I feel for the reviewer, if this continues they may end up returning to interacting with people socially:
Perhaps most telling is that I've been using the Desire for a week now and it has begun to reduce my casual phone use... With the iPhone I would fill downtime and dog walks by web browsing, checking Facebook, reading tweets and texting. The Desire's poor performance in daylight and fiddly on-screen keyboard have made these pastimes more of a chore than they should be.
I'm at least impressed a iCrack addict is out in the daylight more.
I found that the iPhone had indefensible flaws, periodic lag and slow app loading which would mar the otherwise slick nature of the interface. Running one app at a time was indefensibly stupid considering the hardware capability, and especially when the G1/Magic were capable of this with a slightly slower cpu and much less RAM. Consider doing something as trivial as having a chat program, twitter and facebook app logged in whilst checking a web link quickly. A pocket computer that can't multitask? Deal breaker for me.
So I 'upgraded' to a HTC magic just after they came out which incidentally costed about half what my iPhone 2G for about 90% of the spec. Stock Android wasn't that good at the time, but I like how aftermarket ROMs make the phone feel with improved speed and features like multitouch, screen accuracy and vastly improved camera image quality.
Oh and it's Linux, root access allows the ARM core is overclocked 384mhz -> 528mhz and I enabled a swap partition on a fast SDHC card... Hmm so after all this Android lag is merely because Linux has always gotten a bit funny without swap?
Multi-tasking is so indespensible to me now that I cannot go back to a iPhone. An Open platform is a killer feature, and not for any ethicial reasons. Aftermarket software modification is the principal benefit, ultimately a Android phone can now do more (such as easy tethering - your Android phone is a instant usb ethernet gateway), there are things in the Android market that now are not available in the iPhone app store. I might not even bother with a new handset as Android 2.1 will be backported to existing handsets soon.
Any civilization sufficiently advanced to cross interstellar space would have little need for any resources a biosphere at the bottom of a gravity well might offer. It wouldn't be worth the energy expenditure compared to asteroids and moons.
However if they did they would start with Kupier and Oort objects, moving along to mine something like Europa or Titan first which are rich in water and likely organic compounds. So we should watch titan, if we find it loosing mass to a cloud of UFOs we should start researching antimatter weapons.. fast.
This is all moot of course, surviving in space practically requires a almost zero-wastage self contained habitats that need little more than an energy source. We should really be looking for dyson spheres not flying saucers.
Scratch that, knowing what we know about the potential coming singularity, maybe they've just uploaded? Why do we assume we'll be meeting little green men?
I really can only imagine a very few plausible scenarios where we'd be contacted... or invaded. We'd still be a scienfitic curiousity most likely, in which case we'd likely be thoroughly observed and studied without being aware. It'd be a necessity that we'd not be interfered with. Don't Panic.
100mb/s maximum write would take *decades* to kill a SSD. Importantly block write-erase cycles outlives the data retention time for un-refreshed blocks (typically 10 years), so a long-lived system may face data corruption should there somehow be seldom-written blocks lurking. I'm not so confident that the SSD controller circuitry would live that long especially now that all PCBs are manufactured with lead-free RoHS compliant crap. (Indeed I've had a number of reccent mechanical hard drives that have had the controller board fail while the moving parts are working sweetly, yet I have a HDD somewhere from 1998 that still works perfectly).
Thus the following is some what of a myth nowadays:
SSDs if used for this purpose will burn out in weeks or months
Others here will point out the write-limitation ceiling is so high, it'll never be a concern, even in the worst case usage scenario.
In the case of windows I have had ReadyBoost and eboostr on USB disks for years and have a SSD with linux swap and windows swap files on them. I have not had a problem - and these are bargain bin USB flash drives that I was fully ready to consider expendable.
The game industry now more than ever needs to find ways to ad value. If they wanted to tackle piracy they would just about be packaging hats and tshirts with the latest game releases. Not so long ago I picked up an old 90's DOS game called Inferno http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(video_game)at a lawn sale, which came bundled with a rather thick graphic novel providing backstory. I believe this may have been a first in the industry. This was very cool in a period when the industry was experiencing huge growth. I have seldom seen the same thing since.
You also said the App Store had more apps than the android market, but I see more choice in Android, there are several alternative browsers for example?
Manually editing text is time-consuming, fatiguing and error prone. Have a tool to automate that sort of thing is one of the fundamental reasons for having computers in the first place.
Frankly I'm kind of stunned that people still manually edit text files for major firewalls in some critical networks. A robust GUI tool is an essential safeguard for something as simple a typo bringing everything down. Seen it happen. A UI can have necessary warnings and reflect the policies process so a change doesn't make the network eat itself.
As an arty type I think games do contain art, and some games have alot of geninune artistic integrity (mostly found in Indie games but Portal I think has artistic merit). I consider games like Miegakure and Love to very much be Art, if in their own way.
If Ebert was saying games are not and cannot ever be Fine Art I would be inclined to agree. Although I would elaborate in saying only commercial big title releases fit this. Once could use game technology to create an art installation, you see.
Interactive art is not art? Is that what he's saying? A games interactivity due to rules and goals does not by definition exclude it from being Art. I would go further to say usefulness does strip anything of being Art.
I have pottery by a local artist that I use to serve food on, is it no longer art because it's useful?
Would there be justification for me saying Ebert doesn't not really understand Art, or is immersed in a world where Art has a different meaning (film etc)?
However game devs, script writers and content artists spend too much time playing game and watching movies, not reading enough books and digesting enough genuine Art and Design media. There are exceptions to the rule of course, but this phenomena is self evident in the games industry compared to other digital media including web design where some serious Art really does go down.
They just don't get out in the real world enough, with a sketch pad and pencil and study anything. I can't think how many times I see a outdoor open-world game environment that looks like it was designed by someone who hasn't gone outdoors to actually look at some geology, indeed the average level designers understanding of geology is evidently below high school level. Even just poking around google earth for 10 minutes would helped.
Definitions of Art are important here. But putting some work into and showing understanding and interpretation is a huge part of it, communicating this in any form is Art. Art to some extent exists for no other reason to perform this communication. This is something games can do. Indeed games are a potential conduit for Art.
And the biggest problem is that very few people grow up with a C64 or an Amiga nowadays. They don't have any reason to learn how a computer actually works (or what a computer is), if they're just put in front of a computer that can load a game into the OS with a double-click. No reason to actually learn anything if that "just works".
And the next generation of gadgets kids will grow up with won't even have root access to their computing devices. *cough* iPad *cough*.
You can bet that there will be a clause that running the software isn't a get out of jail free card. Running a cracked version will also be made a crime.
This kind thing has never been shown to work. The choices they have with this:
1. It won't perform very well. False positives, false negatives and generally slowing down your machine
2. It'll cost an enormous ammount of money that the taxpayer will pick up part of.
3. It'll be easily cicumvented,as you described, with the inevitable cracked version.
Demos were just fine when you could pick up a magazine cover CD with 20 game demos on it. Now who downloads 2gb just to play 10 minutes of a game? Also Magazines have gone away from cover cds, being a hangover from the omg-CD-ROMs-are-teh-future bubble in the 90's, once they realized it's a quite a labor investment for a very mythical return. I'd go so far as to say it's actually hard to get big-title game demos out to gamers now.
Public BETAs are much more relevant way to both promote your game and make assist with the development.
In many cases all of the good bits are in the trailer. In fact trailers are considered a medium in themselves, there are a number of competitions around the world for short film makers to make a movie trailer for a hypothetical movie.
I can't think how many times I've i've been excited by a game or film trailer only to be disappointed enough with the end result to not buy it. Which leaves me wondering do we even need the commercial release? Crytek should just release cool looking game trailers.
Scratch that, how about just let me read interesting articles about games and game technology, don't even bother releasing anything but screenshots.
This is a quote from a tourist some time before the article:
"Unlike a sterile and lifeless parking lot, you soon get a sense here that this lake is somehow alive.
Roy said that a forty foot by forty foot hole completely fills itself in within 3 days."
"The lake is constantly pulling things into itself, almost like a slow motion black hole.
It's supposed to have "feelers" stretching outward for several miles, additional veins of pitch which stretch out from the main lake."
"this photo of him peeling back the hardened skin of the lake."
"The lake seemed to me more than anything to be like a large creature with no face, only arms and guts in which it slowly swallowed everything around it."
"If it swallows some things, then it also spits others out"
"Here is some leaf litter from part of the forest floor which the lake swallowed, chewed around for a few years and then spat out as indigestible.
These leaves were in perfect condition, but as dry as it's possible to imagine."
So it seems to be a living entity, demonstrably fussy, finding it a hard time getting a decent meal and likely depressed.
That life did not evolve in this pond but adapted from elsewhere is even more remarkable. On Titan natives wouldn't exactly be hardy adapted 'extremeophiles' anymore, any life would have evolved there, and be even more suited to it's environment.
So that density of biomass could be greater, Titan could be a living soup planet. There's a small issue of temperature, if someone could please clarify, chemistry is going to work is a little different at -230 c compared to more than +100c, IANAC but chemical energy may not be available to life or happen at slower rates.?
Slashdot Mirror
Well that's why I try my hardest to get the impure body fluids out.
Who does this guy think he is pontificating like that?
Perhaps most telling is that I've been using the Desire for a week now and it has begun to reduce my casual phone use ... With the iPhone I would fill downtime and dog walks by web browsing, checking Facebook, reading tweets and texting. The Desire's poor performance in daylight and fiddly on-screen keyboard have made these pastimes more of a chore than they should be.
I'm at least impressed a iCrack addict is out in the daylight more.
I found that the iPhone had indefensible flaws, periodic lag and slow app loading which would mar the otherwise slick nature of the interface. Running one app at a time was indefensibly stupid considering the hardware capability, and especially when the G1/Magic were capable of this with a slightly slower cpu and much less RAM. Consider doing something as trivial as having a chat program, twitter and facebook app logged in whilst checking a web link quickly. A pocket computer that can't multitask? Deal breaker for me.
... Hmm so after all this Android lag is merely because Linux has always gotten a bit funny without swap?
So I 'upgraded' to a HTC magic just after they came out which incidentally costed about half what my iPhone 2G for about 90% of the spec. Stock Android wasn't that good at the time, but I like how aftermarket ROMs make the phone feel with improved speed and features like multitouch, screen accuracy and vastly improved camera image quality.
Oh and it's Linux, root access allows the ARM core is overclocked 384mhz -> 528mhz and I enabled a swap partition on a fast SDHC card
Multi-tasking is so indespensible to me now that I cannot go back to a iPhone. An Open platform is a killer feature, and not for any ethicial reasons. Aftermarket software modification is the principal benefit, ultimately a Android phone can now do more (such as easy tethering - your Android phone is a instant usb ethernet gateway), there are things in the Android market that now are not available in the iPhone app store. I might not even bother with a new handset as Android 2.1 will be backported to existing handsets soon.
Asus had a USB thumb drive that was also a USB floppy drive, 1.44mb of flash was reserved for a floppy image you could load.
So does a 3.5 inch floppy become a 5.25 inch hard drive?
Any civilization sufficiently advanced to cross interstellar space would have little need for any resources a biosphere at the bottom of a gravity well might offer. It wouldn't be worth the energy expenditure compared to asteroids and moons.
.. fast.
However if they did they would start with Kupier and Oort objects, moving along to mine something like Europa or Titan first which are rich in water and likely organic compounds. So we should watch titan, if we find it loosing mass to a cloud of UFOs we should start researching antimatter weapons
This is all moot of course, surviving in space practically requires a almost zero-wastage self contained habitats that need little more than an energy source. We should really be looking for dyson spheres not flying saucers.
Scratch that, knowing what we know about the potential coming singularity, maybe they've just uploaded? Why do we assume we'll be meeting little green men?
I really can only imagine a very few plausible scenarios where we'd be contacted... or invaded. We'd still be a scienfitic curiousity most likely, in which case we'd likely be thoroughly observed and studied without being aware. It'd be a necessity that we'd not be interfered with. Don't Panic.
How does that work? True, False ... Maybe?
Yes but what about linux?
Thus the following is some what of a myth nowadays:
SSDs if used for this purpose will burn out in weeks or months
Others here will point out the write-limitation ceiling is so high, it'll never be a concern, even in the worst case usage scenario.
In the case of windows I have had ReadyBoost and eboostr on USB disks for years and have a SSD with linux swap and windows swap files on them. I have not had a problem - and these are bargain bin USB flash drives that I was fully ready to consider expendable.
The game industry now more than ever needs to find ways to ad value. If they wanted to tackle piracy they would just about be packaging hats and tshirts with the latest game releases. Not so long ago I picked up an old 90's DOS game called Inferno http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(video_game)at a lawn sale, which came bundled with a rather thick graphic novel providing backstory. I believe this may have been a first in the industry. This was very cool in a period when the industry was experiencing huge growth. I have seldom seen the same thing since.
A Misdemeanor is a pretty light punishment for something such as this.
Well, they are only micro-dildos (see picture) after all.
Now that Google is getting into hardware, it's only a matter of before we see:
The Google Search (and destroy) Robot. ;)
In that case, any future Robot invasion could be thwarted with robots.txt
*scrolls through the Android market*
I'm confused, so where's this porn?
You also said the App Store had more apps than the android market, but I see more choice in Android, there are several alternative browsers for example?
Manually editing text is time-consuming, fatiguing and error prone. Have a tool to automate that sort of thing is one of the fundamental reasons for having computers in the first place.
Frankly I'm kind of stunned that people still manually edit text files for major firewalls in some critical networks. A robust GUI tool is an essential safeguard for something as simple a typo bringing everything down. Seen it happen. A UI can have necessary warnings and reflect the policies process so a change doesn't make the network eat itself.
For me a next gen shooter would be any FPS without... crates.
As an arty type I think games do contain art, and some games have alot of geninune artistic integrity (mostly found in Indie games but Portal I think has artistic merit). I consider games like Miegakure and Love to very much be Art, if in their own way.
If Ebert was saying games are not and cannot ever be Fine Art I would be inclined to agree. Although I would elaborate in saying only commercial big title releases fit this. Once could use game technology to create an art installation, you see. Interactive art is not art? Is that what he's saying? A games interactivity due to rules and goals does not by definition exclude it from being Art. I would go further to say usefulness does strip anything of being Art.
I have pottery by a local artist that I use to serve food on, is it no longer art because it's useful?
Would there be justification for me saying Ebert doesn't not really understand Art, or is immersed in a world where Art has a different meaning (film etc)?
However game devs, script writers and content artists spend too much time playing game and watching movies, not reading enough books and digesting enough genuine Art and Design media. There are exceptions to the rule of course, but this phenomena is self evident in the games industry compared to other digital media including web design where some serious Art really does go down.
They just don't get out in the real world enough, with a sketch pad and pencil and study anything. I can't think how many times I see a outdoor open-world game environment that looks like it was designed by someone who hasn't gone outdoors to actually look at some geology, indeed the average level designers understanding of geology is evidently below high school level. Even just poking around google earth for 10 minutes would helped.
Definitions of Art are important here. But putting some work into and showing understanding and interpretation is a huge part of it, communicating this in any form is Art. Art to some extent exists for no other reason to perform this communication. This is something games can do. Indeed games are a potential conduit for Art.
And the biggest problem is that very few people grow up with a C64 or an Amiga nowadays. They don't have any reason to learn how a computer actually works (or what a computer is), if they're just put in front of a computer that can load a game into the OS with a double-click. No reason to actually learn anything if that "just works".
And the next generation of gadgets kids will grow up with won't even have root access to their computing devices. *cough* iPad *cough*.
You can bet that there will be a clause that running the software isn't a get out of jail free card. Running a cracked version will also be made a crime.
This kind thing has never been shown to work. The choices they have with this:
1. It won't perform very well. False positives, false negatives and generally slowing down your machine
2. It'll cost an enormous ammount of money that the taxpayer will pick up part of.
3. It'll be easily cicumvented,as you described, with the inevitable cracked version.
Pick two... at best
Demos were just fine when you could pick up a magazine cover CD with 20 game demos on it. Now who downloads 2gb just to play 10 minutes of a game? Also Magazines have gone away from cover cds, being a hangover from the omg-CD-ROMs-are-teh-future bubble in the 90's, once they realized it's a quite a labor investment for a very mythical return. I'd go so far as to say it's actually hard to get big-title game demos out to gamers now.
Public BETAs are much more relevant way to both promote your game and make assist with the development.
In many cases all of the good bits are in the trailer. In fact trailers are considered a medium in themselves, there are a number of competitions around the world for short film makers to make a movie trailer for a hypothetical movie.
I can't think how many times I've i've been excited by a game or film trailer only to be disappointed enough with the end result to not buy it. Which leaves me wondering do we even need the commercial release? Crytek should just release cool looking game trailers.
Scratch that, how about just let me read interesting articles about games and game technology, don't even bother releasing anything but screenshots.
This is a quote from a tourist some time before the article:
"Unlike a sterile and lifeless parking lot, you soon get a sense here that this lake is somehow alive. Roy said that a forty foot by forty foot hole completely fills itself in within 3 days."
"The lake is constantly pulling things into itself, almost like a slow motion black hole. It's supposed to have "feelers" stretching outward for several miles, additional veins of pitch which stretch out from the main lake."
"this photo of him peeling back the hardened skin of the lake."
"The lake seemed to me more than anything to be like a large creature with no face, only arms and guts in which it slowly swallowed everything around it."
"If it swallows some things, then it also spits others out"
"Here is some leaf litter from part of the forest floor which the lake swallowed, chewed around for a few years and then spat out as indigestible. These leaves were in perfect condition, but as dry as it's possible to imagine."
So it seems to be a living entity, demonstrably fussy, finding it a hard time getting a decent meal and likely depressed.
http://www.richard-seaman.com/Travel/TrinidadAndTobago/Trinidad/PitchLake/
That life did not evolve in this pond but adapted from elsewhere is even more remarkable. On Titan natives wouldn't exactly be hardy adapted 'extremeophiles' anymore, any life would have evolved there, and be even more suited to it's environment.
So that density of biomass could be greater, Titan could be a living soup planet. There's a small issue of temperature, if someone could please clarify, chemistry is going to work is a little different at -230 c compared to more than +100c, IANAC but chemical energy may not be available to life or happen at slower rates.?
Yes, now and then a problem springs up, one has to get a grip on the situation, and shortly a solution presents itself.
I have also been known to cause persistent sexual arousal syndrome (PSAS) in females of the opposite sex.
It's been my cross to bear since I was in the fifth grade and had to fight off Miss DeLisi, my teacher, who looked a lot like a young Kelly LeBrock.
It's only gotten worse since I became a professional golfer. I've learned to deal with it by lowering my standards way, way down.
Miss DeLisi: "Easy tiger!"