It's how our voice cellular service works too - unlike the UK, the person placing the call does not pay for the cell service of the person receiving. Unless you're both on the same carrier (in which case, calls are usually free as an incentive to get your friends to sign up), you will use up your minutes whether you placed or received the call.
While the prices are outrageous, the fact that the receiver pays is quite normal for us.
If the recipient's phone is set to be discoverable, you can beam stuff (most often contact info, but any type of data can work) ala Palm IR, complete with an allow/deny button. Thing is, most of the time you don't have discoverability enabled, and it's usually too inconvenient to dig through five layers of menus to get to the setting. At least with IR you need to point it at the other person's PDA, which acts as an informal permission system.
Same boat. I sign out, empty my cache and sign back into Gmail about once a day to see if they've enabled it and still no dice. It just says "Forwarding and POP" in settings, not "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" like people with IMAP enabled describe.
Just to give you some background, I have a very PC-shooter centric gaming history (my heavily-played game of choice for about three years was Quake 3, but I also played not-insignificant amounts of Marathon/Marathon 2/Quake 2/HL/HL2/Counter-Strike/Counter-Strike Source/Tribes 2/NOLF/NOLF2/UT/UT:2004/Far Cry/Battlefield 1942 - I'm sure there are hordes of games I'm forgetting also).
That being said, I'd put Halo 3 on the level of a Half-Life 2 or UT 2004 in terms of quality. I would agree that it's dramatically overmarketed compared to other notable games of its genre on the PC, but I think that's understandable given how well Halo 1 did on Xbox and what it means to Microsoft's console plans. I would also say that Halo is uniquely tuned for console play - not just from the basics of input not sucking, but I think every aspect of gameplay, level design and AI is designed for the experience of playing a console game - and when you move that over to the PC, the whole thing just feels slightly fucked up. While it's (obviously) not great for a PC shooter, I don't think that makes Halo any worse of a game.
Also, keep in mind Halo (and Halo 2) for PC came out over two years after the original Xbox game had come out... anything remotely impressive about them had long since been copied in other games.
Personally, I'll take Halo 3 over Counter-Strike or even UT any day of the week; I truly enjoy Halo 3 multiplayer, although I do wish sometimes there was a bit more ability to easily find custom games. If it ain't for you, that's fine, but I will assure you there is actually something to it.:-)
Because, if you notice, it's deactivated entirely - you have to turn it on before it works.
Which means either a) you can only be revived at the closest one, and if the closest one doesn't work, tough shit, or b) he knew all along that he'd revive at the next closest one, managed to escape, and leaves things open for a BioShock 2.
If you truly, honestly believe that Sony hasn't spent far more on getting movie studios to align with Blu-ray only, placing Blu-ray on the end-caps of every Best Buy, Circuit City and Target in the country, and turning Blockbuster Blu-ray only, then I've got a wonderful bridge to sell you...
You don't need it. On-receiver TrueHD/DTS:MA decoding is bullshit, as all HD-DVDs and most Blu-ray discs have an Advanced Audio flag enabled which requires on-player decoding for mixing in commentary tracks or menu sound effects. The player just decodes it into LPCM (optionally mixing in any other sound effects or sound tracks) and sends it through HDMI or analog.
Yeah, you probably won't care about the difference. I have the 360 HD-DVD player which re-encodes everything into 1.5Mbps DTS over optical anyway, so lossless isn't a huge deal. But for those with high-end setups that will show the difference (and if he actually did spend 20K on a home theater setup, he almost certainly can), it's nice to have.
Actually, it's not even that - Xbox discs are written backwards, from the outside in, and spun backwards. You can't even read them properly in a regular DVD-ROM drive.
No, but many HD-DVDs have Dolby TrueHD, which is often higher quality audio then Blu-ray uncompressed LPCM tracks - TrueHD is a lossless codec and is usually 24-bit audio, whereas many LPCM tracks on Blu-ray are only 16-bit.
TrueHD is also required to be supported by the player on HD-DVD, but is optional on Blu-ray.
It's not perfect (as evidenced by much of the biatching around here), but at least for the way I like to read/., it's a huge improvement over the old system.
Just wanted to be the odd person who actually comments when they like something, instead of only posting when it's broken.
I just tried it again after finding it lacking a couple of months ago, and no, still no way to sort by score. So I guess I'll keep sucking the traditional interface for now. Huh? I just hit Prefs and there's an option for Highest Score First...
I use Parallels on my MBP 2.16Ghz C1D and I haven't had one kernel panic from using it, and I've been using the beta builds since about September of last year. I'm giving it about 800MB out of 2GB, running VS2005, an ASP.NET development server and Excel (don't even ask why), often leaving it open for weeks at a time. If that's not heavy usage, not sure what is.:-) I'd start looking into your hardware - might want to grab REMber and give your RAM a test.
(Thank god this project is almost over... I want nothing more then to shut down my VM and never use it again...)
Odd... my dad's Samsung A900M on Sprint lets him install any Java app he wants; he's running Gmail, Google Maps and Opera Mini on there with no problems. I was actually fairly impressed.
The Cisco General Counsel says they bought a company that had purchased the name in 1996, and if you look at the Wayback Machine, Cisco references the product on their website as far back as 2000 (after the iMac came out but well before the iPod was released).
TrackMania Sunrise - best $25 I've spent on a game. There is a demo widely available, if you'd like to give it a spin first. Note that the game (and the demo)does have StarForce. To be honest, it hasn't caused any real problems on my machine, but it is the most obnoxious form of CD protection I've ever seen (locks the PC up for about 10 seconds while it authenticates).
I want Cedega for Mac OS X. I'm tired of the crap I put up with for native Mac OS X games - buggy versions that come out six months to a year later that run at half the speed and aren't compatible over the network with the PC versions. Boot Camp is OK, but rebooting is a pain just to play some CS:S for 30 minutes.
Believe me, I'm a big Mac fanatic - but I've just given up on Mac gaming. For the casual gamers out there, it's fine... there are enough decent ports for the Mac that a casual gamer will be just fine (most of my friends play WoW for instance, which is a fantastic Mac port, as are all Blizzard games, and whatever they play that isn't WoW they don't care enough about to notice the downsides). But for those of us who are a little more hardcore it's just abysmal.
I know a lot of the Mac porting gods, and they're really good people - I don't blame them for the situation; indeed, it's amazing the games get as far as they do in six months, considering there's *maybe* two programmers working on a game with a monstrous, poorly-organized codebase that relies incredibly heavily on proprietary Microsoft technology and buggy-on-the-Mac third-party libraries. But I get the feeling they just don't have enough resources to truly finish the job. Due to rampant piracy and a terminal lack of interest from the Mac community, a 10,000 copy game is considered a hit on the Mac, and after all the licensing fees are paid to the original PC publisher and third-party library providers, the porting company is just barely breaking even.
Re:Amazon sucks
on
Ruby For Rails
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· Score: 2, Informative
Erm, the whole point of super saver shipping is that your book gets shipped after everyone who's paid for theirs. It's not so much the shipping time as it is the time it will take Amazon to ship the book. Either pay for the shipping or sign up for the Amazon Prime trial and your books will magically start shipping within 24 hours.
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I've heard from people with durian experiences, and apparently if it's not fresh it's really pretty skanky.
If you get a good one, however, it really is supposed to be absolutely wonderful-tasting. Still smells horrible, though.
It's how our voice cellular service works too - unlike the UK, the person placing the call does not pay for the cell service of the person receiving. Unless you're both on the same carrier (in which case, calls are usually free as an incentive to get your friends to sign up), you will use up your minutes whether you placed or received the call.
While the prices are outrageous, the fact that the receiver pays is quite normal for us.
If the recipient's phone is set to be discoverable, you can beam stuff (most often contact info, but any type of data can work) ala Palm IR, complete with an allow/deny button. Thing is, most of the time you don't have discoverability enabled, and it's usually too inconvenient to dig through five layers of menus to get to the setting. At least with IR you need to point it at the other person's PDA, which acts as an informal permission system.
Same boat. I sign out, empty my cache and sign back into Gmail about once a day to see if they've enabled it and still no dice. It just says "Forwarding and POP" in settings, not "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" like people with IMAP enabled describe.
Sure can.
Just to give you some background, I have a very PC-shooter centric gaming history (my heavily-played game of choice for about three years was Quake 3, but I also played not-insignificant amounts of Marathon/Marathon 2/Quake 2/HL/HL2/Counter-Strike/Counter-Strike Source/Tribes 2/NOLF/NOLF2/UT/UT:2004/Far Cry/Battlefield 1942 - I'm sure there are hordes of games I'm forgetting also).
:-)
That being said, I'd put Halo 3 on the level of a Half-Life 2 or UT 2004 in terms of quality. I would agree that it's dramatically overmarketed compared to other notable games of its genre on the PC, but I think that's understandable given how well Halo 1 did on Xbox and what it means to Microsoft's console plans. I would also say that Halo is uniquely tuned for console play - not just from the basics of input not sucking, but I think every aspect of gameplay, level design and AI is designed for the experience of playing a console game - and when you move that over to the PC, the whole thing just feels slightly fucked up. While it's (obviously) not great for a PC shooter, I don't think that makes Halo any worse of a game.
Also, keep in mind Halo (and Halo 2) for PC came out over two years after the original Xbox game had come out... anything remotely impressive about them had long since been copied in other games.
Personally, I'll take Halo 3 over Counter-Strike or even UT any day of the week; I truly enjoy Halo 3 multiplayer, although I do wish sometimes there was a bit more ability to easily find custom games. If it ain't for you, that's fine, but I will assure you there is actually something to it.
Because, if you notice, it's deactivated entirely - you have to turn it on before it works.
Which means either a) you can only be revived at the closest one, and if the closest one doesn't work, tough shit, or b) he knew all along that he'd revive at the next closest one, managed to escape, and leaves things open for a BioShock 2.
If you truly, honestly believe that Sony hasn't spent far more on getting movie studios to align with Blu-ray only, placing Blu-ray on the end-caps of every Best Buy, Circuit City and Target in the country, and turning Blockbuster Blu-ray only, then I've got a wonderful bridge to sell you...
You don't need it. On-receiver TrueHD/DTS:MA decoding is bullshit, as all HD-DVDs and most Blu-ray discs have an Advanced Audio flag enabled which requires on-player decoding for mixing in commentary tracks or menu sound effects. The player just decodes it into LPCM (optionally mixing in any other sound effects or sound tracks) and sends it through HDMI or analog.
Yeah, you probably won't care about the difference. I have the 360 HD-DVD player which re-encodes everything into 1.5Mbps DTS over optical anyway, so lossless isn't a huge deal. But for those with high-end setups that will show the difference (and if he actually did spend 20K on a home theater setup, he almost certainly can), it's nice to have.
Actually, it's not even that - Xbox discs are written backwards, from the outside in, and spun backwards. You can't even read them properly in a regular DVD-ROM drive.
No, but many HD-DVDs have Dolby TrueHD, which is often higher quality audio then Blu-ray uncompressed LPCM tracks - TrueHD is a lossless codec and is usually 24-bit audio, whereas many LPCM tracks on Blu-ray are only 16-bit.
TrueHD is also required to be supported by the player on HD-DVD, but is optional on Blu-ray.
It's not perfect (as evidenced by much of the biatching around here), but at least for the way I like to read /., it's a huge improvement over the old system.
Just wanted to be the odd person who actually comments when they like something, instead of only posting when it's broken.
Anyone have any experience with fake MX records?
I find the idea sort of intriguing, but I have doubts that it'll work for long in the ever-escalating arms race of spam...
It's just like any other Microsoft disc. Who the hell besides a geek would actually know that Microsoft discs have shiny holograms on them?
...would Vista be pirated less or more?
I use Parallels on my MBP 2.16Ghz C1D and I haven't had one kernel panic from using it, and I've been using the beta builds since about September of last year. I'm giving it about 800MB out of 2GB, running VS2005, an ASP.NET development server and Excel (don't even ask why), often leaving it open for weeks at a time. If that's not heavy usage, not sure what is. :-) I'd start looking into your hardware - might want to grab REMber and give your RAM a test.
(Thank god this project is almost over... I want nothing more then to shut down my VM and never use it again...)
Odd... my dad's Samsung A900M on Sprint lets him install any Java app he wants; he's running Gmail, Google Maps and Opera Mini on there with no problems. I was actually fairly impressed.
The Cisco General Counsel says they bought a company that had purchased the name in 1996, and if you look at the Wayback Machine, Cisco references the product on their website as far back as 2000 (after the iMac came out but well before the iPod was released).
I hadn't heard of this before, but now I'm sure to record it (assuming it gets on the air).
I love publicity-bringing lawsuits, don't you?
No, my parents don't care.
TrackMania Sunrise - best $25 I've spent on a game. There is a demo widely available, if you'd like to give it a spin first. Note that the game (and the demo)does have StarForce. To be honest, it hasn't caused any real problems on my machine, but it is the most obnoxious form of CD protection I've ever seen (locks the PC up for about 10 seconds while it authenticates).
Connexion is infinitely faster then your home broadband, your cable modem goes 0mph.
I want Cedega for Mac OS X. I'm tired of the crap I put up with for native Mac OS X games - buggy versions that come out six months to a year later that run at half the speed and aren't compatible over the network with the PC versions. Boot Camp is OK, but rebooting is a pain just to play some CS:S for 30 minutes.
Believe me, I'm a big Mac fanatic - but I've just given up on Mac gaming. For the casual gamers out there, it's fine... there are enough decent ports for the Mac that a casual gamer will be just fine (most of my friends play WoW for instance, which is a fantastic Mac port, as are all Blizzard games, and whatever they play that isn't WoW they don't care enough about to notice the downsides). But for those of us who are a little more hardcore it's just abysmal.
I know a lot of the Mac porting gods, and they're really good people - I don't blame them for the situation; indeed, it's amazing the games get as far as they do in six months, considering there's *maybe* two programmers working on a game with a monstrous, poorly-organized codebase that relies incredibly heavily on proprietary Microsoft technology and buggy-on-the-Mac third-party libraries. But I get the feeling they just don't have enough resources to truly finish the job. Due to rampant piracy and a terminal lack of interest from the Mac community, a 10,000 copy game is considered a hit on the Mac, and after all the licensing fees are paid to the original PC publisher and third-party library providers, the porting company is just barely breaking even.
Erm, the whole point of super saver shipping is that your book gets shipped after everyone who's paid for theirs. It's not so much the shipping time as it is the time it will take Amazon to ship the book. Either pay for the shipping or sign up for the Amazon Prime trial and your books will magically start shipping within 24 hours.