It's probably that appartment building/huge tree/sheet of lead that's between you and the sattelite.
Just a guess.:)
(Mostly joking of course, but seriously... if you've got line of sight and a securely mounted dish (aimed properly, of course), the only thing that's going to wreck your picture is complete burial.)
Yup, we should be politically active......and we should be lobbying to make it so that ISPs, end-users, whoever, can do whatever the fuck they want on the Internet as long as it doesn't violate any other (non internet-specific) laws.
It's funny how one moment people are screaming because regulations are going to limit what they are allowed to do online, and the next they're screaming because some law is going to remove the regulation that's preventing somebody else to do whatever they want online.
ISPs should be allowed to have however many tiers they want. You're free to choose whatever internet provider you'd like, aren't you? If the market doesn't like the multi-tiered model, they'll buy from other providers. The quote you have at the end of your post spells it out pretty well. It's the best argument for why very little bad can come from any legislation that de-regulates ISPs.
If a large bank lost every single customer that used a Mac, it would make no difference to them finacially.
Quite frankly, that's bullshit. It would mean a hell of a lot more to them than the amount it would cost to hire a whole team of software engineers to make their website compatable. Do you have any idea how much money a bank makes off of a single customer? Every credit card transaction, interest on all their accounts, perhaps a mortgage or two, some auto loans... It's not uncommon for 5% of an individual's salary to end up in their bank's account books as profit. A bank with hundreds of thousands of customers is going to see immediatly that supporting their Mac using customers will far more than pay for itself.
Then again, practically every large bank out there supports more than just IE already precicely because they understand this. It's the small banks you might have trouble convincing, because they may only have 10 or so customers that use a Mac.
And switching banks because of browser compatibility isn't an option for most people.
I would be surprised if there were very many people at all who didn't have the option of switching banks for whatever reason they wanted. Nobody is forcing you to use any particular bank, and banks that only support IE with their online banking are becoming very rare indeed.
There's a big difference between being too lazy to switch banks, and being unable to switch banks. (Not that being lazy is even a very good excuse. There are plenty of banks who will do all the work of switching your accounts over for you.)
That's a terrible analogy. Think more like when you wanted to talk to somebody different, you're still speaking the same language, but the way you use your mouth to make sounds has changed...
I mean, really. I love Linksys, but even they are guilty of providing this crap with their wireless add-in cards.
What? Linksys is practicaly the definition of networking gear designed and packaged for the uneducated consumer. They probably spend more money on marketing and product placement by the Geek Squad at Best Buy than they do on the actual hardware. Of course they bundle shit with their software. You're supposed to be smart enough to not install it (since you're hacking the router anyway... the only valid reason to buy Linksys gear.), or to buy hardware from another vendor that is functionally equivalent at a quarter of the price. (Incidentally, my favorite vendor this month is ZyXEL. $15 for an 802.11g box that runs linux and can be a router, or bridge out of the box. Plus access to a bash shell (sortof) with no hacking!)
Thought I should clear that up since you seem to be under the impression that DMA was bought out some time after the PS2 launch.
Nope, that's why I gave credit to the marketing department. The change was entierly prevent continued slide of Rockstar's reputation.
I do agree that Take 2's reputation was not all that great for a while, though it's a fairly young company and reputations do take time to build. You're not going to start a company from scratch and instantly be one of the top publishers/developers in the world
Take 2 is a publisher, not a developer. Just because they own the developers of their titles outright doesn't really change the relationship between developer and publisher all that much. Take 2 doesn't create anything. The development studio known originally as 'Rockstar games' generally produces trash. You can't say that reflects on Take 2 any more than you can determine the quality of a game because it's published by Eidos, Activision, or even Sony or Microsoft. All companies like that do is fund, package, and ship. You have to look one name down the credits list to see who determines the quality.
I don't get it? Are you saying you agree with me? My point was that the huge budget and cutting edge graphics aren't want make a game profitable, and you're seeming to confirm that.
Or did you see "Popcap" in my list and assume that everything I listed was a casual game? Go read it again. One was a hugely profitable MMORPG that is published by Ubisoft and written by a team of 5 guys for under a half million, and the other is an RPG with stick figure graphics. They're both "hardcore", and neither of them are cutting edge.
Is it a bias for outrageous hype, or for first person shooters?
Why would you mention two games that, when their total sales are added up don't reach the total sales of the biggest "blockbuster game" of last year (GTA: San Andreas) in a summary of a story about blockbuster games?
As for the article, well... I think an award should go the the Rockstar Games marketing department, who were obviously the ones behind the DMA Design buyout. Rockstar was well on their way to being notorious for the rock bottom low quality of their games after the PS2 launch, and having DMA Design become Rockstar North has associated an expectation of quality with the Rockstar name. Here's a hint for people reporting about Rockstar: If it says "Rockstar" but doesn't say "Rockstar North" you'd have better odds getting a hit/quality game if you just picked something randomly off the shelf. This is even more true if the game has a movie license associated with it.
...we better get some major consumer electronics retailer to issue a press release and pay MSNBC to cover it. If Blu-Ray wins, think of all the patent licensing revenue we'll lose!
Yup. Cheapskates. Most specialized business applications only cost $40-50 thousand dollars for a 25 seat license. I mean, what the hell are they bitching about? That's a *bargain*.
All the people I know who are still on SP1 (*lots* of people, including me) are still there because SP2, though it installs fine, breaks other stuff.
If you run a fixed set of things, you're behind a firewall, and you don't use Outlook or IE, you may be better off without SP2.
It's the people who shove updates down people's throats because they assume the user doesn't know any better who are clueless.
And if I were Microsoft I'd be more annoyed that more than a quarter of their users still use 98 or 2000...(That's probably an under-estimate because it's from netcraft, and there are tons of machines that don't have internet access)
That is a rediculous, stupid and shortsighted statement.
I'll give you a few lines for you to cook up some stupid prejudiced opinion of what I'm about to say before I continue.
Ready to feel like a moron?
Here's a line from the patriot act's sunset clause for you:
EXCEPTION- With respect to any particular foreign intelligence investigation that began before the date on which the provisions referred to in subsection (a) cease to have effect, or with respect to any particular offense or potential offense that began or occurred before the date on which such provisions cease to have effect, such provisions shall continue in effect.
In other words, you know all that stuff you don't like about the patriot act? Well because they were unable to come up with a new version that protected civil liberties better than the first, all that stuff that you disagree with gets to keep right on happening. Success would have been a new bill that put an end to the bad parts of the patriot act. Sunset doesn't put an end to anything. It says right there that they can keep right on doing all that crap as long as there's any vague connection to some existing investigation. Not only that, but I'd bet money that for every thing in the Patriot act that you disapprove of, there's two things you'd like. It's a HUGE act. It does things like guarantee that government employees that are forced to work overtime due to terroris acts get paid for their work. Is that terrible?
Congerss has a job to do. They are supposed to review the performance of this bill, modify it so it is beter suited to the task at hand, and clean up after it's failures. Failing to reach a compromise (more accuratly, failing to bring the compromise bill for a vote, and bringing this joke up instead) doesn't reflect on the patriotism of anybody. It reflects on how broken politics amongst the current players in Washington has become. What is happening right now is not a good thing. It's a failure of our government.
We have term limits for the executive branch. I think it's time we had them for the legislative branch as well. It's clear that veteran members of the senate and house have begun to put their need for power ahead of rational decisions that would help this country. That goes equally for both major parties (Nancy Pelosi and Bill Frist are two of the worst offenders). We also need better accountablilty. Voters should get a report card about their representative and senators in the mail every year. It should say how they voted on every bill (and votes they didn't bother to show up for should be in bold) and contain a summary of every bill from both the supporting and opposing sides. Spending bills should say what percentage of the money goes to the things described in the title. If more people knew what was actually going on in our government, these people wouldn't get away with 90% of the crap that they pull.
When I said "if you ask me" I meant that *I* would have bought it, but since you bring it up...
There are *tons* of profitable games that don't have top of the line graphics. They just aren't super hyped with multi-million dollar marketing budgets, because they don't need tens or thousands of copies to sell to make a profit. You need cutting edge graphic and a huge budget to justify outrageous hype fueled by a huge amount a advertising dollars, but the the need for big budgets and fancy graphics is a complete myth that only people who need to be spoon fed their content buy into.
Profitable games *don't* need cutting edge graphics. If you disagree, I'd point you to Puzzle Pirates, Popcap, Kingdom of Loathing, or one of the dozens of others of low-profile profitable games that have some out in the last year or two. If you don't know this, you're missing out. Spend a few hours to search around and see what you're missing when you don't look at games that don't advertise on television or in pay-for-reviews gaming rags.
The graphics engine for this game is based on the Dark Cloud series of games. They were known for their highly stylized graphics, and they are a little old at this point. The first one is from 2001. You're seeing a combination of those things. Plus, it looks better when stuff is moving. It wasn't really designed for stills.
If you ask me, they could have used 8-bit sprites, as long as the gameplay was good.
Square Enix, the company that founded the genre, spits in the eye of progress with Dragon Quest VIII.
You know, just because people have come up with new gameplay mechanics doesn't mean we should abandon the old ones. It's about time some tried and true turn based RPG came back on the market. The game market has grown, and there's room for the old style and the new style out there. I think it's fair to say that the old turn based style games offer different types of strategy than the newer real time games, and I was getting a little tired of every new RPG testing my reflexes and jacking up the pace. Those are good games, but sometimes you want to slow down and relax a bit, or add in the increased complexity that having turns allows.
If somebody came up with a real-time version of a game like chess that was sufficiently fun that it became popular, I bet people would still play the old version too. Why should video games be any different. While they're at it, let's get some good old style 2D (the environments, not the graphics nescessarily) platformers back out there for non-handheld systems. Perhaps something that uses the Symphony of the Night engine. Maybe the Revolution will bring some of these types of games back.
Or, you know, never if you happen to have a Radeon mobility and your laptop manufacturer doesn't see any reason to release updates unless the old one crashes.
Luckily a hacked version that will load for laptops anyway should be out shortly after the official desktop release.
That must be some odd definition of "won" that I've never heard of before. You still had to pay for it, didn't you?
This whole thing is nuts. There are plenty of new games out for the consoles that are plentiful to justify waiting until there are a decent number of games and a decent supply to buy a 360. So many in fact, that you probably don't have time to play them all between now and then. Anybody who stands in line in the cold for hours for an 8% chance of buying one (for themselves or as a christmas present) is a moron.
You don't think there would have been a cover story on the front of the Boston Herald every day after the Xbox 360 release if some money didn't change hands, do you? What about all that coverage on CNN? I thought it was always just assumed that the gaming press was for sale. Every single month from as far back as I can remember you see some shit game get better than average reviews from the big review sites and magazines. The real news should be that the regular media is taking the bait too.
Anyone who has tried powering a single LED with a reasonable capacitor knows you need a BIG, EXPENSIVE cap on there to store any rasonable charge for very long.
Actually a thin foil coating on the outside and inside of the box would be signifigantly more than sufficient. Cheap and easy.
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably that appartment building/huge tree/sheet of lead that's between you and the sattelite.
:)
Just a guess.
(Mostly joking of course, but seriously... if you've got line of sight and a securely mounted dish (aimed properly, of course), the only thing that's going to wreck your picture is complete burial.)
Yup, we should be politically active... ...and we should be lobbying to make it so that ISPs, end-users, whoever, can do whatever the fuck they want on the Internet as long as it doesn't violate any other (non internet-specific) laws.
It's funny how one moment people are screaming because regulations are going to limit what they are allowed to do online, and the next they're screaming because some law is going to remove the regulation that's preventing somebody else to do whatever they want online.
ISPs should be allowed to have however many tiers they want. You're free to choose whatever internet provider you'd like, aren't you? If the market doesn't like the multi-tiered model, they'll buy from other providers. The quote you have at the end of your post spells it out pretty well. It's the best argument for why very little bad can come from any legislation that de-regulates ISPs.
If a large bank lost every single customer that used a Mac, it would make no difference to them finacially.
Quite frankly, that's bullshit. It would mean a hell of a lot more to them than the amount it would cost to hire a whole team of software engineers to make their website compatable. Do you have any idea how much money a bank makes off of a single customer? Every credit card transaction, interest on all their accounts, perhaps a mortgage or two, some auto loans... It's not uncommon for 5% of an individual's salary to end up in their bank's account books as profit. A bank with hundreds of thousands of customers is going to see immediatly that supporting their Mac using customers will far more than pay for itself.
Then again, practically every large bank out there supports more than just IE already precicely because they understand this. It's the small banks you might have trouble convincing, because they may only have 10 or so customers that use a Mac.
And switching banks because of browser compatibility isn't an option for most people.
I would be surprised if there were very many people at all who didn't have the option of switching banks for whatever reason they wanted. Nobody is forcing you to use any particular bank, and banks that only support IE with their online banking are becoming very rare indeed.
There's a big difference between being too lazy to switch banks, and being unable to switch banks. (Not that being lazy is even a very good excuse. There are plenty of banks who will do all the work of switching your accounts over for you.)
That's a terrible analogy. Think more like when you wanted to talk to somebody different, you're still speaking the same language, but the way you use your mouth to make sounds has changed...
I mean, really. I love Linksys, but even they are guilty of providing this crap with their wireless add-in cards.
What? Linksys is practicaly the definition of networking gear designed and packaged for the uneducated consumer. They probably spend more money on marketing and product placement by the Geek Squad at Best Buy than they do on the actual hardware. Of course they bundle shit with their software. You're supposed to be smart enough to not install it (since you're hacking the router anyway... the only valid reason to buy Linksys gear.), or to buy hardware from another vendor that is functionally equivalent at a quarter of the price. (Incidentally, my favorite vendor this month is ZyXEL. $15 for an 802.11g box that runs linux and can be a router, or bridge out of the box. Plus access to a bash shell (sortof) with no hacking!)
Thought I should clear that up since you seem to be under the impression that DMA was bought out some time after the PS2 launch.
Nope, that's why I gave credit to the marketing department. The change was entierly prevent continued slide of Rockstar's reputation.
I do agree that Take 2's reputation was not all that great for a while, though it's a fairly young company and reputations do take time to build. You're not going to start a company from scratch and instantly be one of the top publishers/developers in the world
Take 2 is a publisher, not a developer. Just because they own the developers of their titles outright doesn't really change the relationship between developer and publisher all that much. Take 2 doesn't create anything. The development studio known originally as 'Rockstar games' generally produces trash. You can't say that reflects on Take 2 any more than you can determine the quality of a game because it's published by Eidos, Activision, or even Sony or Microsoft. All companies like that do is fund, package, and ship. You have to look one name down the credits list to see who determines the quality.
I don't get it? Are you saying you agree with me? My point was that the huge budget and cutting edge graphics aren't want make a game profitable, and you're seeming to confirm that.
Or did you see "Popcap" in my list and assume that everything I listed was a casual game? Go read it again. One was a hugely profitable MMORPG that is published by Ubisoft and written by a team of 5 guys for under a half million, and the other is an RPG with stick figure graphics. They're both "hardcore", and neither of them are cutting edge.
Is it a bias for outrageous hype, or for first person shooters?
Why would you mention two games that, when their total sales are added up don't reach the total sales of the biggest "blockbuster game" of last year (GTA: San Andreas) in a summary of a story about blockbuster games?
As for the article, well... I think an award should go the the Rockstar Games marketing department, who were obviously the ones behind the DMA Design buyout. Rockstar was well on their way to being notorious for the rock bottom low quality of their games after the PS2 launch, and having DMA Design become Rockstar North has associated an expectation of quality with the Rockstar name. Here's a hint for people reporting about Rockstar: If it says "Rockstar" but doesn't say "Rockstar North" you'd have better odds getting a hit/quality game if you just picked something randomly off the shelf. This is even more true if the game has a movie license associated with it.
...we better get some major consumer electronics retailer to issue a press release and pay MSNBC to cover it. If Blu-Ray wins, think of all the patent licensing revenue we'll lose!
Yup. Cheapskates. Most specialized business applications only cost $40-50 thousand dollars for a 25 seat license. I mean, what the hell are they bitching about? That's a *bargain*.
Wow, that's new.
Of course I guess the reason mine might have been different is because it was one of the ultra-lights with no optical drive...
All the people I know who are still on SP1 (*lots* of people, including me) are still there because SP2, though it installs fine, breaks other stuff.
If you run a fixed set of things, you're behind a firewall, and you don't use Outlook or IE, you may be better off without SP2.
It's the people who shove updates down people's throats because they assume the user doesn't know any better who are clueless.
And if I were Microsoft I'd be more annoyed that more than a quarter of their users still use 98 or 2000...(That's probably an under-estimate because it's from netcraft, and there are tons of machines that don't have internet access)
That is a rediculous, stupid and shortsighted statement.
I'll give you a few lines for you to cook up some stupid prejudiced opinion of what I'm about to say before I continue.
Ready to feel like a moron?
Here's a line from the patriot act's sunset clause for you:
EXCEPTION- With respect to any particular foreign intelligence investigation that began before the date on which the provisions referred to in subsection (a) cease to have effect, or with respect to any particular offense or potential offense that began or occurred before the date on which such provisions cease to have effect, such provisions shall continue in effect.
In other words, you know all that stuff you don't like about the patriot act? Well because they were unable to come up with a new version that protected civil liberties better than the first, all that stuff that you disagree with gets to keep right on happening. Success would have been a new bill that put an end to the bad parts of the patriot act. Sunset doesn't put an end to anything. It says right there that they can keep right on doing all that crap as long as there's any vague connection to some existing investigation. Not only that, but I'd bet money that for every thing in the Patriot act that you disapprove of, there's two things you'd like. It's a HUGE act. It does things like guarantee that government employees that are forced to work overtime due to terroris acts get paid for their work. Is that terrible?
Congerss has a job to do. They are supposed to review the performance of this bill, modify it so it is beter suited to the task at hand, and clean up after it's failures. Failing to reach a compromise (more accuratly, failing to bring the compromise bill for a vote, and bringing this joke up instead) doesn't reflect on the patriotism of anybody. It reflects on how broken politics amongst the current players in Washington has become. What is happening right now is not a good thing. It's a failure of our government.
We have term limits for the executive branch. I think it's time we had them for the legislative branch as well. It's clear that veteran members of the senate and house have begun to put their need for power ahead of rational decisions that would help this country. That goes equally for both major parties (Nancy Pelosi and Bill Frist are two of the worst offenders). We also need better accountablilty. Voters should get a report card about their representative and senators in the mail every year. It should say how they voted on every bill (and votes they didn't bother to show up for should be in bold) and contain a summary of every bill from both the supporting and opposing sides. Spending bills should say what percentage of the money goes to the things described in the title. If more people knew what was actually going on in our government, these people wouldn't get away with 90% of the crap that they pull.
When I said "if you ask me" I meant that *I* would have bought it, but since you bring it up...
There are *tons* of profitable games that don't have top of the line graphics. They just aren't super hyped with multi-million dollar marketing budgets, because they don't need tens or thousands of copies to sell to make a profit. You need cutting edge graphic and a huge budget to justify outrageous hype fueled by a huge amount a advertising dollars, but the the need for big budgets and fancy graphics is a complete myth that only people who need to be spoon fed their content buy into.
Profitable games *don't* need cutting edge graphics. If you disagree, I'd point you to Puzzle Pirates, Popcap, Kingdom of Loathing, or one of the dozens of others of low-profile profitable games that have some out in the last year or two. If you don't know this, you're missing out. Spend a few hours to search around and see what you're missing when you don't look at games that don't advertise on television or in pay-for-reviews gaming rags.
The graphics engine for this game is based on the Dark Cloud series of games. They were known for their highly stylized graphics, and they are a little old at this point. The first one is from 2001. You're seeing a combination of those things. Plus, it looks better when stuff is moving. It wasn't really designed for stills.
If you ask me, they could have used 8-bit sprites, as long as the gameplay was good.
Square Enix, the company that founded the genre, spits in the eye of progress with Dragon Quest VIII.
You know, just because people have come up with new gameplay mechanics doesn't mean we should abandon the old ones. It's about time some tried and true turn based RPG came back on the market. The game market has grown, and there's room for the old style and the new style out there. I think it's fair to say that the old turn based style games offer different types of strategy than the newer real time games, and I was getting a little tired of every new RPG testing my reflexes and jacking up the pace. Those are good games, but sometimes you want to slow down and relax a bit, or add in the increased complexity that having turns allows.
If somebody came up with a real-time version of a game like chess that was sufficiently fun that it became popular, I bet people would still play the old version too. Why should video games be any different. While they're at it, let's get some good old style 2D (the environments, not the graphics nescessarily) platformers back out there for non-handheld systems. Perhaps something that uses the Symphony of the Night engine. Maybe the Revolution will bring some of these types of games back.
I have a 9700.
When I try to install the mobility drivers on my system, they exit with a message saying that I need to obtain the drivers from my laptop vendor.
There is an application that hacks the check out of the installer, and then the drivers work just fine, but I still wouldn't call that 'supported'.
Or, you know, never if you happen to have a Radeon mobility and your laptop manufacturer doesn't see any reason to release updates unless the old one crashes.
Luckily a hacked version that will load for laptops anyway should be out shortly after the official desktop release.
Welcome to 2005, I realize things must be strange for you considering you've been frozen since 1930...
More likely the submitter owns Sony PCs.
If you own a Sony computer (or a Mavica with an optical drive), don't lose your CDs!.
That must be some odd definition of "won" that I've never heard of before. You still had to pay for it, didn't you?
This whole thing is nuts. There are plenty of new games out for the consoles that are plentiful to justify waiting until there are a decent number of games and a decent supply to buy a 360. So many in fact, that you probably don't have time to play them all between now and then. Anybody who stands in line in the cold for hours for an 8% chance of buying one (for themselves or as a christmas present) is a moron.
That should say "a cover story about the 360".... Of course there would have been *some* cover story or other...
You don't think there would have been a cover story on the front of the Boston Herald every day after the Xbox 360 release if some money didn't change hands, do you? What about all that coverage on CNN? I thought it was always just assumed that the gaming press was for sale. Every single month from as far back as I can remember you see some shit game get better than average reviews from the big review sites and magazines. The real news should be that the regular media is taking the bait too.
Try it for yourself. You may need to coat the cardbaord with something non conductive.. wax or plastic wrap will do the trick.
Don't hurt yourself. You can give yourself a nasty shock. You'll be surprised how much charge it will hold.
Anyone who has tried powering a single LED with a reasonable capacitor knows you need a BIG, EXPENSIVE cap on there to store any rasonable charge for very long.
Actually a thin foil coating on the outside and inside of the box would be signifigantly more than sufficient. Cheap and easy.