go back to the main menu to switch tasks.
That same sort of thing does happen in limited parts of the US (mostly the northeast, which is older and denser, since larger amounts of the cities predate cars). I live in Boston, which is relatively compact, and you're likely to run into all sorts of people on the subway. Even more so in New York, and to some extent a few other places like Chicago.
On the other hand, I also have family in Detroit and Cleveland, and since I don't drive, I basically end up unable to leave the house and do anything without waiting for someone else to get a ride with them. Everything is enormously spread out, public transportation is nearly nonexistent, and most people wouldn't be caught dead on it if they had the choice.
Kind of a weird contrast. Not surprisingly, given my lack of driving, I prefer European-style cities (whether actually in Europe or not) to the newer car-based US type.
Sure they have. Look what they did with the record companies... remember when Amazon was fighting to price music at less than $0.99, they were fighting against Apple and the record companies Apple had brainwashed into selling all tracks for at least $0.99.
While I do agree with some parts of your post, this isn't quite accurate. Apple was refusing to let them sell anything for a different price from $0.99, i.e. they also refused to let them sell songs for more than that. They were enforcing constant, non-variable pricing for all songs, not a lower limit. At the same time, places like Wal-Mart had already been selling the same songs for $0.89 for a while already.
And as an added bonus, the 360 version has plenty of framerate issues on top of that. It's the very, very rare example (only one I can think of, actually) of a Squeenix game that runs better in the "crappy" PC port than the console version, which was unexpected considering their long and glorious history of atrocious PC ports (even Gyromancer, which is newer than TLR, is totally borked on the PC).
Except last time I checked, you could just pirate the DLC for the EA games, too, and if you do that you don't have to go through the hassle of creating an EA account and going through the clusterfuck that is trying to tie your EA and BioWare accounts together (and potentially Steam, too). Still ends up being less painful to just download it for free, at least for the single-player games they've been doing that with lately, like DA:O and ME2. I'm holding out in the hope that there'll eventually be some edition of them released in a year or two that I can buy with all the DLC and everything included that doesn't require me to go through all that crap, but the more time passes and the more stories I see about things like this, the less hopeful I am.
Just for the hell of it, I tried both on an ancient iMac, with all of a 500 MHz G3 in it and the latest Safari. They were both about the same speed: Flash was just over 2 fps, and HTML5 was just under 2 fps. I actually expected a lot worse. The Flash one scales to fit my relatively small window (the screen can only do 1024x768, after all), but the HTML5 one has scrollbars. No idea how/if that affects it, but I've seen stranger things make a noticeable difference. Also, the Flash one stutters and drops a lot in speed temporarily if I click on it, while the HTML5 one doesn't seem to mind at all. Considering other people are getting 10 fps with multi-core CPUs (even a single core of which is dramatically faster for just about anything than this is) I'm amazed this thing can pull off 2 fps. It can't even handle the low-res/low-quality videos on YouTube without choking and dying miserably.
There are a bunch of other games similar to those, too. However, they're all turn-based strategy, not RTS like he was talking about. While I and plenty of other people like those, there are a lot of people who don't like anything turn-based and think it's too slow and doesn't have enough action.
Whenever I think of switching to an intel cpu I give up since I cannot figure out how to compare them to an amd cpu
Look at benchmarks (preferably from multiple sources), particularly of things you actually tend to use the CPU for? There are plenty of people out there who've already figured out how whichever CPUs you're considering compare to each other for <insert purpose here>, whether it's compiling code, playing games, encoding video, running simulations, or whatever else. Works for me. This past fall, I found a few different ones in the price/performance range I was looking for, then poked around on places like Slickdeals to see if any of them were on sale, and now I have a shiny new CPU that I've been quite happy with.
Totally coincidentally, it involved me switching from AMD to Intel (and then a month or two later, my video card from Nvidia to ATI/AMD), because they happened to have what I wanted at the price I could afford at the time.
Charlie Demerjian is hardly an unbiased source of reporting on nVidia
And the understatement of the year award goes to...
See also: Okami, where the entire game is based around the Shinto religion. Many of the characters, including the player character, are based on Shinto deities, and the plot is a mishmash of a bunch of myths and legends and references to a whole lot of different Shinto-related things, to the point that you'll miss half of what's going on if you're not at least vaguely familiar with the stories involved (and even if you're vaguely familiar with them, like I was, if you're not Japanese, you'll still end up looking stuff up on Wikipedia on a regular basis).
...consuming 300 times less power. *sigh*
Oops. Sorry. 300 times fewer.
If you want a place where high-school history of their own nation is a complete and utter whitewash, look to the United States of America.
Yeah, we certainly have our share of that. A history grad student friend's pet peeve was how minimal to nonexistent the teaching of stuff like the Trail of Tears tends to be in the US.
Most of the world has a computer barely capable of 3D graphics. If you want a game like that, look into World of Goo, Braid, Mahjongg, a number of board games, or something similar.
While World of Goo fits in that category quite well (and is a whole lot of fun, too), Braid (which is also quite good), despite being entirely 2D, is actually brutal to run on even relatively new hardware. It does a lot of wacky shader stuff for all the visual effects and becomes nearly unplayable if it can't maintain a consistently high framerate. My Geforce 8600 GT couldn't even keep up with it until I manually edited some of the relatively undocumented hidden settings. It's not an especially fast card anymore these days, but it absolutely blows away any on-board stuff, so I don't see it working out terribly well for people without a fairly decent discrete video card unless it's been patched to let you disable more stuff (preferably in-game) and auto-detect what your hardware can do better. Most people aren't going to put up with fiddling with command line options just to get the thing to run.
Can you even name ONE adult female player character off the top of your head that doesn't fit this mold (must be human and not created by the player, sorry)?
Just glancing at the foot or so of my game shelf I can see from here that isn't blocked by my monitor, Jade from Beyond Good and Evil and Chell from Portal, who are each the main character in their respective games and look like normal people.
Of course, they're sitting next to P.N.03, which is pretty much the embodiment of that stereotype. Heh.
Please, just stop. It's crap like that and your original post that make people with Asperger's look bad, or at least silly through association with your blathering. As someone who's actually been officially diagnosed with it and who has as a result spent a good deal of time interacting with a number of other people both with official diagnoses and self-diagnosed via the Internet, you're just making yourself and all of us look bad, and I'm really getting tired of having to correct people's assumptions that we're all "my mommy says I'm special" like you and of being associated with people who run around making claims like that.
I don't know you or anything about you, but you come across as the stereotypical person who read about it online somewhere and identified with some of the things whatever article you found mentioned, then picked up on the bizarre subculture that seems to think everyone with Asperger's has magical powers and can do no wrong. I hate to break it to you, but it's just not true. Most of the crap you attribute to them/us in your post is completely nonsensical and unproven, and it makes you sound like some kind of aspie fanboy/zealot.
Just like any other group of people, we're all individuals with individual personalities. Last time I checked, exactly zero of the things you listed are included in the diagnostic criteria, and (probably not surprisingly, when you consider that) I've run into some people with those qualities and others with the exact opposites, in various combinations. Most of the ones you bring up aren't even stereotypically associated with it, outside of the Magical Aspie crowd.
It's just as bad as the people who think being bipolar gives you special powers and is universally a "good" thing with no downside, but that's an entirely different rant...
If you use the trip planner on mbta.com, it will actually pretend that the various subway trains are on a specific schedule and tell you when they're supposed to come. Obviously it's never actually right, but despite that, I've had pretty good luck with getting places on time by following the times it spits out at me, although that's probably mostly because it hugely overestimates how long it takes. It seems to assume that it takes ten minutes to walk 200 feet to transfer to a different train or bus, so even if everything's running way off schedule, it has enough built-in room for error that it'll still usually get you there early if you do what they tell you. Unless they spontaneously shut down the red line for several hours at a time again like kept happening last year, and then you're screwed.
Oh, and the thing about a train coming every five minutes reminds me of when I used to live on the 57 bus line. The schedule for that is similar, saying that during the busiest parts of the day, there's a bus every six minutes, or that they're less than ten minutes apart, or something like that. In theory, it's almost true, but in practice, not so much. There'll be no buses for 20 minutes, then three in a row will pass by within about 90 seconds; repeat until rush hour is over. On average, the wait between them is under ten minutes, but that doesn't really do you a whole lot of good when you're stuck standing there in the snow for almost 20 minutes. Heh.
Wait, what? I'm kind of confused. I realize Slashdot isn't a collective entity with a hive mind, but I can't figure out whether the comments on this story make me believe that more or less than usual. On one hand, all the ones that have been modded up so far say the same thing as each other, which is generally something along the lines of, "Boo hoo, Nintendo. Go cry some more. You're getting what you deserve," with a lot more consistency than usual. On the other hand, the stereotypical responses that usually show up on stories like this are missing. You guys are hurting my brain.
As you say providing Nintendo makes money on the device itself then they've really got nothing to complain about and aren't really acting any better than the RIAA/MPAA trying to force their ideal laws on foreign nations. Even if they didn't make money on the device I'm inclined to say more fool them for pursuing such a silly business model.
Speaking of hurting my brain...what does this even mean? Providing goods and/or services in exchange for money is a silly business model? What are they supposed to do, give the games away? Make paying for them completely voluntary? I don't know. Maybe that'd work. I'm guessing not terribly well, as it costs them money to make the games, and the third party companies don't get anything from the console sales, so I'm not sure how any games would get made in the first place if no one were paying for them...
Obviously someone needs to do something differently if people taking their stuff for free is causing a big problem, and bugging various governments about it may not be the right solution, but on a basic level their "silly business model" (make things people want, then sell them to people at a price that is greater than what they cost to produce but still low enough for a decent number of them to pay for them) seems pretty reasonable to me.
The other point is it's not like they even seemed to try hard to prevent piracy. Their systems are some of the most easily hackable out there so if they don't even invest in anti-piracy measures like Sony and Microsoft do then why should they expect anyone to help them if they wont help themselves?
Yes, please do encourage them to make it even more obnoxious to use various hardware/software. I never can get enough of people bitching about DRM and other types of copy protection and hardware lockouts and other crap. It's almost as much fun as when it directly affects me (Thanks, Steam, for failing to authenticate my account for ten minutes straight a couple days ago when I had exactly ten minutes to kill before I had to go do something else...I wish my Wii could do that, too).
Anyway, something that I'm really surprised that I haven't seen mentioned (at least in anything modded up that I skimmed through) is that a bunch of what Nintendo tends to complain about, at least based on what they've said in the past, is wide-scale for-profit piracy, not some guy in his basement soldering a mod chip on, particularly with places like China. I get just as irritated when people go after homebrew stuff or individual users (Hi, RIAA!), but I really have a hard time arguing with them when they say they have a problem with groups in China or Russia or wherever pressing their own copies of games/CDs/DVDs and selling them.
I'm not even sure where I'm heading with all this, but the comments today are enough sillier than usual that I had to boggle out loud at them.
FMV can make a a game's story feel disjointed from the actual gameplay.
Having just finished the PC version of Jade Empire and bitched about that exact issue, I agree wholeheartedly. The game was running at 1920x1440, all settings maxed out (on a mid-range computer, which is not hard considering it was originally an Xbox game), with AA and everything. Then it suddenly drops to a pre-rendered video at 640x480 with, aside from some of the smoke effects, generally worse quality even ignoring the drastically lower resolution, and on top of that, it was badly compressed. It's pretty jarring every single time it happens. I was kind of hoping by this point that things would be done in-engine all the time, because some games started doing that successfully years ago, but even things like Mass Effect have pre-rendered stuff in them. Someone please make it stop already?
Please, please, let me stop running into stuff like this that reminds me of how much "fun" I had repairing those over the years. I did it so many times that I was able to get it down to about 20 minutes start to finish for replacing the hard drive. After a while, you don't even have to think about it anymore, and it becomes mostly a matter of how fast you can move your fingers while still keeping them steady. The way I did it was always to set the bottom case next to the computer itself and lay the screws in the position on the case that matched up with where they went inside the computer, so everything always ends up exactly where it came from without having to remember or keep track of anything other than that. Words cannot express how relieved I am that my sister's old iBook died for good after she gave it to her boyfriend last year. With any luck, I may never see the inside of one again.
Thanks. That's a useful start, and it's interesting to see who uses it on how many games. EA is apparently the worst, to no one's surprise. The link to this page on there is good, too, which includes a bunch of StarForce and SafeDisc stuff, among other things.
I now read reviews first and foremost to find out what manner of fucktard-inspired DRM and compulsory tracking/on-line registration is involved.
I only wish reviewers included specific and exhaustive details of the DRM and on-line 'features' of every game they reviewed.
Along those lines, here's something I've been wondering about lately. With all the bitching that people do about DRM on PC games (and I've done my share of it, too), why isn't there some kind of site that lets you search for a game, and it'll tell you what kind of DRM/copy protection/other crap is included with it?
Before I buy games, I want to know if they have version x.y of SecuROM or StarForce or just require a SN be entered or a disc check or have a code wheel or make you look up the fourteenth word of the third paragraph of the twenty-ninth page of appendix H of the manual or install a keylogger that reports all your credit card data back to EA or whatever other crap might come along with it. I'd also like to be able to easily find out if a game doesn't have those things, like stuff from Stardock, and if there's a crack or patch to remove it (or preferably not install it in the first place) for ones that do, whether through GameCopyWorld or the developers, or maybe the Greatest Hits version doesn't include it in the first place. Not links to cracks or torrents of the games or even reviews or anything, just a quick and easy way to find out whether the publisher is evil or not.
Basically, it seems obvious to me that something like this should/would exist and be useful to a lot of people, judging by a lot of comments I see on here, but if it does, I can't find it, and if it doesn't, I'm not sure why. I would say I'd do it myself, but I don't have enough of the relevant data to start anything useful, and I don't trust my rather rusty web fu to do it right myself at the moment...
Anyone? Bueller?
What are you trying to do, read a book in a room painted matte black with the light bulb on the other side of the room? I can feel 150 watt incandescent bulbs burning my retinas if I'm sitting near them or looking in their direction. I can quite comfortably read with a 25W bulb (also incandescent) in the lamp next to my bed. I tried a 15W bulb, too, but that's a bit low even for me. I realize my eyes are more sensitive to light than most people's, but the rest of my family has normal vision and generally doesn't use much more than 60W bulbs to read by. For overhead lighting, especially for a larger room, sure, you need more than that, but just to read a book... I think the only person I know who uses a lamp that bright to read by is my grandma, who's almost 90. Weird how much variation in vision and lighting preferences there is, just reading through this thread.
I have a Sansa that works like that, and I really, really wish it didn't. Trying to manage dozens of gigs of MP3s by hand and decide which ones I want to put on there is a disaster (not to mention the abortion of a UI the thing has, but that's another story entirely). Once the files are actually on it (and as long as I only want to listen to specific albums or put it on shuffle), it's fine, but it reminds me why I stopped manually organizing large numbers of files like that many years ago and never looked back. I definitely understand why some people like it in some situations, but if you're indecisive or like to change what you have on your MP3 player on a regular basis, it can be a royal pain in the ass and fairly time-consuming.
I do agree with your opinion of iTunes...on Windows. On OS X, it's rather nice and acts closer to how I want than anything else I've tried on any OS, which will come in handy with the used iPod I seem to be inheriting, although it's been getting a bit bloated in the past few releases. I refuse to install it on my PC, though, because I am in no mood to put up with all the crap you already mentioned.