When I first read about this, I thought that I'd finally be able to use my NTFS formatted FreeAgent external drive on my 360. Too bad this isn't the case. It's ironic that the 360 doesn't seem to be able to use external drives formatted using the same file system being used in current Windows operating systems.
It seems to me that they were looking for an excuse to leave, and the hacking provided exactly that.
Don't know about that. China's got millions and millions of potential Google users in a fast developing market. Google probably wanted to be there and wanted to stay, but not on the (probably unfair) terms of Chinese government.
This project might produce interesting results, depending on how they run things. Theology? Well, some Japanese games had references to Christian theology removed when brought to Western countries, including early Castlevania games and more recent games like Grandia 2 and Maken X. Politics? Poly Play, developed in Communist East Germany was awful (yet popular, since there wasn't much else to play there), but Tetris, developed in... wait for it... Soviet Russia became a cultural phenomenon. Then there's the supposed North Korean arcade: http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2008/09/inside-north-korean-arcade.html Culturally, there's the usual topics of sex and violence in games. And increasingly, ethnicity and gender. Big whoop.
I just hope it doesn't turn out to be just like other university subdepartments dedicated to "specialty" studies, home to a bunch of self-righteous blowhards who don't really know what they're talking about.
So... what happens to the downloaded movies that you've "bought" once the inevitable PS4 comes out? Would you be able to redownload the films or simply move the old hard drive into the new device? For all we know, Sony's license to distribute the films may not cover successive devices.
Of course, then there's the matter of downloaded content on other systems like the Xbox 360...
FTA: "Ortiz admits that prior to introducing the bill he did not research salt’s role in food chemistry, its effect on flavor or his bill’s ramifications for the restaurant industry. He tells me he was prompted to introduce the bill because his father used salt excessively for many years, developed high blood pressure and had a heart attack."
So he's proposing the bill because his own bad personal experience, not because it would benefit his constituents, who probably don't want the bill either. So much for representative government.
In the five years that I've been a Wikipedia editor, I've played most of these roles, but right now I'm definitely a watchdog. I primarily revert vandalism. It's a good way to stay out of edits wars. At this point, most of the stuff on Wikipedia is way too messy to clean up and/or improve. I'd rather clean up Cowboys Stadium on any given Sunday in the Fall than clean up content on Wikipedia. As for deletionists? They deal with the administrative (sigh) aspect of Wikipedia, while this study seems to be driven mainly on the content itself.
Personally, I had a Motorola phone that didn't survive being dunked in a toilet bowl. And a Samsung one that seemed to cave into the extreme heat of a radiator.
Multiple monitors as display area extenders seem to be used when a cost effective single monitor doesn't exist to do the job. A couple of Darius games, The Ninja Warriors and Konami's X-Men used multiple monitors in arcades since a single wider screen monitor didn't exist. But then cheap rear projection technology came along and made this setup obsolete. Soon enough a cheap, single screen solution will come along to replace Eyefinity. Then we'll need another multimonitor setup when that resolution proves to be inadequate. And so on. Developers should really focus on the level of detail in games, rather than resolution. Live action DVDs running in 480p beat the visuals of any modern game running in any resolution.
A few games do use multimonitor setups for novel purposes though - Sega's Ferrari F355 Challenge used several monitors to simulate peering out of the windows in an actual Ferrari F355 car. It was a very eye pleasing effect.
The Actiontec Mi424-WR Verizon provides for FiOS supports WPA and WPA2, at least from Revision D on. But by default, it uses WEP (the web admin console actually recommends WEP). One of the Westell routers I've seen for a Verizon Business DSL installation a few years back only supports WEP. So I just disabled wireless outright for that installation.
The article doesn't features game with actual weapons like Call of Duty, it instead features weapons that don't actually exist yet as they are portrayed in games. I hope someone else does a comparison with how weapons work in Modern Warfare 2 with their real-life counterparts, kind of like how Top Gear did comparisons with Gran Turismo and real life cars.
Well, of course, there's supposed to be a passage of time in between each search, but they do a pretty bad job of showing that in the ad. They should have shown the Google home page on a monitor while the backdrop changes after each search, and provide some indicator of how much time has past in between in each search (e.g. a calendar, a window showing the weather of the season and location).
The way I figure it, the next logical search after the last one would been:
"ashley madison":P
The real reason that Apple is so closed-off is because they want to stay unique, or at least appear to be unique. Jobs probably fears that Apple will become just another "beige box" maker just like the company was becoming when he first returned to it. It's a decent strategy. It protects them against copy cats so by the time the competition brings out similar products, Apple's already gained a stranglehold on the market. It also gets a good buzz going about what the "next big thing" from Apple is. Contrast that with Microsoft, who prefer to be ubiquitous.
Of course, Apple's strategy has its caveats. Just ask its suppliers, who have to keep their lips sealed or lose their accounts...
He's not the guy to blame for people's misconceptions regarding computers. He's just doing his job and making stuff look pretty. Blaming him would be like blaming some make up guy for making Hollywood starlets set an impossibly high bar for beauty. Or script writers for giving people misconceptions about how life works. Rather, it's the failing of the educational system for not adequately educating people regarding technology, which still remains a set of magic boxes for the lay man.
Now that you mention Asimov, I think he wrote something that basically sums up the need for science fiction:
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all..
You're not alone. In The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin rightfully pointed out that descriptive text beats icons on any day. I believe he even cited studies that supported his claims. But in documents pertaining to the original Macintosh (a project Raskin led before Steve Jobs made it his pet project), developers were encouraged to use icons instead of text whereever possible.
Icons are used for two purposes - they generally take up a fixed number of pixels that generally use less space than text and they look pretty. The first reason is moot since even the cheapest display devices can spit out high resolution images with lots of space for text. And even if there isn't enough space, text labels can always be hidden via collapsible menus. Text can also be scaled to larger and smaller sizes as needed. The second reason is probably one of the biggest selling points for operating systems with pretty GUIs, e.g. Mac OS X. But with text labels, there's far less ambiguity about what they mean.
Of course, there are situations where icons would be preferable. If you can't translate descriptive text for buttons in other languages, then an icon might be more convenient to use. And of course, they look good. I doubt the iPhone would sell so well if the pretty icons were replaced by text.
DisplayPort seems like one of those technologies that have great mind share, as well as some advantages over the competing technology, but will never gain mainstream adoption (See: Firewire).
Chalk this up to the same bad management decisions that got Jayson Blair bylines in the paper. On the Internet, people seem to be largely unwilling to pay for access to content. They figure they pay their ISP already, so they should have access to whatever they want. Whether this is a valid argument or not is up for debate. But the bottom line is, if content providers like the New York Times aren't willing to offer their access to their content for free (usually via an ad-supported model), there's always a dozen other content providers that are willing to provide free access to equivalent services.
One big change in modern game endings is the fact that it doesn't seem like much of an accomplishment to finish a games. Games these days generally have mid-level checkpoints and infinite continues, so there's no satisfaction in reaching the end. You just feel like endlessly grinding to the end.
Also, the concept of "completing" a game has changed. Whereas it once meant clearing all the stages in a game, completion might mean unlocking all the game content (e.g. 100% completion levels in Gran Turismo, or getting all the "achievements" in some titles).
Sounds like more fodder for game developers and publishers to whine about lost revenues due to used game sales and piracy, as well as justifying their pricing models and DLC systems. Kind of pointless having a huge game development budget when it's the same, uninnovative, linear experience time and time again. Thankfully, the increasing success of so-called "indie" games may have them rethink their huge dev costs.
What about Sliders? Fun show, great ensemble cast, interesting concept that postulated about alternate Earths. The first couple of seasons were great, but then they changed the tone to become a lot more dark and dreary. They whacked John Rhys-Davies, added Kari Wuhrer and started ripping off various sci-fi films for plots. Cleavant Derricks's character became serious and less of a comic relief character. They started fighting an unnecessary recurring antagonist, the cro-mags. Sabrina Lloyd was written out, Jerry O'Connell got his brother on the show and then they had some weirdness about two Quinn Mallories merging or something.
Slashdot Mirror
When I first read about this, I thought that I'd finally be able to use my NTFS formatted FreeAgent external drive on my 360. Too bad this isn't the case. It's ironic that the 360 doesn't seem to be able to use external drives formatted using the same file system being used in current Windows operating systems.
It seems to me that they were looking for an excuse to leave, and the hacking provided exactly that.
Don't know about that. China's got millions and millions of potential Google users in a fast developing market. Google probably wanted to be there and wanted to stay, but not on the (probably unfair) terms of Chinese government.
This project might produce interesting results, depending on how they run things. Theology? Well, some Japanese games had references to Christian theology removed when brought to Western countries, including early Castlevania games and more recent games like Grandia 2 and Maken X. Politics? Poly Play, developed in Communist East Germany was awful (yet popular, since there wasn't much else to play there), but Tetris, developed in... wait for it... Soviet Russia became a cultural phenomenon. Then there's the supposed North Korean arcade: http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2008/09/inside-north-korean-arcade.html Culturally, there's the usual topics of sex and violence in games. And increasingly, ethnicity and gender. Big whoop.
I just hope it doesn't turn out to be just like other university subdepartments dedicated to "specialty" studies, home to a bunch of self-righteous blowhards who don't really know what they're talking about.
So... what happens to the downloaded movies that you've "bought" once the inevitable PS4 comes out? Would you be able to redownload the films or simply move the old hard drive into the new device? For all we know, Sony's license to distribute the films may not cover successive devices.
Of course, then there's the matter of downloaded content on other systems like the Xbox 360...
FTA: "Ortiz admits that prior to introducing the bill he did not research salt’s role in food chemistry, its effect on flavor or his bill’s ramifications for the restaurant industry. He tells me he was prompted to introduce the bill because his father used salt excessively for many years, developed high blood pressure and had a heart attack."
So he's proposing the bill because his own bad personal experience, not because it would benefit his constituents, who probably don't want the bill either. So much for representative government.
In the five years that I've been a Wikipedia editor, I've played most of these roles, but right now I'm definitely a watchdog. I primarily revert vandalism. It's a good way to stay out of edits wars. At this point, most of the stuff on Wikipedia is way too messy to clean up and/or improve. I'd rather clean up Cowboys Stadium on any given Sunday in the Fall than clean up content on Wikipedia. As for deletionists? They deal with the administrative (sigh) aspect of Wikipedia, while this study seems to be driven mainly on the content itself.
This guy's story trumps all lost cell phone stories: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2277640.ece His Nokia phone spent a week in the belly of a fish and it still worked after a fisherman found it.
Personally, I had a Motorola phone that didn't survive being dunked in a toilet bowl. And a Samsung one that seemed to cave into the extreme heat of a radiator.
I hope that Raskin resumes work on Archy, a really promising zooming user interface project started by his dad long ago.
Multiple monitors as display area extenders seem to be used when a cost effective single monitor doesn't exist to do the job. A couple of Darius games, The Ninja Warriors and Konami's X-Men used multiple monitors in arcades since a single wider screen monitor didn't exist. But then cheap rear projection technology came along and made this setup obsolete. Soon enough a cheap, single screen solution will come along to replace Eyefinity. Then we'll need another multimonitor setup when that resolution proves to be inadequate. And so on. Developers should really focus on the level of detail in games, rather than resolution. Live action DVDs running in 480p beat the visuals of any modern game running in any resolution.
A few games do use multimonitor setups for novel purposes though - Sega's Ferrari F355 Challenge used several monitors to simulate peering out of the windows in an actual Ferrari F355 car. It was a very eye pleasing effect.
The Actiontec Mi424-WR Verizon provides for FiOS supports WPA and WPA2, at least from Revision D on. But by default, it uses WEP (the web admin console actually recommends WEP). One of the Westell routers I've seen for a Verizon Business DSL installation a few years back only supports WEP. So I just disabled wireless outright for that installation.
The article doesn't features game with actual weapons like Call of Duty, it instead features weapons that don't actually exist yet as they are portrayed in games. I hope someone else does a comparison with how weapons work in Modern Warfare 2 with their real-life counterparts, kind of like how Top Gear did comparisons with Gran Turismo and real life cars.
Well, of course, there's supposed to be a passage of time in between each search, but they do a pretty bad job of showing that in the ad. They should have shown the Google home page on a monitor while the backdrop changes after each search, and provide some indicator of how much time has past in between in each search (e.g. a calendar, a window showing the weather of the season and location).
:P
The way I figure it, the next logical search after the last one would been:
"ashley madison"
The film looks good, but Patton Oswalt best sums up the feeling of almost every single jaded Star Wars fan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDCjIjsZp_Y
Worth noting: Matthew Stover wrote the novelization of "Revenge of the Sith".
Considering where a lot of this stuff comes from, it should probably read, "Can You Trust Computer Equipment?"
The real reason that Apple is so closed-off is because they want to stay unique, or at least appear to be unique. Jobs probably fears that Apple will become just another "beige box" maker just like the company was becoming when he first returned to it. It's a decent strategy. It protects them against copy cats so by the time the competition brings out similar products, Apple's already gained a stranglehold on the market. It also gets a good buzz going about what the "next big thing" from Apple is. Contrast that with Microsoft, who prefer to be ubiquitous.
Of course, Apple's strategy has its caveats. Just ask its suppliers, who have to keep their lips sealed or lose their accounts...
He's not the guy to blame for people's misconceptions regarding computers. He's just doing his job and making stuff look pretty. Blaming him would be like blaming some make up guy for making Hollywood starlets set an impossibly high bar for beauty. Or script writers for giving people misconceptions about how life works. Rather, it's the failing of the educational system for not adequately educating people regarding technology, which still remains a set of magic boxes for the lay man.
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all..
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov
You're not alone. In The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin rightfully pointed out that descriptive text beats icons on any day. I believe he even cited studies that supported his claims. But in documents pertaining to the original Macintosh (a project Raskin led before Steve Jobs made it his pet project), developers were encouraged to use icons instead of text whereever possible.
Icons are used for two purposes - they generally take up a fixed number of pixels that generally use less space than text and they look pretty. The first reason is moot since even the cheapest display devices can spit out high resolution images with lots of space for text. And even if there isn't enough space, text labels can always be hidden via collapsible menus. Text can also be scaled to larger and smaller sizes as needed. The second reason is probably one of the biggest selling points for operating systems with pretty GUIs, e.g. Mac OS X. But with text labels, there's far less ambiguity about what they mean.
Of course, there are situations where icons would be preferable. If you can't translate descriptive text for buttons in other languages, then an icon might be more convenient to use. And of course, they look good. I doubt the iPhone would sell so well if the pretty icons were replaced by text.
DisplayPort seems like one of those technologies that have great mind share, as well as some advantages over the competing technology, but will never gain mainstream adoption (See: Firewire).
Chalk this up to the same bad management decisions that got Jayson Blair bylines in the paper. On the Internet, people seem to be largely unwilling to pay for access to content. They figure they pay their ISP already, so they should have access to whatever they want. Whether this is a valid argument or not is up for debate. But the bottom line is, if content providers like the New York Times aren't willing to offer their access to their content for free (usually via an ad-supported model), there's always a dozen other content providers that are willing to provide free access to equivalent services.
One big change in modern game endings is the fact that it doesn't seem like much of an accomplishment to finish a games. Games these days generally have mid-level checkpoints and infinite continues, so there's no satisfaction in reaching the end. You just feel like endlessly grinding to the end. Also, the concept of "completing" a game has changed. Whereas it once meant clearing all the stages in a game, completion might mean unlocking all the game content (e.g. 100% completion levels in Gran Turismo, or getting all the "achievements" in some titles).
This isn't terribly shocking. Both agencies also wasted millions of tax payer dollars on the failed "Deep Water" initiative, which sought to modernize some of the Coast Guard's old vessels: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/17/60minutes/main2823448.shtml
Sounds like more fodder for game developers and publishers to whine about lost revenues due to used game sales and piracy, as well as justifying their pricing models and DLC systems. Kind of pointless having a huge game development budget when it's the same, uninnovative, linear experience time and time again. Thankfully, the increasing success of so-called "indie" games may have them rethink their huge dev costs.
What about Sliders? Fun show, great ensemble cast, interesting concept that postulated about alternate Earths. The first couple of seasons were great, but then they changed the tone to become a lot more dark and dreary. They whacked John Rhys-Davies, added Kari Wuhrer and started ripping off various sci-fi films for plots. Cleavant Derricks's character became serious and less of a comic relief character. They started fighting an unnecessary recurring antagonist, the cro-mags. Sabrina Lloyd was written out, Jerry O'Connell got his brother on the show and then they had some weirdness about two Quinn Mallories merging or something.