I use Becky! and have never got a virus. However, as for the others in the office, even the engineers, at least 50% use Outlook, and judging by the icons I see in their icon bars, half of them have pending (pending for how long?) MS Windows Updates. It's a miracle there aren't more breakouts, quite frankly.
Our company mandates it on all PCs. For about the last month, we seem to have had new virus definition files at least once a day, often twice a day.
Of course, we've still managed to get viruses through, both from not having the latest update (one Bagle variant got through), and from people not running the virus scanner - on Monday someone who had his/her portable at home at the weekend connected to the office network with NetSky-Q loaded.
I never really saw the attraction in these. I have many non-overlapping "personal spaces" on the internet, but I've never had the urge to advertise that me here is the same person as me over in the goatse.cx Fan Club. If someone catches my eye as an interesting poster here, and I see the name again over there, I might mail/PM them, but I don't want every lurker suddenly deciding they want to be my friend just because of our shared interest in enormous arseholes.
On mobiles at least. In Japan (I don't know about the rest of the world), iMode/iAppli phones all run Java on lots of different flavours of OSes and chip sets, so one code base runnable on many phones makes a lot of sense for the developer, and the iMode micropayment scheme makes it easy to get some return for your investment.
Nintendo has realized that there is big money in old games.
In Japan right now there's currently a series of ads for classic rereleases of NES games on the GameBoy - Mario et al - with the main part of the ad being a person playing intently on his GB, with the instantly recognisable bleeps coming out the machine. It's just in the final 5 seconds you get one screenshot then the box shots. I wish I could find a web link for them - ahh, here we go:
As I know everyone will say Roller-Coaster Tycoon
on
G-rated Simulation Games?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'd vote for Transport Tycoon. The lower skill levels are very weak AI (can you set the number of CPU opponents to zero?) but the integrated traffic management skills are still needed even there. It's perhaps just a little slow-paced, especially at the beginning, so takes a while to get to an "interesting" point, although you could always give them a saved game you prepared earlier.
Railroad Tycoon II has pre-set scenarios and perhaps looks better than TT, but I never got into that game quite so much.
Oh, if the Sims is too racy, good old SimCity might be OK - ISTR that there is specific educational information available for it.
[And maybe in the US too?] is that the Health and Safety regulations are such that the monitor must be positionable. There's obviously some get-out clause for notebooks, but that regulation was the death of the classic all-in-one box Mac, for instance.
Reading the patent, your interpretation seems correct, but what the heck is novel or nonobvious about that? Any competent programmer could come up with a method for doing the same thing in a few hours.
I agree with your conclusions. However, that's the way patents work, and it all gets down to cross-licencing being cheaper than fighting it out in court, as most large companies have a portfolio of equally obvious IP that would result in cross-sueing and the collapse of the whole system. That of course, would probably been seen as a good thing by most/.ers, but not by the corporations.
For instance, one patent my company has stumbled upon is, to use a bad analogy, like reinventing the wheel as a hat. Fair enough, the third party have a few very specific and good hat designs, but the patent also has basic claims that putting any round road-use object on your head also falls under their auspices. It looks like rather than challenge the validity of circular hats as being novel, we're just going to take the path of least resistance and cross-licence.
Had Dean decided to help develop the human network of citizen journalists, providing coverage not just of his campaign, and not just the good spin of his campaign, he might have been able to survive the onslaught of the television networks.
The statistics say that only a few percentage of the online population read blogs. How would that have changed anything?
Oh, and as a sort-of side note, that's the first time I've ever read Dave Winer's blog. Is his writing always that bad and his arguements that disconnected? I've been living in a non-English-speaking country for a few years, and I felt the English he used was as bad as mine is sometimes. What's his excuse?
How many PS2 games actually suffered sales loss from complaints about it being only 30fps instead of 60fps? How did sales figures correlate to high performance scores?
Instead of Sony bemoaning that developers aren't using the full power of the machine, shouldn't they instead concentrate on how they can make it easier for the developer to unlock that power?
Taking into account the fact that Japan is possibly the last of the developed countries where you can use your ATM card ONLY at your bank's machine
No, you can use your cash card at multiple banks' machines. Japan may be backward in terms of ATMs only having hours of business from 8am to 7pm or so on average, or most refusing to accept foreign-issued credit cards, but for the major banks, all have usage agreements with one or more competitor.
BTW, in Finland and most of Western Europe, (and in Japan too) you can pay for your snack purchases by you phone (no need for the smartcard), so what is exactly news about this??
The difference is that this smart card is off-line, an electronic wallet type idea, not an online transaction, so it has all the speed benefits associated with it. The main use, I suspect, is going to be for commuter passes and other pre-paid train cards (see the current FeLiCa/Suica/Icoca system in use by JR, for instance), so you don't want to have to wait for 1 minute while trying to dial up to confirm you are allowed to go through the ticket gate.
Unfortunately, the most popular facets of the simulation genre in Japan are those of "rapist", "pedophile", and "incestual pedophile rapist", judging by Something Awful's review pages.
On a serious note, they say:
If a game like Dragon Quest VIII came out on PC, they could easily sell 4 or 5 million copies, but there's just no incentive for Square Enix to move away from consoles
but surely there's not much bigger an incentive than 4 or 5 million sales for a port?
If I buy a $50 game based on your review then I can never trust your opinion again.
Regular readers should notice that you never give bad reviews.
If you can't be honest then you are *just* advertising not "relying on advertising".
Whilst this is the ethical stance, and I am in agreement with your opinion, it would appear that magazines and websites have nothing to lose by printing the reviews their advertisers want. If there was an impact on sales or page views due to readers being fed up with biased reviews, surely they'd soon notice and rectify the situation? The fact that regurgitated press releases repackaged as news still regularly appear (I specifically gave up my games mag reading habit due to the Ultima Online hype-fest that surrounded its release) suggests that the masses just don't care.
1. They are spoilt. Way back in time they maybe just had the one machine, and had to pay for most of their games, so they forced themselves to like it more. Now, with more money, all the consoles, warez by the gigabyte, no time to play anything properly, they pick on any little fault, remembering the golden days when they had no choice but to enjoy the little they had.
2. They are snobby. These guys will no doubt be the ones getting modded up in this thread, about how they still play Ultima IV or M.U.L.E. once per month, or will talk about how everything is now just cut-screens and renders, no content, not like back then when they had their 160 x 120 B&W screen on their half-a-mega-hertz wind-up computer so it had to be all content, not glitz.
I accept there might actually be some people who genuinely enjoy regularly playing old PC games, but for each one that does, there's no doubt 10 more chipping in about their rose-tinted memories, not their experiences. I rememer the last three times recently I tracked down some old games I had really fond memories of. I tried replaying them, and realised they were actually really awful, knowing what I know now about what is available!
Although they seem to have been kept buoyed up by their successes in the console area, they have a pretty large portfolio of other stuff. However, recently they've been falling behind a bit in a lot of departments, especially in Japan. All the other big home electronics companies are doing pretty well, and I could rattle off some of these other comapnies' new products from TV adverts in Japan, yet all I can remember from Sony is their PS2 ads plus generic corporate "It's a Sony" adverts. I'm sure these ads must actually do feature a product or two, but I can't for the life of me remember what.
As for their market for PS2 sales: recent adverts have featured more primary-school-aged kids and retired people as the owners - presumably they've saturated the 10-40 age bracket?
Ah yes, that solves a lot of issues with the lack of immediate electronic results for primarily paper solutions. I presume there's some sort of unique barcode on the voting form to prevent accidental or deliberate rescanning.
In the UK, where I'm from, the only discussions about the election process is multiple voting (dead people, collecting cards from student halls, etc) - of course still an issue with these electronic methods - and the general "people too lazy/disenfranchised/dischanted to get out to vote" issue, and all these rightful concerns about unreliability (let alone the alleged fraud cases!) with electronic machines is only going to make people less likely to bother to express their democratic rights.
Voting technology doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
Sure, it may take a few hours to count all the votes, but they're verifiably countable and recountable, and seem good enough for most of the other countries in the world. Why does there have to be an electronic solution to this non-problem?
...by sending random commands to the hard disk controller. Of course, it was the one and only HD on the PC, and being the typical engineer had no backups. And of course, he sent some command that does a factory reset (or similar) of the whole controller hardware, thereby turning his HD into a large doorstop, losing at least a month's worth of development on that and other projects.
I feel I should add a moral, but that wasn't the first time, and won't be the last, that he lost large quantities of data.
Currently, the price for just a basic DVD/HDD Recorder in Japan is, even at the cheapest discount stores, comparableto the list price Sony are quoting. This smells of something to me - are they going to be selling some additional EPG service to bump up the price?
Also, considering the PS2 must be reaching saturation point in Japan, can there really be significant earnings to be had from people buying extra software?
Reading most of the for and against posts here and in the linked articles, both sides hold very binary views of the issues: it's either "The killers might have played the game, so therefore anyone who plays the game may very well kill someone", or the "I've been playing it for X years and I've not gone on a homicidal spree". Proper scientific studies seem to suggest there might be a weak causal link between games and violence, but rather than discuss the real issues, we only hear the two polarly opposed absolutes.
If it were another subject, like, say "Smoking can cause cancer", viewpoints like "Even one breath of second hand smoke will kill you!" or "My grampa puffed 20 a day and he's still a healthy 95" would be instantly dismissed as intellectually naive. Why do people seem to think this lack of deductive reasoning is acceptable to defend or condemn the issues surrounding a much more complex proposition?
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I use Becky! and have never got a virus. However, as for the others in the office, even the engineers, at least 50% use Outlook, and judging by the icons I see in their icon bars, half of them have pending (pending for how long?) MS Windows Updates. It's a miracle there aren't more breakouts, quite frankly.
Of course, we've still managed to get viruses through, both from not having the latest update (one Bagle variant got through), and from people not running the virus scanner - on Monday someone who had his/her portable at home at the weekend connected to the office network with NetSky-Q loaded.
I never really saw the attraction in these. I have many non-overlapping "personal spaces" on the internet, but I've never had the urge to advertise that me here is the same person as me over in the goatse.cx Fan Club. If someone catches my eye as an interesting poster here, and I see the name again over there, I might mail/PM them, but I don't want every lurker suddenly deciding they want to be my friend just because of our shared interest in enormous arseholes.
On mobiles at least. In Japan (I don't know about the rest of the world), iMode/iAppli phones all run Java on lots of different flavours of OSes and chip sets, so one code base runnable on many phones makes a lot of sense for the developer, and the iMode micropayment scheme makes it easy to get some return for your investment.
One, two, three.
I'd vote for Transport Tycoon. The lower skill levels are very weak AI (can you set the number of CPU opponents to zero?) but the integrated traffic management skills are still needed even there. It's perhaps just a little slow-paced, especially at the beginning, so takes a while to get to an "interesting" point, although you could always give them a saved game you prepared earlier.
Railroad Tycoon II has pre-set scenarios and perhaps looks better than TT, but I never got into that game quite so much.
Oh, if the Sims is too racy, good old SimCity might be OK - ISTR that there is specific educational information available for it.
How does the output of 1200 lumens from 80 watts input compare to a conventional bulb's output? To a fluorescent bulb's output?
[And maybe in the US too?] is that the Health and Safety regulations are such that the monitor must be positionable. There's obviously some get-out clause for notebooks, but that regulation was the death of the classic all-in-one box Mac, for instance.
For instance, one patent my company has stumbled upon is, to use a bad analogy, like reinventing the wheel as a hat. Fair enough, the third party have a few very specific and good hat designs, but the patent also has basic claims that putting any round road-use object on your head also falls under their auspices. It looks like rather than challenge the validity of circular hats as being novel, we're just going to take the path of least resistance and cross-licence.
Oh, and as a sort-of side note, that's the first time I've ever read Dave Winer's blog. Is his writing always that bad and his arguements that disconnected? I've been living in a non-English-speaking country for a few years, and I felt the English he used was as bad as mine is sometimes. What's his excuse?
Instead of Sony bemoaning that developers aren't using the full power of the machine, shouldn't they instead concentrate on how they can make it easier for the developer to unlock that power?
Surely I can't be the only person who thought that when reading the story?
No, you can use your cash card at multiple banks' machines. Japan may be backward in terms of ATMs only having hours of business from 8am to 7pm or so on average, or most refusing to accept foreign-issued credit cards, but for the major banks, all have usage agreements with one or more competitor.
The difference is that this smart card is off-line, an electronic wallet type idea, not an online transaction, so it has all the speed benefits associated with it. The main use, I suspect, is going to be for commuter passes and other pre-paid train cards (see the current FeLiCa/Suica/Icoca system in use by JR, for instance), so you don't want to have to wait for 1 minute while trying to dial up to confirm you are allowed to go through the ticket gate.
That reminds me of a crap joke...
Teacher: Have you finished the experiments with the pendula?
Student: Yes, and now we are sitting on our ba doing our sa.
On a serious note, they say:
but surely there's not much bigger an incentive than 4 or 5 million sales for a port?
Whilst this is the ethical stance, and I am in agreement with your opinion, it would appear that magazines and websites have nothing to lose by printing the reviews their advertisers want. If there was an impact on sales or page views due to readers being fed up with biased reviews, surely they'd soon notice and rectify the situation? The fact that regurgitated press releases repackaged as news still regularly appear (I specifically gave up my games mag reading habit due to the Ultima Online hype-fest that surrounded its release) suggests that the masses just don't care.
I see two reasons why people complain:
1. They are spoilt. Way back in time they maybe just had the one machine, and had to pay for most of their games, so they forced themselves to like it more. Now, with more money, all the consoles, warez by the gigabyte, no time to play anything properly, they pick on any little fault, remembering the golden days when they had no choice but to enjoy the little they had.
2. They are snobby. These guys will no doubt be the ones getting modded up in this thread, about how they still play Ultima IV or M.U.L.E. once per month, or will talk about how everything is now just cut-screens and renders, no content, not like back then when they had their 160 x 120 B&W screen on their half-a-mega-hertz wind-up computer so it had to be all content, not glitz.
I accept there might actually be some people who genuinely enjoy regularly playing old PC games, but for each one that does, there's no doubt 10 more chipping in about their rose-tinted memories, not their experiences. I rememer the last three times recently I tracked down some old games I had really fond memories of. I tried replaying them, and realised they were actually really awful, knowing what I know now about what is available!
Although they seem to have been kept buoyed up by their successes in the console area, they have a pretty large portfolio of other stuff. However, recently they've been falling behind a bit in a lot of departments, especially in Japan. All the other big home electronics companies are doing pretty well, and I could rattle off some of these other comapnies' new products from TV adverts in Japan, yet all I can remember from Sony is their PS2 ads plus generic corporate "It's a Sony" adverts. I'm sure these ads must actually do feature a product or two, but I can't for the life of me remember what.
As for their market for PS2 sales: recent adverts have featured more primary-school-aged kids and retired people as the owners - presumably they've saturated the 10-40 age bracket?
Ah yes, that solves a lot of issues with the lack of immediate electronic results for primarily paper solutions. I presume there's some sort of unique barcode on the voting form to prevent accidental or deliberate rescanning.
In the UK, where I'm from, the only discussions about the election process is multiple voting (dead people, collecting cards from student halls, etc) - of course still an issue with these electronic methods - and the general "people too lazy/disenfranchised/dischanted to get out to vote" issue, and all these rightful concerns about unreliability (let alone the alleged fraud cases!) with electronic machines is only going to make people less likely to bother to express their democratic rights.
Voting technology doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
Sure, it may take a few hours to count all the votes, but they're verifiably countable and recountable, and seem good enough for most of the other countries in the world. Why does there have to be an electronic solution to this non-problem?
...by sending random commands to the hard disk controller. Of course, it was the one and only HD on the PC, and being the typical engineer had no backups. And of course, he sent some command that does a factory reset (or similar) of the whole controller hardware, thereby turning his HD into a large doorstop, losing at least a month's worth of development on that and other projects.
I feel I should add a moral, but that wasn't the first time, and won't be the last, that he lost large quantities of data.
I've got one of the latest DoCoMo phones, a P505i
NGage screen: 176x208x12bit
P505i screen: 240x320x16bit (wife's is 22bit or so) + mini backscreen
NGage games: Tries proper games, pretends to be Gameboy
P505i games: Lots of simple games, ideal for idle minutes on trains
NGage storage: MMC, dismantle to insert
P505i storage: mini-SD included in price, remove small rubber cover to access
NGage camera: Err...
P505i camera: 310,000 pixels (wife has 1Mpix+), two lenses
NGage audio: Polyphonic
P505i audio: 48 voices
NGage case design: Bloody stupid
P505i case design: Like a phone
NGage users: 500 or so
P505i users: Over 1 million if you count the other 505i models
NGage price: 150 to 400 euros
P505i price: about 100 to 200 euros
Currently, the price for just a basic DVD/HDD Recorder in Japan is, even at the cheapest discount stores, comparableto the list price Sony are quoting. This smells of something to me - are they going to be selling some additional EPG service to bump up the price?
Also, considering the PS2 must be reaching saturation point in Japan, can there really be significant earnings to be had from people buying extra software?
Cuz lst tym 1 luk'd @ rndm blogz 90% wuz thiz kinz f shizz.
Ugg, even more painful to write than read!
Reading most of the for and against posts here and in the linked articles, both sides hold very binary views of the issues: it's either "The killers might have played the game, so therefore anyone who plays the game may very well kill someone", or the "I've been playing it for X years and I've not gone on a homicidal spree". Proper scientific studies seem to suggest there might be a weak causal link between games and violence, but rather than discuss the real issues, we only hear the two polarly opposed absolutes.
If it were another subject, like, say "Smoking can cause cancer", viewpoints like "Even one breath of second hand smoke will kill you!" or "My grampa puffed 20 a day and he's still a healthy 95" would be instantly dismissed as intellectually naive. Why do people seem to think this lack of deductive reasoning is acceptable to defend or condemn the issues surrounding a much more complex proposition?