A couple of years ago I bought some emerald earrings from a jeweler in NY that used Amazon. They had really good prices, but I was a little worried, so I used a Citibank virtual credit card number. When I received the earrings, they were pretty crappy, so I tried to return them. This process took over a month. When the jeweler tried to refund my money back onto the card, they couldn't, because the card had expired. (I had set it up to expire in a month) Citibank said there was nothing they could do, so the jeweler ended up mailing me a check. Lesson? Either get a number that lasts longer than a month so you can possibly return stuff, thereby exposing that CC number for longer than necessary, or make sure you don't buy anything with them you might want to return.:P
And I have no idea if things purchased with virtual credit card numbers are covered by extended warranties touted by the credit card companies....
The "customer" for the Nexus One was not just the cellular phone user, it was every HW manufacturer. For manufacturers it showed what Android could do. If you look at all the phones released prior to the Nexus One, the hardware specifications were very similar in terms of performance, which let's be honest, was not super awesome. Once the Nexus One came out, the specs for subsequent phones jumped to match it and surpass it, and adoption of Android phones exploded. It's not clear that jump would have happened if not for the Nexus One. With approximately 135000 sold by March, let's assume a total inventory of 150000 phones. At an estimated $175 manufacturing cost, that's $26.25 million. Given the massive explosion of phones and subsequent sales (and search revenue!) The cost of the Nexus One is nothing compared to Apple's advertising budget ($500 million in 2009). Even if you were generous and assumed Google spent $50M on the Nexus One as a whole, that's still only 10%. Sounds like Google made a smart move to me.
You can't be "smart" about your online identity when you're forced to post it in a games forums. The whole point of "being smart about your online identity" is by _staying_ anonymous. This act by Blizzard goes entirely against that principle.
Um.
You're not forced to post in the Blizzard forums. You're not forced to add RealID friends. And face it, you're not forced to play World of Warcraft or Starcraft II. Every single thing you do in life has consequences. If you're not willing to accept the consequences of a particular action, DON'T DO IT. If you don't post on the Blizzard forums and don't add any friends via RealID you have not subverted "being smart about your online identity" at all.
Are you kidding me? All UMA does is take you from "I can't get service anywhere" to "I can't get service anywhere unless I'm in Starbucks, a hotel, or my friend's house with WiFi" Don't get me wrong, my wife has a UMA phone and she loves it, but UMA doesn't work when you're actually, you know, mobile.
As for price point, I'm unsure how $180 w/2 yr contract for a phone that makes Windows Mobile look like the OS for your grandparents is unattractive. This thing destroys the Tilt in everything except Exchange connectivity (yawn). If you factor in the cost of an 8GB microSD card ($30) it's still priced almost the same as the iPhone. And you can replace the battery! (Something I still can't believe people don't bitch about)
Bottom line, it sounds like it doesn't meet your needs, so it obviously must be a failure for everyone.
Dude, bundle the GPS with the unit. It's that simple. The article is very misleading. The photo shows the GPS unit attached to the product, yet you have to scroll down midway through the article to find out "oh, it doesn't come with that." It just seems like you said "Oh, I want to make this product that will allow you to do this great stuff with geotagging" and then completely halfassed it after 75% of the way through development. Determining the direction and stuff is great and a neat feature, which I applaud you for. But not providing a complete solution out of the box just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, especially at the price you're quoting.
"The Jelbert GeoTagger has a mount for the Garmin Gecko 301 GPS receiver which must be fitted in order to operate (purchased separately)."
This thing costs 149 british pounds, and ALL IT IS is a serial port connected to a processor that translates NMEA sentences to location and directional information, connected to an SD slot. You have to buy a GPS unit for it to work!
Hey, at least for 150USD sony throws in the GPS!
You'd be better off rolling your own with this for a heckuva lot cheaper, and it comes with the GPS too! But you lose directional information. boohoo!:P
I have a T-mobile MDA, and I've personally evaluated MS Pocket Streets 2006, Delorme Street Atlas Handheld 2006, and TomTom 5. Far and away, TomTom has the best UI. It lets you easily set up a new route directly on the unit. Pocket Streets doesn't even DO routing, and I fought with Street Atlas for a week and STILL couldn't figure out how to generate routes directly within the program based on an address. Even Delorme admits their UI sucks and won't really do anything about it. Everything had to be done on a PC and transferred to the device. TomTom also deals best with missing directions. If you miss an exit or turn the wrong way, it'll automatically recalculate directions based on your current position. Delorme Street Atlas just whines "Off Route" at you. Voice prompts on Street Atlas have a *half-mile* granularity, so you'll get "turn left in one half mile" then right when you get on top of it "turn left". TomTom will tell you every hundred yards or so up to the turn.
I live in the bay area, and I have yet to have a problem with an address not existing, so based on what other people are saying, it looks like database quality depends on what state you live in. If your device is a phone, or you can get access to an internet connection from your device somehow, you can get live traffic updates, just like the hardware TomToms. The only problem I have with TomTom is that it takes about a minute for it to start up on my phone, but I think that's my phone's problem. (MDA is known to have a slow processor) I couldn't find it in a store, but you should be able to find TomTom at any of the major mobile device software websites. Best $150 I EVER spent.
As for a GPS, I got the Delorme Blue Logger. It's also $150, but it supports an external antenna, plus you can have it record waypoints as you move. Configuring that requires a PC, however.
...is that there has to be *some* identifiable way for two end points to set up communication, a way for one side to understand what the other side is saying. And technology already exists to identify the protocols, regardless of how complex the protocol is, at multi-gigabit speeds. From what I've seen so far, the encrypted protocol referenced here isn't going to do squat against that. The traffic is still identifiable as bittorrent, and therefore can be filtered/shaped/whatever.
...that all the experience you could have gotten after hitting 60 (especially doing high end quests and whatnot) might be able to put you at level 62 or 63 at this point (depending on how long you've been 60) instead of being wasted. It would be really cool though, if Blizzard had kept track of all the XP players got beyond 60 and awarded it. I doubt that will happen though.
I found this while poking around the live site, talk about on-demand publishing! For 100 pounds, you can have a custom-designed monopoly set created and made for you.
In my mind, that's just as cool as if not cooler than live monopoly (which is only open to UK residents anyway:P )....
OK We got it awhile ago, UMD is an oxymoron
on
Porn in Your Pocket
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why is it that almost three months after NA release and well over six months since JP release EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE that mentions the PSP has yet another person seemingly possessed to post "ZOMG! Teh U stands 4 Universal, yet....it is a proprietary format!" That was a funny-once, not a funny-40-hojillion.
Did anyone bother to stop and think that maybe, just maybe, the U in UMD refers to the M and not the D? That is, you can put any kind of media on it? As in, music and movies and pictures and games, (Yes, I know that's not all media types) which is what they've been pimping the thing for in the first place? I'm not saying it's not a stupid name, and I know Sony is the king of proprietary formats, but jeez. Give it a rest already.
The game was graphically very pretty, and the whole emphasis on using cover was cool.
That having been said, the gameplay footage itself SUCKED ASS. I don't care how pretty your game looks, if it's running at 15fps and is choppy as hell, it's going to look like utter shit, and people won't want to play it.
The other humourous "dirty little secret" at MS' booth was that all Xbox 360 demos were running on Macintosh G5s. Understandable, but nonetheless funny as hell.
Well, the nice part is that cancelling your account doesn't kill your characters like FFXI can, so shelve it for 6 months or so and then check the state of the game.................
But let's start with this. We're talking about a PC game. PC interfaces come with a mouse and controller. It would make sense to create a port of the game that caters to this interface.
No, we're not. We're talking about a game for the Playstation 2 and the PC, where all players are in the same world system. When designing a game for multiple operating systems, you want the interface to be the same. Apple taught us that consistency is good, yes?
Instead they basically ported the PS2 version over directly, and poorly mapped the PS2 buttons onto the keyboard. So using the keyboard is a chore.
Simple example: Let's say I want to equip a new sword.
FFXI: Press the "-" key on the numpad, and then choose the Equipment option. Then select the "Weapon" slot. Then select the new piece of equipment. (Of course, you can use either the keyboard or the mouse for this.)
World of Warcraft: Press Shift-B. Right click on the new sword. Done.
Which is easier here?
Chore for you maybe.
Ctrl-E. Return. Up or Down however many times to get the weapon you want. Return. Escape. Done.
I can do this in less than a second. All without my hands leaving the keyboard. Or if it's a switch I need to do often, I just make a macro for it.
Is there any time in WoW where you have to take your hand off the mouse to use the keyboard? Do you ever have to do it in the middle of a fight? I'm sorry, I hate having to switch control mechanisms, *especially* in the middle of a fight.
But ignoring the terrible control for a while, let's talk about the gameplay for a bit, and how this game can be more accurately called Crab Fantasy XI.
Uh, did you play the same game that I do? I'll freely admit the scaling up of monster models, but it's not like that's unique to FFXI, and I definitely have not spent my entire game levelling off crabs. I think the only time I fought them at all was in Qufim.
Personally, I think playstyle has much more to do with how one views FFXI. If all you think of the game is "Get my job to 75 and sub to 37" then heck yeah you're going to look at it as a grind. Did you ever fish, just for the sake of fishing? Did you ever just hang out someplace with your friends? That said, most of the MMOG experience is tied to the other players you interact with in the game. If you don't find people you can connect with, then you'll lose interest. There are 50+ people in my linkshell for me to hang out with, and I'm "grinding" 5 or 6 jobs at the same time. Whatever I'm in the mood for, I can do. I'm a casual player, so I'm less concerned about when I achieve something and more about what happens along the way. I like FFXI a lot, and I'm sorry you don't share that opinion, since it seems like you've put some effort into it in the past. I hope WoW is the game you're looking for.
Yes, hopefully all the mouthbreathers and asshats will migrate to EQ2 and WoW, so those of us who actually enjoy the game can enjoy it that much more.
If nothing else, FFXI has the best damn control mechanism of any MMOG out there. WASD makes you run in the direction you push, and the arrow keys move the camera. I haven't touched the mouse in-game in over 10 months.
From what I can tell, the people who hate FFXI the most are the ones that insisted on using mouse+keyboard instead of keyboard only or ps2-style controller and keyboard. If I was still using the mouse, I'd hate it too.
After seeing all the bashing of Valve over things like the media being required to be present, did anyone stop and think that maybe the reason there is such draconian protection measures in the retail version is because Vivendi required it as part of the distribution contract? There is *no* logical reason for Valve to require a physical disc to be present once you've registered the product in Steam. So the only logical reason I can come up with for why it's there is because they were required to by their distribution contract. Yes, there is also the conspiracy theory that Valve wanted to people to buy it via Steam so they added media protection to generate unrest. I don't buy that though.
The pair I picked up was to replace the pair I bought in 1996, and that was only because all the covering over the foam had come off. The headphones themselves are still quite usable, but I figured paying another $90 after 8 years of usage was okay.:)
The mini-Apple store is basically most stuff in a full-size Apple store condensed into one aisle.
There is another mini-Apple store that opened in Oakridge Mall in San Jose, which looked like it would be larger, but I haven't seen it since it opened.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of years ago I bought some emerald earrings from a jeweler in NY that used Amazon. They had really good prices, but I was a little worried, so I used a Citibank virtual credit card number. When I received the earrings, they were pretty crappy, so I tried to return them. This process took over a month. When the jeweler tried to refund my money back onto the card, they couldn't, because the card had expired. (I had set it up to expire in a month) Citibank said there was nothing they could do, so the jeweler ended up mailing me a check. Lesson? Either get a number that lasts longer than a month so you can possibly return stuff, thereby exposing that CC number for longer than necessary, or make sure you don't buy anything with them you might want to return. :P
And I have no idea if things purchased with virtual credit card numbers are covered by extended warranties touted by the credit card companies....
The "customer" for the Nexus One was not just the cellular phone user, it was every HW manufacturer. For manufacturers it showed what Android could do. If you look at all the phones released prior to the Nexus One, the hardware specifications were very similar in terms of performance, which let's be honest, was not super awesome. Once the Nexus One came out, the specs for subsequent phones jumped to match it and surpass it, and adoption of Android phones exploded. It's not clear that jump would have happened if not for the Nexus One. With approximately 135000 sold by March, let's assume a total inventory of 150000 phones. At an estimated $175 manufacturing cost, that's $26.25 million. Given the massive explosion of phones and subsequent sales (and search revenue!) The cost of the Nexus One is nothing compared to Apple's advertising budget ($500 million in 2009). Even if you were generous and assumed Google spent $50M on the Nexus One as a whole, that's still only 10%. Sounds like Google made a smart move to me.
You can't be "smart" about your online identity when you're forced to post it in a games forums. The whole point of "being smart about your online identity" is by _staying_ anonymous. This act by Blizzard goes entirely against that principle.
Um.
You're not forced to post in the Blizzard forums. You're not forced to add RealID friends. And face it, you're not forced to play World of Warcraft or Starcraft II. Every single thing you do in life has consequences. If you're not willing to accept the consequences of a particular action, DON'T DO IT. If you don't post on the Blizzard forums and don't add any friends via RealID you have not subverted "being smart about your online identity" at all.
Are you kidding me? All UMA does is take you from "I can't get service anywhere" to "I can't get service anywhere unless I'm in Starbucks, a hotel, or my friend's house with WiFi" Don't get me wrong, my wife has a UMA phone and she loves it, but UMA doesn't work when you're actually, you know, mobile.
As for price point, I'm unsure how $180 w/2 yr contract for a phone that makes Windows Mobile look like the OS for your grandparents is unattractive. This thing destroys the Tilt in everything except Exchange connectivity (yawn). If you factor in the cost of an 8GB microSD card ($30) it's still priced almost the same as the iPhone. And you can replace the battery! (Something I still can't believe people don't bitch about)
Bottom line, it sounds like it doesn't meet your needs, so it obviously must be a failure for everyone.
Dude, bundle the GPS with the unit. It's that simple. The article is very misleading. The photo shows the GPS unit attached to the product, yet you have to scroll down midway through the article to find out "oh, it doesn't come with that." It just seems like you said "Oh, I want to make this product that will allow you to do this great stuff with geotagging" and then completely halfassed it after 75% of the way through development. Determining the direction and stuff is great and a neat feature, which I applaud you for. But not providing a complete solution out of the box just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, especially at the price you're quoting.
This "product" is completely bogus.
From the article:
This thing costs 149 british pounds, and ALL IT IS is a serial port connected to a processor that translates NMEA sentences to location and directional information, connected to an SD slot. You have to buy a GPS unit for it to work!
Hey, at least for 150USD sony throws in the GPS!
You'd be better off rolling your own with this for a heckuva lot cheaper, and it comes with the GPS too! But you lose directional information. boohoo! :P
For the lazy though, the sony unit still wins.
I believe VGCats has best described the frustration Otis "calls" forth.
I have a T-mobile MDA, and I've personally evaluated MS Pocket Streets 2006, Delorme Street Atlas Handheld 2006, and TomTom 5. Far and away, TomTom has the best UI. It lets you easily set up a new route directly on the unit. Pocket Streets doesn't even DO routing, and I fought with Street Atlas for a week and STILL couldn't figure out how to generate routes directly within the program based on an address. Even Delorme admits their UI sucks and won't really do anything about it. Everything had to be done on a PC and transferred to the device. TomTom also deals best with missing directions. If you miss an exit or turn the wrong way, it'll automatically recalculate directions based on your current position. Delorme Street Atlas just whines "Off Route" at you. Voice prompts on Street Atlas have a *half-mile* granularity, so you'll get "turn left in one half mile" then right when you get on top of it "turn left". TomTom will tell you every hundred yards or so up to the turn.
I live in the bay area, and I have yet to have a problem with an address not existing, so based on what other people are saying, it looks like database quality depends on what state you live in. If your device is a phone, or you can get access to an internet connection from your device somehow, you can get live traffic updates, just like the hardware TomToms. The only problem I have with TomTom is that it takes about a minute for it to start up on my phone, but I think that's my phone's problem. (MDA is known to have a slow processor) I couldn't find it in a store, but you should be able to find TomTom at any of the major mobile device software websites. Best $150 I EVER spent.
As for a GPS, I got the Delorme Blue Logger. It's also $150, but it supports an external antenna, plus you can have it record waypoints as you move. Configuring that requires a PC, however.
...is that there has to be *some* identifiable way for two end points to set up communication, a way for one side to understand what the other side is saying. And technology already exists to identify the protocols, regardless of how complex the protocol is, at multi-gigabit speeds. From what I've seen so far, the encrypted protocol referenced here isn't going to do squat against that. The traffic is still identifiable as bittorrent, and therefore can be filtered/shaped/whatever.
This is just a side effect of when registrations were opened in the mid90s. everyone and their brother wanted a domain.
...that all the experience you could have gotten after hitting 60 (especially doing high end quests and whatnot) might be able to put you at level 62 or 63 at this point (depending on how long you've been 60) instead of being wasted. It would be really cool though, if Blizzard had kept track of all the XP players got beyond 60 and awarded it. I doubt that will happen though.
bates.mo.tel.
I found this while poking around the live site, talk about on-demand publishing! For 100 pounds, you can have a custom-designed monopoly set created and made for you.
In my mind, that's just as cool as if not cooler than live monopoly (which is only open to UK residents anyway :P )....
Why is it that almost three months after NA release and well over six months since JP release EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE that mentions the PSP has yet another person seemingly possessed to post "ZOMG! Teh U stands 4 Universal, yet....it is a proprietary format!" That was a funny-once, not a funny-40-hojillion.
Did anyone bother to stop and think that maybe, just maybe, the U in UMD refers to the M and not the D? That is, you can put any kind of media on it? As in, music and movies and pictures and games, (Yes, I know that's not all media types) which is what they've been pimping the thing for in the first place? I'm not saying it's not a stupid name, and I know Sony is the king of proprietary formats, but jeez. Give it a rest already.
The game was graphically very pretty, and the whole emphasis on using cover was cool.
That having been said, the gameplay footage itself SUCKED ASS. I don't care how pretty your game looks, if it's running at 15fps and is choppy as hell, it's going to look like utter shit, and people won't want to play it.
The other humourous "dirty little secret" at MS' booth was that all Xbox 360 demos were running on Macintosh G5s. Understandable, but nonetheless funny as hell.
GSIA couldn't admin their way out of a wet paper bag, at least, not when I worked for Computing Services back in the day.
"Tepper School of Business"....LOLOLOLOL
Holy heck this is a pain to do....... key api is cumbersome at best.
Well, the nice part is that cancelling your account doesn't kill your characters like FFXI can, so shelve it for 6 months or so and then check the state of the game.................
Blizzard explicity states that they won't delete your characters if you stop paying for your account.
But let's start with this. We're talking about a PC game. PC interfaces come with a mouse and controller. It would make sense to create a port of the game that caters to this interface.
No, we're not. We're talking about a game for the Playstation 2 and the PC, where all players are in the same world system. When designing a game for multiple operating systems, you want the interface to be the same. Apple taught us that consistency is good, yes?
Instead they basically ported the PS2 version over directly, and poorly mapped the PS2 buttons onto the keyboard. So using the keyboard is a chore. Simple example: Let's say I want to equip a new sword. FFXI: Press the "-" key on the numpad, and then choose the Equipment option. Then select the "Weapon" slot. Then select the new piece of equipment. (Of course, you can use either the keyboard or the mouse for this.) World of Warcraft: Press Shift-B. Right click on the new sword. Done. Which is easier here?
Chore for you maybe.
Ctrl-E. Return. Up or Down however many times to get the weapon you want. Return. Escape. Done.
I can do this in less than a second. All without my hands leaving the keyboard. Or if it's a switch I need to do often, I just make a macro for it.
Is there any time in WoW where you have to take your hand off the mouse to use the keyboard? Do you ever have to do it in the middle of a fight? I'm sorry, I hate having to switch control mechanisms, *especially* in the middle of a fight.
But ignoring the terrible control for a while, let's talk about the gameplay for a bit, and how this game can be more accurately called Crab Fantasy XI.
Uh, did you play the same game that I do? I'll freely admit the scaling up of monster models, but it's not like that's unique to FFXI, and I definitely have not spent my entire game levelling off crabs. I think the only time I fought them at all was in Qufim.
Personally, I think playstyle has much more to do with how one views FFXI. If all you think of the game is "Get my job to 75 and sub to 37" then heck yeah you're going to look at it as a grind. Did you ever fish, just for the sake of fishing? Did you ever just hang out someplace with your friends? That said, most of the MMOG experience is tied to the other players you interact with in the game. If you don't find people you can connect with, then you'll lose interest. There are 50+ people in my linkshell for me to hang out with, and I'm "grinding" 5 or 6 jobs at the same time. Whatever I'm in the mood for, I can do. I'm a casual player, so I'm less concerned about when I achieve something and more about what happens along the way. I like FFXI a lot, and I'm sorry you don't share that opinion, since it seems like you've put some effort into it in the past. I hope WoW is the game you're looking for.
Yes, hopefully all the mouthbreathers and asshats will migrate to EQ2 and WoW, so those of us who actually enjoy the game can enjoy it that much more.
If nothing else, FFXI has the best damn control mechanism of any MMOG out there. WASD makes you run in the direction you push, and the arrow keys move the camera. I haven't touched the mouse in-game in over 10 months.
From what I can tell, the people who hate FFXI the most are the ones that insisted on using mouse+keyboard instead of keyboard only or ps2-style controller and keyboard. If I was still using the mouse, I'd hate it too.
After seeing all the bashing of Valve over things like the media being required to be present, did anyone stop and think that maybe the reason there is such draconian protection measures in the retail version is because Vivendi required it as part of the distribution contract? There is *no* logical reason for Valve to require a physical disc to be present once you've registered the product in Steam. So the only logical reason I can come up with for why it's there is because they were required to by their distribution contract. Yes, there is also the conspiracy theory that Valve wanted to people to buy it via Steam so they added media protection to generate unrest. I don't buy that though.
I got to the FEC with no problem. electoral-vote.com seemed fine too.
The pair I picked up was to replace the pair I bought in 1996, and that was only because all the covering over the foam had come off. The headphones themselves are still quite usable, but I figured paying another $90 after 8 years of usage was okay. :)
The mini-Apple store is basically most stuff in a full-size Apple store condensed into one aisle.
There is another mini-Apple store that opened in Oakridge Mall in San Jose, which looked like it would be larger, but I haven't seen it since it opened.