To be fair, Counter-Strike was a free, fan made Half-Life mod before Valve bought it and it became a pay to play game. There are a lot of games that simply use the single player as a sort of training mode for the online multiplayer portion. CoD4 and from what I've heard, Modern Warfare 2 both use this tactic quite a bit. SOCOM 3 for the Playstation 2 was the same way. I've run into very few games that have equally good single and multiplayer functions.
I think yahoo and amazon are considered "bad design" by contract web designers, but on the whole they are very good designs. Both companies are highly successful* at what they do and their main page is what generates that success and revenue for them.
*yahoo was gutted by Microsoft in the not too distant past, but the main page hasn't changed drastically since then.
If your job is to make websites that you can sell a multi-year contract to build, design and maintain, then yes, yahoo and amazon are terrible websites. If you are an internal team for the company and are focused on generating revenue, they're the gold standard. There's a huge disconnect between what contractors design and why they design them that way, and what an internal team comes up with and who they are (or perhaps, more importantly, not) selling it to. Ebay, Youtube and Craigslist are all notoriously ugly websites, yet a) they're designed and maintained by an internal team and b) highly functional pillars of online commerce
Asian websites seem to reflect pictures of downtown areas of major asian cities - Tokyo, Hong Kong, parts of Beijing, Vietnam, etc. Shockingly, their major cities don't look terribly different from western megalopolises like NYC and London. Their colorful ads just happen to have asian character sets, which have a lot more lines and end up looking more busy to the western eye. Have you looked at yahoo.com/ or amazon.com lately? I mean, Yahoo has cleaned up their image some, but it's still very cluttered and messy. I can only imagine what Google News.jp or.cn looks like, or heaven forbid, the japanese translated version of Wunderground.com?? Just add some purple and yellow rounded corner rectangles in the background and it looks like every other stereotypical asian website out there.
Anyways, my point is, websites are driven by advertising. Websites of local languages are going to look similar to the Times Squares and Piccadilly Circuses of the world, in their local languages and alphabets. Certain color combinations might make certain alphabets stand out better. Helveltica (and all the child fonts it's spawned over the years) happens to look really good in Red, White or Blue on a White or dark colored background, which is probably why western advertising all looks the same for the most part. People tend to use more asian color schemes for party invitiations when using Comic Sans, and that font everyone loves to hate, Papyrus, tends to look best Black on white on tan.
You realize that by only seeing half the frames produced by the TV, even if the resulting video appears to be 30fps in 3D, will by default be half the brightness of the original TV, not counting whatever light reduction (and you thought 3D glasses were dark already!) you get from the fancy 3D glasses.
Eventually you're going to hit a point where you just say, "you know, let's just spring for the twin-screen 720p display glasses" for $1000 and call it a day. $700 for a pair of video glasses a decade ago was stupid money, now it's looking like a much better option for 3D.
Fun fact: movie theater projectors only project light on the screen 50% of the time; the other half of the time is spent with the shutter closed while the film progresses to the next frame.... you just make up for the 50% reduction in light by using a $150 xenon bulb the size of a NFL regulation football that has to be handled with gloves, full face mask and shrapnel suit -> cool youtube video example (not me!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVpD8SWzKFM DLP projectors are much more efficient since about 90% of the light makes it to the screen (the mirrors are always moving, but there's still the color wheel) so they can use a smaller bulb.
I thought nvidia's latest stuff is just shrunken, overclocked/dual cored versions of the 8800gts core of 2006, which was later relabled the 9800gts of 2009. Nvidia's tech is a bit long in tooth imo. Kind of curious what they've got in store when the wheels finally fall off the 8800 series.
Actually, the.torrent popped up on a couple of private forums. Not a haxxored cracked copy, but the basic game file, simply because the Steam servers couldn't keep up. I know a couple of people ended up sharing it via sneakernet on 4GB flash drives, too:) Once the download starts, you can close steam, copy the full game into the specific folder, restart steam, and resume the download, and the game will install normally on your steam account, assuming your account is authorized to play that game. Works great. We did something similar last year at Quakecon (2000+ person lan party) when Valve released a major TF2 update the afternoon the event started. Had to update about 100 people via sneakernet, and then tether them to an iphone to get steam to verify the data and go into offline mode. What a farking PITA, but it worked!
Enter the launch day patch, which introduces some game breaking feature set, making the cracked early copy incompatible to play with the legit version. Which means you have to re engineer your cracked version all over again. It wouldn't suprise me in the least if they release some game breaking patch once a week for the first three months, to maximize "release day" sales.
I think they tried to solve this by creating branded skins like HTC's Sense and Motorola's "Motoblur". I think Samsung and a few others have their own skins as well. But yes, it's difficult to tell all but the flagship android phones apart these days.
My version of the facebook app has been updated three times this year ??? Maybe there are different versions for different generation BBs. My 8320 has the FB app and I haven't run into any of the issues you're talking about. My only gripe is the high level of compression they use on "mobile uploads" pictures.
They have a really good keyboard. Email, facebook, phonebook, phonecam integration is superb, it even has a (rather good!) integrated PDF viewer. But it can't browse the web worth shit. Blackberries were excellent devices barely a year ago, but I think RIM got blindsided by cheap, excellent Android phones. I think their OS development VP thought they had at least another year before Android really caught on, and could count on the iPhone exclusivity contract to bide their time. Sadly, nowadays a Blackberry Curve that looked like an excellent phone/buy a year ago, now looks terribly dated. With the advent of "free android phone with 2 year contract", RIM may have lost whatever foothold they had carved out for themselves in the consumer market. Android phones are better in practically everyway for the consumer. Except the fantastic keyboards.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft has ceded the enterprise market to RIM with the introduction of Win Phone 7, which looks like a mostly consumer OS. There's got to be some detail they're leaving out about the new MS phones; when phone7 was announced there was hardly any mention about buisness use. I guess they'll expect buisness customers to continue to use WinMo 5/6 which has a featureset from five years ago?
I really like my Blackberry. As a phone. It's nigh indestructible, and the OS is ideal for the itsy bitsy 2.5" screen. I can even buy aftermarket replacement parts for it (trackball). However the smartphone industry has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last year. As much as I am satisfied with my BlackBerry, I know it's so far behind the curve now that even their new OS 5 can't save them now. My next phone will for sure be an Android device, maybe an iPhone. Even the new "Windows Phone 7" isn't completely distasteful. Do you really want to buy a consumer device tablet running an outdated OS designed for enterprise users? On an oversized tablet device? There's so many better options out there, starting with the Apple iPad, various Chrome/Android products in the works, and HP has a WebOS tablet in the works. But something running the Blackberry OS in this day and age simply looks....antiquated. RIM may never catch up in the smartphone OS race at this point; I think the BB Storm is proof of that. And with the Motorola Charm on the horizon... well, we come to bury RIM, not praise their outdated OS.
Pushing people off 32bit so that 64 bit drivers are properly developed for is a pretty good reason.
I bet in two years' time with the wider adoption of 64 bit atom processors we'll see Win7-64 being 80%+ of the install base. Considering both versions cost the same there's no reason to go with 32 bit unless you have some horrible backwards app that can't handle being run in XP-32 compatibility mode as administrator.
What's the driver situation like on XP-64 these days? Do you get security updates at about the same time as your 32 bit brethren? I remember in ~2004 when my buddy got XP he had to downgrade to 32 bit due to driver avalibility issues but I'm sure a lot has changed in six years.
Motorola (and a few other manufactures, I'm sure) sell a great speakerphone system that clips to the sunvisor in your car, and can be wired into the vehicle's power system.
Police and FDs usually have a little extra money left over. Get the cable company to spring for one A-D converter per building, and then tell each building they will need to buy their own if they don't want to all watch the same channel. You're the messenger of bad news, they won't shoot you over it. This is what is known as "passing the buck".
Apparently the Girl Guides owned the rights to the song for 26 years, up until 1968, at which point they were sold or transfered. So you'd have to be more specific about what year you sung the song for slashdot to really know how much you owe these guys.
Bumping against, hell I think they're mostly worried about photographers who have never been out in a boat before, piloting a zodiac and parking it right in front of a moving fishing boat who is deploying said booms, unaware that fishingboats aren't particularly fast, nor do they have breaks. Q.E.D.:
Idiot photographer parks zodiac in front of fishing boat Fishing boat runs over zodiac Coastguard has to send out a ship to take care of idiot photographer, further stressing the thinly spread coastguard BP profits (somehow)
A lot of time & money has been well used on investgating it but
I think it might be better said that a lot of time and money has been spent trying to find solid justification to send a human out there. Fossils, liquid water, or better yet a real lifeform surviving on the planet would guarantee funding for decades to come. Until that day comes we're stuck playing with grownup RC toys on other planets.
That's a big "if". AFAIK it's never been done before, especially on a AAAAA title. I know Valve said they'd do it, and there's no technical limitation for it, but the chances Sony backs out of this due to the precident it sets (basically a dumb Steam terminal) could be very dangerous for the industry. I can see Sony backtracking on this, or nerfing the feature significantly.
My buddy lived in China (Beijing) for two years. At least as of 2008, accessing the english internet was either a) slow as hell or b) largely firewalled off. Major news sites, useful tools (particularly to a power-user) and a whole host of things we take for granted either had limited availability or simply couldn't connect to the US server. As I understand it, it's gotten worse, not better since then.
Case in point: Appreciate what you have here in the US of A. You have it really, really good here.
Not only did they land the damn thing on an asteroid, the probe was in good enough shape to take back off again and arrive at earth. It landed without use of airbags or whatever is in vouge on the mars missions these days. The fact that anything functioned at all after taking off at 20,000mph from earth and landing on a distant body is fucking amazing. That the engines worked after that is just icing on the cake. I bet the structural engineers are going to have a field day examining the frame of the probe over the coming weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, Counter-Strike was a free, fan made Half-Life mod before Valve bought it and it became a pay to play game. There are a lot of games that simply use the single player as a sort of training mode for the online multiplayer portion. CoD4 and from what I've heard, Modern Warfare 2 both use this tactic quite a bit. SOCOM 3 for the Playstation 2 was the same way. I've run into very few games that have equally good single and multiplayer functions.
I think yahoo and amazon are considered "bad design" by contract web designers, but on the whole they are very good designs. Both companies are highly successful* at what they do and their main page is what generates that success and revenue for them.
*yahoo was gutted by Microsoft in the not too distant past, but the main page hasn't changed drastically since then.
If your job is to make websites that you can sell a multi-year contract to build, design and maintain, then yes, yahoo and amazon are terrible websites. If you are an internal team for the company and are focused on generating revenue, they're the gold standard. There's a huge disconnect between what contractors design and why they design them that way, and what an internal team comes up with and who they are (or perhaps, more importantly, not) selling it to. Ebay, Youtube and Craigslist are all notoriously ugly websites, yet a) they're designed and maintained by an internal team and b) highly functional pillars of online commerce
Asian websites seem to reflect pictures of downtown areas of major asian cities - Tokyo, Hong Kong, parts of Beijing, Vietnam, etc. Shockingly, their major cities don't look terribly different from western megalopolises like NYC and London. Their colorful ads just happen to have asian character sets, which have a lot more lines and end up looking more busy to the western eye. Have you looked at yahoo.com/ or amazon.com lately? I mean, Yahoo has cleaned up their image some, but it's still very cluttered and messy. I can only imagine what Google News.jp or .cn looks like, or heaven forbid, the japanese translated version of Wunderground.com?? Just add some purple and yellow rounded corner rectangles in the background and it looks like every other stereotypical asian website out there.
Anyways, my point is, websites are driven by advertising. Websites of local languages are going to look similar to the Times Squares and Piccadilly Circuses of the world, in their local languages and alphabets. Certain color combinations might make certain alphabets stand out better. Helveltica (and all the child fonts it's spawned over the years) happens to look really good in Red, White or Blue on a White or dark colored background, which is probably why western advertising all looks the same for the most part. People tend to use more asian color schemes for party invitiations when using Comic Sans, and that font everyone loves to hate, Papyrus, tends to look best Black on white on tan.
You realize that by only seeing half the frames produced by the TV, even if the resulting video appears to be 30fps in 3D, will by default be half the brightness of the original TV, not counting whatever light reduction (and you thought 3D glasses were dark already!) you get from the fancy 3D glasses.
Eventually you're going to hit a point where you just say, "you know, let's just spring for the twin-screen 720p display glasses" for $1000 and call it a day. $700 for a pair of video glasses a decade ago was stupid money, now it's looking like a much better option for 3D.
Fun fact: movie theater projectors only project light on the screen 50% of the time; the other half of the time is spent with the shutter closed while the film progresses to the next frame.... you just make up for the 50% reduction in light by using a $150 xenon bulb the size of a NFL regulation football that has to be handled with gloves, full face mask and shrapnel suit -> cool youtube video example (not me!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVpD8SWzKFM DLP projectors are much more efficient since about 90% of the light makes it to the screen (the mirrors are always moving, but there's still the color wheel) so they can use a smaller bulb.
I thought nvidia's latest stuff is just shrunken, overclocked/dual cored versions of the 8800gts core of 2006, which was later relabled the 9800gts of 2009. Nvidia's tech is a bit long in tooth imo. Kind of curious what they've got in store when the wheels finally fall off the 8800 series.
Actually, the .torrent popped up on a couple of private forums. Not a haxxored cracked copy, but the basic game file, simply because the Steam servers couldn't keep up. I know a couple of people ended up sharing it via sneakernet on 4GB flash drives, too :) Once the download starts, you can close steam, copy the full game into the specific folder, restart steam, and resume the download, and the game will install normally on your steam account, assuming your account is authorized to play that game. Works great. We did something similar last year at Quakecon (2000+ person lan party) when Valve released a major TF2 update the afternoon the event started. Had to update about 100 people via sneakernet, and then tether them to an iphone to get steam to verify the data and go into offline mode. What a farking PITA, but it worked!
You sound like you'd really like the Myth series, then
Enter the launch day patch, which introduces some game breaking feature set, making the cracked early copy incompatible to play with the legit version. Which means you have to re engineer your cracked version all over again. It wouldn't suprise me in the least if they release some game breaking patch once a week for the first three months, to maximize "release day" sales.
I think they tried to solve this by creating branded skins like HTC's Sense and Motorola's "Motoblur". I think Samsung and a few others have their own skins as well. But yes, it's difficult to tell all but the flagship android phones apart these days.
My version of the facebook app has been updated three times this year ??? Maybe there are different versions for different generation BBs. My 8320 has the FB app and I haven't run into any of the issues you're talking about. My only gripe is the high level of compression they use on "mobile uploads" pictures.
They have a really good keyboard. Email, facebook, phonebook, phonecam integration is superb, it even has a (rather good!) integrated PDF viewer. But it can't browse the web worth shit. Blackberries were excellent devices barely a year ago, but I think RIM got blindsided by cheap, excellent Android phones. I think their OS development VP thought they had at least another year before Android really caught on, and could count on the iPhone exclusivity contract to bide their time. Sadly, nowadays a Blackberry Curve that looked like an excellent phone/buy a year ago, now looks terribly dated. With the advent of "free android phone with 2 year contract", RIM may have lost whatever foothold they had carved out for themselves in the consumer market. Android phones are better in practically everyway for the consumer. Except the fantastic keyboards.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft has ceded the enterprise market to RIM with the introduction of Win Phone 7, which looks like a mostly consumer OS. There's got to be some detail they're leaving out about the new MS phones; when phone7 was announced there was hardly any mention about buisness use. I guess they'll expect buisness customers to continue to use WinMo 5/6 which has a featureset from five years ago?
I really like my Blackberry. As a phone. It's nigh indestructible, and the OS is ideal for the itsy bitsy 2.5" screen. I can even buy aftermarket replacement parts for it (trackball). However the smartphone industry has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last year. As much as I am satisfied with my BlackBerry, I know it's so far behind the curve now that even their new OS 5 can't save them now. My next phone will for sure be an Android device, maybe an iPhone. Even the new "Windows Phone 7" isn't completely distasteful. Do you really want to buy a consumer device tablet running an outdated OS designed for enterprise users? On an oversized tablet device? There's so many better options out there, starting with the Apple iPad, various Chrome/Android products in the works, and HP has a WebOS tablet in the works. But something running the Blackberry OS in this day and age simply looks....antiquated. RIM may never catch up in the smartphone OS race at this point; I think the BB Storm is proof of that. And with the Motorola Charm on the horizon... well, we come to bury RIM, not praise their outdated OS.
Pushing people off 32bit so that 64 bit drivers are properly developed for is a pretty good reason.
I bet in two years' time with the wider adoption of 64 bit atom processors we'll see Win7-64 being 80%+ of the install base. Considering both versions cost the same there's no reason to go with 32 bit unless you have some horrible backwards app that can't handle being run in XP-32 compatibility mode as administrator.
What's the driver situation like on XP-64 these days? Do you get security updates at about the same time as your 32 bit brethren? I remember in ~2004 when my buddy got XP he had to downgrade to 32 bit due to driver avalibility issues but I'm sure a lot has changed in six years.
I recently upgraded from XP-32 to Win7-64 and was amazed that everything I own had recent and fully functional 64 bit drivers... except my netgear brand wifi card, which is 64 bit supported, unless you have more than 3.5GB of ram. The workaround of which involves unsigned Spanish language drivers...
Motorola (and a few other manufactures, I'm sure) sell a great speakerphone system that clips to the sunvisor in your car, and can be wired into the vehicle's power system.
Police and FDs usually have a little extra money left over. Get the cable company to spring for one A-D converter per building, and then tell each building they will need to buy their own if they don't want to all watch the same channel. You're the messenger of bad news, they won't shoot you over it. This is what is known as "passing the buck".
Apparently the Girl Guides owned the rights to the song for 26 years, up until 1968, at which point they were sold or transfered. So you'd have to be more specific about what year you sung the song for slashdot to really know how much you owe these guys.
Trying to imagine how kdawson would put a negative, sensationalist spin on this
Touché, good sir! That's what I get for posting long after my bedtime.
Bumping against, hell I think they're mostly worried about photographers who have never been out in a boat before, piloting a zodiac and parking it right in front of a moving fishing boat who is deploying said booms, unaware that fishingboats aren't particularly fast, nor do they have breaks. Q.E.D.:
Idiot photographer parks zodiac in front of fishing boat
Fishing boat runs over zodiac
Coastguard has to send out a ship to take care of idiot photographer, further stressing the thinly spread coastguard
BP profits (somehow)
I think it might be better said that a lot of time and money has been spent trying to find solid justification to send a human out there. Fossils, liquid water, or better yet a real lifeform surviving on the planet would guarantee funding for decades to come. Until that day comes we're stuck playing with grownup RC toys on other planets.
That's a big "if". AFAIK it's never been done before, especially on a AAAAA title. I know Valve said they'd do it, and there's no technical limitation for it, but the chances Sony backs out of this due to the precident it sets (basically a dumb Steam terminal) could be very dangerous for the industry. I can see Sony backtracking on this, or nerfing the feature significantly.
My buddy lived in China (Beijing) for two years. At least as of 2008, accessing the english internet was either a) slow as hell or b) largely firewalled off. Major news sites, useful tools (particularly to a power-user) and a whole host of things we take for granted either had limited availability or simply couldn't connect to the US server. As I understand it, it's gotten worse, not better since then.
Case in point: Appreciate what you have here in the US of A. You have it really, really good here.
Not only did they land the damn thing on an asteroid, the probe was in good enough shape to take back off again and arrive at earth. It landed without use of airbags or whatever is in vouge on the mars missions these days. The fact that anything functioned at all after taking off at 20,000mph from earth and landing on a distant body is fucking amazing. That the engines worked after that is just icing on the cake. I bet the structural engineers are going to have a field day examining the frame of the probe over the coming weeks.