The fact remains that world + dog is still using Facebook. God knows why, but they seem to be willing to accept whatever Zuckerberg throws at them.
I honestly like G+, especially the mobile app, but practicality says that I also stay on Facebook.
I was the same way, then I eventually just dumped my facebook profile. I had realized that I had enough of the people that actually were interesting and/or good friends on G+ and the only thing keeping me on facebook were the events. Most people I talk to mention the events as the primary reason they are still there. Hopefully G+ will get that working soon.
Well I found this article on it:
tech crunch netflix-facebook app
Though honestly I really hope this is just an app you can use in facebook rather than having the facebook login go to netflix.
Well if you don't like the giving up of privacy there is always paying slightly more for either the nook e-ink or the sony e-ink.
You also can use the competing devices to get e-books from the library and epub books that are online for free. You can do the epub for kindle, though it just requires more in-between work on the user. With that in mind you can quite easily get enough free e-books to make up for the price. The other thing to consider is that along with being able to carry around dozens of books with you, it also makes physical storage space in ones living space much easier. So it can be quite nice for someone living in a small apartment that likes to read.
I looked it up and found that John Adams signed a law mandating sailors to purchase health insurance. Here is a link to the law:
5th congress passed law
and an article talking about it:
daily KOS article
So if precedent means anything it doesn't look like the law will be struck down. Though stranger things have happened before.
Am I the only one who actually *liked* the physical keyboard and buttons on the old Kindle? I don't want my greasy fingerprints all over my screen and I like the tactile feel of a physical keyboard. And the Kindle's physical keyboard was a pretty good one too.
Yeah, Sony tried this before with their own touchscreen e-ink book. I have the last non-touch screen one and never upgraded because of the slight extra reflectivity the touch screen gave. So I'm curious if the amazon version will avoid said problem. What really got me semi-interested was the $79 basic no thrills version. The prices for the e-ink screens must be going down to get an e-ink device for so cheap.
9 definitely had its redeeming qualities. Heck, even 8 was a pretty good game, but the problem is that neither of them even came close to reproducing the magic that went into 7. Now I'm just convinced that Square got lucky with 7 and that was just a fluke--a one-off occurrence that will never be repeated in the series. It's been more than 10 years so we should all just accept that fact and move on.
I think 9, 7, and 6 were the best in the series. I think part of it is how well the battle system is done in each game, along with the quality of the music/story. 8 was nice and pretty, but the battle system (which was so easy to break) was just not enjoyable over time. I liked 10 but then if you wanted all your characters to gain xp you had to switch them all out every battle, which was so annoying. 9, 7, and 6 had good battle engines for their time and that really makes all the difference for me at least. Even 12 was pretty decent, a lot better than 10 or X-2. 13 was just embarrassing and 11/14 I don't even consider to be FF since they are MMO games.
I could see this being a bit more interesting if they used it to have AI driven combat scenes that you photograph rather than scripted scenes. Or something like that, just so that going through a particular stage never means seeing the same thing over and over again. Though from how fps games have worked lately I have my doubts.
Article was a little too light on technical details for me. This article read like something you might find in an “intro to computers” textbook. Vague somewhat-technical description of what it does and a few somewhat unclearly described differences.
Not necessarily a bad article, just wasn't what I was hoping for:(
Well there is always wikipedia to the rescue: UEFI on Wiki
There is another tablet market and that is of course the eReader http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-book_reader market. Basically the tablet is a content consumption device, with a teensy bit of interactivity and form filling thrown in.
Acer doesn't want to get into the content distribution market, and Amazon's Kindle is just crap in comparison.
So Acer is likely right, the tablet PC market has passed it fad moment and the big fight will be on for a more functional and colourful table eReader, subsidised by content distribution. Now the real question is will the major content distribution empires jump into the fray, a free fully featured tablet with a two year subscription contract to their whole media empire, including archived content. They have got the content and they can tell Apple et al to go jump and basically distribute direct.
The eReaders are good because of their display technology. They do one thing very well and that is show text for reading. It is similar to why one might get a good camera rather than a cell phone. The cell phone has a camera too but it is nothing compared to a good camera. In the same manner if you read a lot then an eReader with an eInk display is worlds better than any of the other similar devices.
But don't worry, once AT&T and T-Mobile merge, they won't waste so much money on redundant overhead, so they'll be able to make texting free with the savings. Right? Right?
I seem to remember a document being leaked by a lawyer working for AT&T that pretty much exposed that they were only buying T-mobile to reduce competition. So if that gets out I have my hopes that the merger won't be allowed to happen.
It didn't last for very long though. The process was halted back in June after multiple earthquakes, and the UK is pretty stable geologically - earthquakes strong enough to be felt usually make the national news - so a connection seems highly likely. Coverage at the BBC, FT and Independent.
NPR reported on the same sort of thing happening in Faulkner County, Ark. I think they later stopped the drills for a period to see if it stopped the small quakes and found that the quakes did stop.
A friend from google posted in g+ that they are doing a very limited opening of the games at first before letting everyone in the trial. So you'll see it soon enough.
I use it pretty much exclusively now. I have 170 people in my circles and there are only a few (between 1-10) that don't post in g+. So I still read facebook but I only post there in response to said individuals, oh and events. I really wish they would get good event/calendar hook up for g+.
Well their focus seems on having games on a separate tab. So if you don't want to know about games you don't click on that tab and you don't hear about others playing games either.
Don't know if that works perfectly, but that appears to be their goal: "your circles will only see the updates when they're interested in playing games too".
This!
I like that g+ is trying to make the default behavior for users not involve what a lot of people find to be annoying.
A Nintendo 3DS that sells for a couple hundred, but costs $20-$30 for cheap little games?
Or the iPad2, costs $500-$600, but costs $1-$5 for cheap little games. Oh, and you can watch Netflix on it.
Indeed, netflix is on both, online cheap games are on both. So you have the option to get quality long games on the 3ds along with everything the iPad offers as far as game costs. Oh and it is less than half the cost. Though I think you were drumming up support for Apple, the points you make really give more push towards the 3ds.
Could it also be because people can buy about 20 iPhone games for the price of one 3DS game?
True, but the online store for the 3ds/dsi has those types of games too. The 3ds also has 3d videos and netflix. I would have a device that can browse, view netflix, do 3d well, play games of both cheap and AAA quality any day. Especially with the back catalog of gameboy advance and nintendo games that are coming to it too.
What happened to demos, shareware, and all that fancy stuff that made PC games popular?
There are still quite a lot of demos on steam and the websites of the developers for games. It is only with some of the big budget games that you don't get demos for a game. In those cases they sometimes do the free weekends or something similar.
Dungeon Siege 3 is one of the absolutely terrible examples.
The camera view is utterly useless, you need to hit a button to pick up *everything*, in coop mode, your camera flies all over the place in an attempt to keep both characters on screen, the menus are so obviously Console based it's not funny, and I could go on and on.
Simply fucking terrible. I wish I could claim my money back.
I agree, and the game is pretty much unplayable without a gamepad. I had some friends really wanting me to get it but after seeing how bad the keyboard/mouse controls were I just scrapped the idea.
I feel that mouse/keyboard is a hack that only works for certain types of games. Games aren't meant to be played with mouse/keyboard, it just happens to be what everyone had laying around. It's also less comfortable.
I can understand certain types of games converging to a mouse-like control. However the keyboard is a joke for gaming. At least drop the keyboard and give me a real gaming tool for my left hand.
Some of this may be true, but the mouse/keyboard is the assumed controller that all pc owners will have. Requiring a specific gamepad or controller is the same as requiring a specific device not bundled with a console. You've seen how many good games on consoles do that. So if you, as a developer, want to be up tight about your control preferences than don't expect as many pc players to enjoy and/or play the game. If the developer gets some controls down that work with the keyboard/mouse too then you just have more people that will enjoy the game.
But how much of this field of view does your monitor occupy? CSS specifies the standard viewing distance for a desktop PC monitor as 28 inches, meaning a 21" 16:9 PC monitor has only 36.2 degrees. (Showing my work: 21" diagonal VIS * 16/sqrt(16^2+9^2) = 18.3" wide. Horizontal field of view is 2*arctan(width/2/distance), or 36.2 degrees.)
Doing that would be a bit surreal. It would be a game that looked as though you were looking through a window into another world the entire time. Which would be kinda neat, but it is a bit better if you get more of a view of the world at all times so that you feel like there isn't a monitor.
So why don't more PC games support a home theater PC mode, in which four USB gamepads are connected through a hub to a PC with a TV as its monitor?
Some indie games do this. Jamestown is the one that comes to mind for me. It has one of the BEST methods for controls. You can pretty much use WHATEVER you want and it just asks for you to map the controls before you start (only 3 buttons). One of the best experiences I've had in pc gaming in a while. I just wish it had online multiplayer.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, it will be nice when facebook does this in a good way.
The fact remains that world + dog is still using Facebook. God knows why, but they seem to be willing to accept whatever Zuckerberg throws at them. I honestly like G+, especially the mobile app, but practicality says that I also stay on Facebook.
I was the same way, then I eventually just dumped my facebook profile. I had realized that I had enough of the people that actually were interesting and/or good friends on G+ and the only thing keeping me on facebook were the events. Most people I talk to mention the events as the primary reason they are still there. Hopefully G+ will get that working soon.
Well I found this article on it: tech crunch netflix-facebook app
Though honestly I really hope this is just an app you can use in facebook rather than having the facebook login go to netflix.
Well if you don't like the giving up of privacy there is always paying slightly more for either the nook e-ink or the sony e-ink. You also can use the competing devices to get e-books from the library and epub books that are online for free. You can do the epub for kindle, though it just requires more in-between work on the user. With that in mind you can quite easily get enough free e-books to make up for the price. The other thing to consider is that along with being able to carry around dozens of books with you, it also makes physical storage space in ones living space much easier. So it can be quite nice for someone living in a small apartment that likes to read.
I looked it up and found that John Adams signed a law mandating sailors to purchase health insurance. Here is a link to the law: 5th congress passed law and an article talking about it: daily KOS article So if precedent means anything it doesn't look like the law will be struck down. Though stranger things have happened before.
Am I the only one who actually *liked* the physical keyboard and buttons on the old Kindle? I don't want my greasy fingerprints all over my screen and I like the tactile feel of a physical keyboard. And the Kindle's physical keyboard was a pretty good one too.
Yeah, Sony tried this before with their own touchscreen e-ink book. I have the last non-touch screen one and never upgraded because of the slight extra reflectivity the touch screen gave. So I'm curious if the amazon version will avoid said problem. What really got me semi-interested was the $79 basic no thrills version. The prices for the e-ink screens must be going down to get an e-ink device for so cheap.
9 definitely had its redeeming qualities. Heck, even 8 was a pretty good game, but the problem is that neither of them even came close to reproducing the magic that went into 7. Now I'm just convinced that Square got lucky with 7 and that was just a fluke--a one-off occurrence that will never be repeated in the series. It's been more than 10 years so we should all just accept that fact and move on.
I think 9, 7, and 6 were the best in the series. I think part of it is how well the battle system is done in each game, along with the quality of the music/story. 8 was nice and pretty, but the battle system (which was so easy to break) was just not enjoyable over time. I liked 10 but then if you wanted all your characters to gain xp you had to switch them all out every battle, which was so annoying. 9, 7, and 6 had good battle engines for their time and that really makes all the difference for me at least. Even 12 was pretty decent, a lot better than 10 or X-2. 13 was just embarrassing and 11/14 I don't even consider to be FF since they are MMO games.
I could see this being a bit more interesting if they used it to have AI driven combat scenes that you photograph rather than scripted scenes. Or something like that, just so that going through a particular stage never means seeing the same thing over and over again. Though from how fps games have worked lately I have my doubts.
Article was a little too light on technical details for me. This article read like something you might find in an “intro to computers” textbook. Vague somewhat-technical description of what it does and a few somewhat unclearly described differences.
Not necessarily a bad article, just wasn't what I was hoping for :(
Well there is always wikipedia to the rescue: UEFI on Wiki
There is another tablet market and that is of course the eReader http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-book_reader market. Basically the tablet is a content consumption device, with a teensy bit of interactivity and form filling thrown in.
Acer doesn't want to get into the content distribution market, and Amazon's Kindle is just crap in comparison.
So Acer is likely right, the tablet PC market has passed it fad moment and the big fight will be on for a more functional and colourful table eReader, subsidised by content distribution. Now the real question is will the major content distribution empires jump into the fray, a free fully featured tablet with a two year subscription contract to their whole media empire, including archived content. They have got the content and they can tell Apple et al to go jump and basically distribute direct.
The eReaders are good because of their display technology. They do one thing very well and that is show text for reading. It is similar to why one might get a good camera rather than a cell phone. The cell phone has a camera too but it is nothing compared to a good camera. In the same manner if you read a lot then an eReader with an eInk display is worlds better than any of the other similar devices.
But don't worry, once AT&T and T-Mobile merge, they won't waste so much money on redundant overhead, so they'll be able to make texting free with the savings. Right? Right?
I seem to remember a document being leaked by a lawyer working for AT&T that pretty much exposed that they were only buying T-mobile to reduce competition. So if that gets out I have my hopes that the merger won't be allowed to happen.
Well you can still use it with a dumb phone for the voice calls. If people send you a text to that number you can get to it via the voice website.
I think it is the latter. It isn't something you can invite people to, it is just something you can either see or not see (at least at the moment).
In the world of BSG, fracking is always a good thing.
Interesting, I always associated it with Netrunner. It was in the flavor text of a few cards and in the names of a few too.
It didn't last for very long though. The process was halted back in June after multiple earthquakes, and the UK is pretty stable geologically - earthquakes strong enough to be felt usually make the national news - so a connection seems highly likely. Coverage at the BBC, FT and Independent.
NPR reported on the same sort of thing happening in Faulkner County, Ark. I think they later stopped the drills for a period to see if it stopped the small quakes and found that the quakes did stop.
Can others see it? I can't find it on my page.
A friend from google posted in g+ that they are doing a very limited opening of the games at first before letting everyone in the trial. So you'll see it soon enough.
I use it pretty much exclusively now. I have 170 people in my circles and there are only a few (between 1-10) that don't post in g+. So I still read facebook but I only post there in response to said individuals, oh and events. I really wish they would get good event/calendar hook up for g+.
Well their focus seems on having games on a separate tab. So if you don't want to know about games you don't click on that tab and you don't hear about others playing games either.
Don't know if that works perfectly, but that appears to be their goal: "your circles will only see the updates when they're interested in playing games too".
This! I like that g+ is trying to make the default behavior for users not involve what a lot of people find to be annoying.
A Nintendo 3DS that sells for a couple hundred, but costs $20-$30 for cheap little games? Or the iPad2, costs $500-$600, but costs $1-$5 for cheap little games. Oh, and you can watch Netflix on it.
Indeed, netflix is on both, online cheap games are on both. So you have the option to get quality long games on the 3ds along with everything the iPad offers as far as game costs. Oh and it is less than half the cost. Though I think you were drumming up support for Apple, the points you make really give more push towards the 3ds.
Could it also be because people can buy about 20 iPhone games for the price of one 3DS game?
True, but the online store for the 3ds/dsi has those types of games too. The 3ds also has 3d videos and netflix. I would have a device that can browse, view netflix, do 3d well, play games of both cheap and AAA quality any day. Especially with the back catalog of gameboy advance and nintendo games that are coming to it too.
What happened to demos, shareware, and all that fancy stuff that made PC games popular?
There are still quite a lot of demos on steam and the websites of the developers for games. It is only with some of the big budget games that you don't get demos for a game. In those cases they sometimes do the free weekends or something similar.
Dungeon Siege 3 is one of the absolutely terrible examples.
The camera view is utterly useless, you need to hit a button to pick up *everything*, in coop mode, your camera flies all over the place in an attempt to keep both characters on screen, the menus are so obviously Console based it's not funny, and I could go on and on.
Simply fucking terrible. I wish I could claim my money back.
I agree, and the game is pretty much unplayable without a gamepad. I had some friends really wanting me to get it but after seeing how bad the keyboard/mouse controls were I just scrapped the idea.
Meh, I prefer a gamepad.
I feel that mouse/keyboard is a hack that only works for certain types of games. Games aren't meant to be played with mouse/keyboard, it just happens to be what everyone had laying around. It's also less comfortable.
I can understand certain types of games converging to a mouse-like control. However the keyboard is a joke for gaming. At least drop the keyboard and give me a real gaming tool for my left hand.
Some of this may be true, but the mouse/keyboard is the assumed controller that all pc owners will have. Requiring a specific gamepad or controller is the same as requiring a specific device not bundled with a console. You've seen how many good games on consoles do that. So if you, as a developer, want to be up tight about your control preferences than don't expect as many pc players to enjoy and/or play the game. If the developer gets some controls down that work with the keyboard/mouse too then you just have more people that will enjoy the game.
We have about a 120 degree field of view.
But how much of this field of view does your monitor occupy? CSS specifies the standard viewing distance for a desktop PC monitor as 28 inches, meaning a 21" 16:9 PC monitor has only 36.2 degrees. (Showing my work: 21" diagonal VIS * 16/sqrt(16^2+9^2) = 18.3" wide. Horizontal field of view is 2*arctan(width/2/distance), or 36.2 degrees.)
Doing that would be a bit surreal. It would be a game that looked as though you were looking through a window into another world the entire time. Which would be kinda neat, but it is a bit better if you get more of a view of the world at all times so that you feel like there isn't a monitor.
USB is a dream as far as joysticks/gamepads go.
So why don't more PC games support a home theater PC mode, in which four USB gamepads are connected through a hub to a PC with a TV as its monitor?
Some indie games do this. Jamestown is the one that comes to mind for me. It has one of the BEST methods for controls. You can pretty much use WHATEVER you want and it just asks for you to map the controls before you start (only 3 buttons). One of the best experiences I've had in pc gaming in a while. I just wish it had online multiplayer.