There is more than simple raw technical comparison. The iPod wins out hands down against any other player in terms of form factor and UI. Plus, the consistency of quality of their products keep people coming back. Creative can't capitalize on a name the way iPod can because iirc Creative had a string of mediocre mp3 players before the iRiver.
This law is perfectly reasonable. The problem is that it discriminates against the games industry - and there is cross-industry competition you must consider. If this law is to be applied to games, then it should be applied to _all_ forms of media - movies, graphic books, even albums. To do otherwise discriminates unfairly against the games industry for sensationalist reasons.
There is no reason that child-media-control (or censorship, if you will) should care what the form of the media is. It is both unfair, and inefficient to handle this seperately.
Of course, the MPAA and RIAA have better lobbyists than the ESA.
Actually, I'd been thinking about the same thing... can you think of any good "party"-style opensource games? The problem is that most multiplayer OSS games are network-oriented and not designed for hotseat action, and many don't have good joystick support (that part would be more trivial to DIY 'though).
I've been considering starting up a project to "convert" some common OSS games into being shared-screen games (instead of splitscreen or network) and then wiring them all to pull input configuration from the same source so that you don't have to spend 20 minutes before each game setting up each player's joystick controls.
Amen. I'm another AIW user and the bundled software is absolutely appalling. For example: the AIW software comes with a complete program guide... that is not really usable from the TV screen. The AIW TV-out mode of the media player has no real way to open files that aren't already part of your library (so if you keep your divx movies on CD, you're screwed). Hell, you can't even add files to the library from the TV gui. So basically, to properly use the ATI software you have to keep switching back and forth from TV mode to PC mode... and the process isn't easy. Half the time the TV GUI mode is hard to get out of. And the remote is positively useless for navigating normal windows commands - because most of the common keyboard-input keys aren't emulated (like tab, enter) you have to use its weak, slow mouse emulation.
Painful, painful, awful software. I so want to replace it with a 3rd party PVR program, but in a lot of cases I'd end up with a new remote... making my old ATI Remote Wonder a waste of money... I'm starting to consider that remote a sunk cost.
I'd go MythTV if I could - but AIW cards don't support it.
I think that the the UI is the biggest problem to surmount. Adding any UI controls to a cellphone besides the basic directional controller would be messy - but it would help if the directional controller behaved half as well as a modern gamepad (instead of being slow and non-diagonal for gaming). Any additional UI would make the system larger, and small size is paramount in phone design. At best you could get a simple D-pad and a few buttons, and even then the phone is not well-suited for 2-handed use.
Really, I see a far more likely future being in audio-oriented gaming. Think about it - your phone could use a speech-to-text converter and play trivia games with you. You could have people even play games while driving without taking their hands or eyes off of the road. Play text-adventure games like Zork in audio-only mode. For going online, you could play Trade Wars or some other super-low-bandwidth titles (assuming phone bandwidth costs will remain at their current, prohibitively expensive levels).
Plus, in that case your phone games would be significantly different from your DS games, etc. and you'd have a better chance at competing.
I mean really, who doesn't love a good trivia game?
Lots of games do the expansion-on-steroids-as-standalone approach. It's better to think of them as a new game with backwards compatibility.
Look at UT2k4. The game was basically a massive content upgrade for UT2k3 - same game, same models, but new modes, new maps, and the game added vehicles. Nobody complained about UT2k4 being an expensive standalone because it was an e-freain'-normous game.
Imho, the best approach is to offer a small rebate for people who already own the old title... but that's only if the new game is a superset of the old. Since I don't think CoV players have full acces to CoH content and vice versa, they might have a good trick there to get people to pay full price for both, but still want one only if the feel like it.
Umm, my wife's 4GB Nano begs to differ. It was purchased because it fits comfortably in any pocket - even one on women's clothing. Given that she is a teacher and thus can't take anything off of her person that she woudln't like stolen, the pocketability of the device was the prime concern.
Amen. Video will be portable when VR becomes popular, or Star Wars-style floating screens become popular. Possibly a tiny personal projector would work for a portable movie player, but you'd still need a flat white surface (not a lot of those on transportation vehicles) and they tend to be really, really hot.
If there were some sort of standard wireless interface for TVs, this could work - you'd just hook in. But plugging into RCA jacks is probably too much of a PITA for most users. Still, that would be my most likely prediction for a movie-pod - a 3x4 screen with RCA jacks to plug it into TV.
The big reason I don't see Apple trying this is that personal movie player's aren't really taking off. The only ones that are taking off are the larger-screened portable DVD players for travellers. Not smaller, pod-sized devices. Since you can't scratch the screen, the device pretty much has to be folding, so there's no reason not to put a DVD drive in one - it's not like pods that are way larger than CDs.
So I imagine that's all a video-iPod would be - a normal, vanilla portable-DVD player with a hard disk and QuickTime support.
At that point, you're halfway to an iBook. May as well get a laptop.
I have to say that, for games where the touch-screen is just used as an analogue stick I don't use the stylus, bu the thumb-strap.
The DS comes with the usual portable-device-don't-don't-drop-me wrist strap, but it looks a little different - it has an odd, rounded plastic section and a collar you can use to tighten it. What you do is run the thing underneath the DS and wrap it around your thumb. The plastic piece provides a nice no-smudge single-contact surface to touch the screen with. It works really well for Metroid Hunters demo.
I think the problem is that even the Taiwanese government considers Taiwan a province of China. The point is that they believe that the Taiwanese government thinks itself the rightful rulers of China, just as the PRC governing party thinks of itself as the rightful ruler of China (including Taiwan).
Groups who want China and Taiwan to suck it up and make politics reflect reality unfortunately don't have control of the Taiwanese government.
This isn't about BSOD. This is worse. I think I remember this feature - some sort of "disk doubler" feature. Disk Doubler might've been a competing product to the actual MS version. Either way, it was a system that would somehow make your disks have far more space. I don't know if it was a more efficient FAT, or just automatically unzipping and zipping files for you or what, but a lot of people used it until their drives magically vanished. At that point you needed a format to fix the problem, iirc.
I used it for a while, then heard stories from friends... plus, it sucked up some precious lower memory, making certain games unplayable. So I went through the excruciating process of converting all the drives back, finding the program still resident in memory, and then trying to track down how to prevent it from loading on boot.
Wouldln't be surprised if they just retask the Sun Java Desktop into Google desktop to continue this lucrative partnership.
Firefox (hooked in with Google-stuff), Google Office, and some of the usual opensource tools. The trick is to get a major PC manufacturer on board like Dell or something, so that hardware support isn't a huge problem (you control the hardware).
Really, if the reno air races can't get much public popularity, what hope do rocket races have? Plus, the simple fact is that races are much less interesting when the craft is fragile. Safety measures make sports dull, and aircraft require a lot of safety. Still, it is incredibly cool that they do that - I'd love to see it.
Personally, my approach would be to make the tracks 3D by suspending the objectives in the air. Use weather balloons tethered to the ground as wickets - all the planes have to do is get close enough to the balloon. You could probably suspend things much higher that way. So then you can have a steep climb after baloon 5. The balloons could be triggered to explode in the event a plane gets within safety range as emergency measure, allowing it to fall away harmlessly. It would also be entertaining for the fans the way crashes are "aww crap, Andretti blew up turn 6 and he's out of the race.".
Of course, the real trick would keep all the airflow from the planes from pushing the balloons around - each baloon would have to be held down by 3 or 4 cables at wide angles.
So does anyone race choppers or autogyros? Or is it all conventional prop planes?
It's his desktop. He plugs in a keyboard and mouse and uses it as such. He can also pick it up and use it while standing around. It's his work machine - he runs part of a hospital IT structure, and handles a lot of terminals. This involves running around a lot, and not necessarily wanting to set up the laptop.
Really, a tablet is just a laptop that has replaced the keyboard/mouse with a stylus. That allows it to be used while standing up, but it doesn't make quite as good a PC while on-the-go.
I'd be willing to bet it's the other way around. Pathetic, depressed dramatic teenaged girls watch sappy romantic Mary Kate & Ashley movies where everything is better once they find themselves in the arms of a man. Thus, they become desperate to please a guy. So, they end up going out and giving blowjobs to some scabby scater who couldn't give a fuck about them.
Depression leads to stupid, meaningless highschool sex, not the other way around - and it's because of hopeless codependant melodramatic girls buying into bad pop-culture.
Notice non of the _boys_ who get sex are depressed. Notice who's giving all the oral.
Seems like they do. God kills metric buttloads people, God is good, ergo killing metric buttloads of people is good... as long as they're somewhat vaguely associated with ideological enemies.
Well, to be fair, Epic provides a lot of free support for their games after initial release. This includes additional content, server browsers, modding contests (with large prizes provided by epic) that lead to more value added to the game, etc. When a game has a large online component, you're buying more than just the game. Yes, they don't run the actual game servers - but they do provide other things.
I'm betting because of things like that more companies will be moving over to the MMO subscription model - even for non-MMO games. This would mean that selling the box would only be the first step, you'd still have to pay your subscription to access the masterserver.
I'm not expert, but afaik at that point the non-regional job becomes trivial - simply tracking the country code servers, rather than running.com,.org, etc. All individual domains become regional issues that are no longer the business of the UN. You could have local backup top-level servers for the big national TLDs - there just aren't that many of them - so the importance of the non-regional servers go way down.
imho, the fastest solution to the problem would be to obliterate the core DNS servers. Give a year's warning. The USA could then transfer all to.us, like the UK does -.mil.us,.org.us,.com.us, etc. Previous.us domains could be transferred to.misc.us or similar.
Then, every country can handle their own TLDs, and nobody has to worry about the main TLDs. ICANN could be practically dissolved at that point, except possibly for managing the domains of countries that do not have the resources to manage their own.
is this a joke? Did I miss a sarcasm tag? I doubt most of those were invented in the USA. For example, iirc Python was invented in the Netherlands (although Guido currently lives in the USA).
Well, true word-of-mouth does happen. Does Armagetron have PR people? I see tons of people playing that around the school. Liero was huge when I was in highschool - and that's just a lone-dev freeware game.
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There is more than simple raw technical comparison. The iPod wins out hands down against any other player in terms of form factor and UI. Plus, the consistency of quality of their products keep people coming back. Creative can't capitalize on a name the way iPod can because iirc Creative had a string of mediocre mp3 players before the iRiver.
Bluetooth is the answer to that. Most reviews of "mp3 phones" complain about a total lack of synergy - it is _exactly_ the sum of it's parts.
This law is perfectly reasonable. The problem is that it discriminates against the games industry - and there is cross-industry competition you must consider. If this law is to be applied to games, then it should be applied to _all_ forms of media - movies, graphic books, even albums. To do otherwise discriminates unfairly against the games industry for sensationalist reasons.
There is no reason that child-media-control (or censorship, if you will) should care what the form of the media is. It is both unfair, and inefficient to handle this seperately.
Of course, the MPAA and RIAA have better lobbyists than the ESA.
Actually, I'd been thinking about the same thing... can you think of any good "party"-style opensource games? The problem is that most multiplayer OSS games are network-oriented and not designed for hotseat action, and many don't have good joystick support (that part would be more trivial to DIY 'though).
I've been considering starting up a project to "convert" some common OSS games into being shared-screen games (instead of splitscreen or network) and then wiring them all to pull input configuration from the same source so that you don't have to spend 20 minutes before each game setting up each player's joystick controls.
Amen. I'm another AIW user and the bundled software is absolutely appalling. For example: the AIW software comes with a complete program guide... that is not really usable from the TV screen. The AIW TV-out mode of the media player has no real way to open files that aren't already part of your library (so if you keep your divx movies on CD, you're screwed). Hell, you can't even add files to the library from the TV gui. So basically, to properly use the ATI software you have to keep switching back and forth from TV mode to PC mode... and the process isn't easy. Half the time the TV GUI mode is hard to get out of. And the remote is positively useless for navigating normal windows commands - because most of the common keyboard-input keys aren't emulated (like tab, enter) you have to use its weak, slow mouse emulation.
Painful, painful, awful software. I so want to replace it with a 3rd party PVR program, but in a lot of cases I'd end up with a new remote... making my old ATI Remote Wonder a waste of money... I'm starting to consider that remote a sunk cost.
I'd go MythTV if I could - but AIW cards don't support it.
I think that the the UI is the biggest problem to surmount. Adding any UI controls to a cellphone besides the basic directional controller would be messy - but it would help if the directional controller behaved half as well as a modern gamepad (instead of being slow and non-diagonal for gaming). Any additional UI would make the system larger, and small size is paramount in phone design. At best you could get a simple D-pad and a few buttons, and even then the phone is not well-suited for 2-handed use.
Really, I see a far more likely future being in audio-oriented gaming. Think about it - your phone could use a speech-to-text converter and play trivia games with you. You could have people even play games while driving without taking their hands or eyes off of the road. Play text-adventure games like Zork in audio-only mode. For going online, you could play Trade Wars or some other super-low-bandwidth titles (assuming phone bandwidth costs will remain at their current, prohibitively expensive levels).
Plus, in that case your phone games would be significantly different from your DS games, etc. and you'd have a better chance at competing.
I mean really, who doesn't love a good trivia game?
Lots of games do the expansion-on-steroids-as-standalone approach. It's better to think of them as a new game with backwards compatibility.
Look at UT2k4. The game was basically a massive content upgrade for UT2k3 - same game, same models, but new modes, new maps, and the game added vehicles. Nobody complained about UT2k4 being an expensive standalone because it was an e-freain'-normous game.
Imho, the best approach is to offer a small rebate for people who already own the old title... but that's only if the new game is a superset of the old. Since I don't think CoV players have full acces to CoH content and vice versa, they might have a good trick there to get people to pay full price for both, but still want one only if the feel like it.
So really, it's two games with one universe - well not a single shared universe, as I'm sure there will be CoH-only areas and CoV-only areas.
That's kinda cool.
Of course, that leads to thoughts of panspermia. What it abiogenesis never took place on Earth, but instead was colonized by extraplanetary spores?
Umm, my wife's 4GB Nano begs to differ. It was purchased because it fits comfortably in any pocket - even one on women's clothing. Given that she is a teacher and thus can't take anything off of her person that she woudln't like stolen, the pocketability of the device was the prime concern.
Amen. Video will be portable when VR becomes popular, or Star Wars-style floating screens become popular. Possibly a tiny personal projector would work for a portable movie player, but you'd still need a flat white surface (not a lot of those on transportation vehicles) and they tend to be really, really hot.
If there were some sort of standard wireless interface for TVs, this could work - you'd just hook in. But plugging into RCA jacks is probably too much of a PITA for most users. Still, that would be my most likely prediction for a movie-pod - a 3x4 screen with RCA jacks to plug it into TV.
The big reason I don't see Apple trying this is that personal movie player's aren't really taking off. The only ones that are taking off are the larger-screened portable DVD players for travellers. Not smaller, pod-sized devices. Since you can't scratch the screen, the device pretty much has to be folding, so there's no reason not to put a DVD drive in one - it's not like pods that are way larger than CDs.
So I imagine that's all a video-iPod would be - a normal, vanilla portable-DVD player with a hard disk and QuickTime support.
At that point, you're halfway to an iBook. May as well get a laptop.
So I don't see apple releasing such a device.
I have to say that, for games where the touch-screen is just used as an analogue stick I don't use the stylus, bu the thumb-strap.
The DS comes with the usual portable-device-don't-don't-drop-me wrist strap, but it looks a little different - it has an odd, rounded plastic section and a collar you can use to tighten it. What you do is run the thing underneath the DS and wrap it around your thumb. The plastic piece provides a nice no-smudge single-contact surface to touch the screen with. It works really well for Metroid Hunters demo.
Of course, for Kirby, I just use the stylus.
I think the problem is that even the Taiwanese government considers Taiwan a province of China. The point is that they believe that the Taiwanese government thinks itself the rightful rulers of China, just as the PRC governing party thinks of itself as the rightful ruler of China (including Taiwan).
Groups who want China and Taiwan to suck it up and make politics reflect reality unfortunately don't have control of the Taiwanese government.
This isn't about BSOD. This is worse. I think I remember this feature - some sort of "disk doubler" feature. Disk Doubler might've been a competing product to the actual MS version. Either way, it was a system that would somehow make your disks have far more space. I don't know if it was a more efficient FAT, or just automatically unzipping and zipping files for you or what, but a lot of people used it until their drives magically vanished. At that point you needed a format to fix the problem, iirc.
I used it for a while, then heard stories from friends... plus, it sucked up some precious lower memory, making certain games unplayable. So I went through the excruciating process of converting all the drives back, finding the program still resident in memory, and then trying to track down how to prevent it from loading on boot.
Wouldln't be surprised if they just retask the Sun Java Desktop into Google desktop to continue this lucrative partnership.
Firefox (hooked in with Google-stuff), Google Office, and some of the usual opensource tools. The trick is to get a major PC manufacturer on board like Dell or something, so that hardware support isn't a huge problem (you control the hardware).
Really, if the reno air races can't get much public popularity, what hope do rocket races have? Plus, the simple fact is that races are much less interesting when the craft is fragile. Safety measures make sports dull, and aircraft require a lot of safety. Still, it is incredibly cool that they do that - I'd love to see it.
Personally, my approach would be to make the tracks 3D by suspending the objectives in the air. Use weather balloons tethered to the ground as wickets - all the planes have to do is get close enough to the balloon. You could probably suspend things much higher that way. So then you can have a steep climb after baloon 5. The balloons could be triggered to explode in the event a plane gets within safety range as emergency measure, allowing it to fall away harmlessly. It would also be entertaining for the fans the way crashes are "aww crap, Andretti blew up turn 6 and he's out of the race.".
Of course, the real trick would keep all the airflow from the planes from pushing the balloons around - each baloon would have to be held down by 3 or 4 cables at wide angles.
So does anyone race choppers or autogyros? Or is it all conventional prop planes?
A friend of mine has a tablet.
It's his desktop. He plugs in a keyboard and mouse and uses it as such. He can also pick it up and use it while standing around. It's his work machine - he runs part of a hospital IT structure, and handles a lot of terminals. This involves running around a lot, and not necessarily wanting to set up the laptop.
Really, a tablet is just a laptop that has replaced the keyboard/mouse with a stylus. That allows it to be used while standing up, but it doesn't make quite as good a PC while on-the-go.
I'd be willing to bet it's the other way around. Pathetic, depressed dramatic teenaged girls watch sappy romantic Mary Kate & Ashley movies where everything is better once they find themselves in the arms of a man. Thus, they become desperate to please a guy. So, they end up going out and giving blowjobs to some scabby scater who couldn't give a fuck about them.
Depression leads to stupid, meaningless highschool sex, not the other way around - and it's because of hopeless codependant melodramatic girls buying into bad pop-culture.
Notice non of the _boys_ who get sex are depressed. Notice who's giving all the oral.
Seems like they do. God kills metric buttloads people, God is good, ergo killing metric buttloads of people is good... as long as they're somewhat vaguely associated with ideological enemies.
Heheh, the temps aint that bad - they're rebroadcasting a ton of BBC stuff that is way better than usual CBC fare.
Well, to be fair, Epic provides a lot of free support for their games after initial release. This includes additional content, server browsers, modding contests (with large prizes provided by epic) that lead to more value added to the game, etc. When a game has a large online component, you're buying more than just the game. Yes, they don't run the actual game servers - but they do provide other things.
I'm betting because of things like that more companies will be moving over to the MMO subscription model - even for non-MMO games. This would mean that selling the box would only be the first step, you'd still have to pay your subscription to access the masterserver.
I'm not expert, but afaik at that point the non-regional job becomes trivial - simply tracking the country code servers, rather than running .com, .org, etc. All individual domains become regional issues that are no longer the business of the UN. You could have local backup top-level servers for the big national TLDs - there just aren't that many of them - so the importance of the non-regional servers go way down.
imho, the fastest solution to the problem would be to obliterate the core DNS servers. Give a year's warning. The USA could then transfer all to .us, like the UK does - .mil.us, .org.us, .com.us, etc. Previous .us domains could be transferred to .misc.us or similar.
Then, every country can handle their own TLDs, and nobody has to worry about the main TLDs. ICANN could be practically dissolved at that point, except possibly for managing the domains of countries that do not have the resources to manage their own.
web, Linux, IRC, MySQL, Python
is this a joke? Did I miss a sarcasm tag? I doubt most of those were invented in the USA. For example, iirc Python was invented in the Netherlands (although Guido currently lives in the USA).
Well, true word-of-mouth does happen. Does Armagetron have PR people? I see tons of people playing that around the school. Liero was huge when I was in highschool - and that's just a lone-dev freeware game.