All registrars should prohibit scripted registrations by using human verification picture codes.
That will work for about 2 days before domain squatters discover they can hire a room full of teens in China to click 'reload' on the registrar's website and fill out captchas all day.
In the mean time, I need to figure out how to make sure I can instantly register the domain I want.
Registrars should borrow a page from video game stores and public libraries, and create waitlists. Make a $10 down payment, and the registrar will contact you and give you a brief exclusive opportunity to register a domain the next time it becomes available. If you pass, the next person on the list then gets the opportunity to register it.
Your front yard has a water fountain sitting next to the sidewalk. You pay for the water. The fountain only works by use of a key. But you have a machine sitting next to the fountain that produces a key for anyone who presses a button labelled "Press here to request access to water fountain". Am I committing a crime by pressing the button and then drinking the water?
I'm sorry, your analogy must contain at least one automobile. Please try again.
Racing games, and even most sport games have the penalty of costs. Sure, why don't I drive a 1.3 million dollar car 120 mph the wrong way through Italy, why didn't I think of that.
Whereas a $300 electric guitar and a $60 guitar-shaped game controller actually cost the same amount...?
Sure it's a game, but so are flight sims and look how realistic [as best as you can get on a home PC] they are.
I don't find realistic simulations to be all that much fun, myself. The learning curve is too steep and the activity often too mundane.
I would rather play a game like Afterburner than MS Flight Simulator; who cares about boring details like checking altimeters and retracting the landing gear after takeoff, I just want to get in a firefight with some Russian MiGs already, goddammit.
The same approach is the difference between learning to play guitar and playing Guitar Hero. Enjoying the latter has no effect on whether I should or do enjoy the former.
Unfortunatly the greatest guitar game of all time is missing one of the greatest, if not THE greatest Aussie ever to play the guitar, Angus Young.
I hear they tried doing an AC/DC Guitar Hero track where the player performs as Malcom young, but they found that it was too easy to get a perfect score by just going "chunka chunka" on eighth notes for 3 minutes straight.
How do you dial a PSP? No touch screen, no keypad.
A few possibilities: 1) Push the analog nub around like a rotary phone's dial. 2) Map the D-pad, face buttons, Select, and Start to 0-9, *, and #. Impress your friends by instructing them to call you by entering the Konami Code. 3) Seriously, who even uses a keypad for dialing anymore? I select a name from a contact list when I need to make a call. A lot of automated phone systems even support voice activation instead now.
surely it's long established that "number of colours" refers to the number of possible colours an individual pixel can display, and not using tricks like dithering?
I don't know that it has.
Consider the classic tri-color cathode ray tube. It cannot actually display the color white, or orange or yellow or purple. The only colors that the phosphors can glow are red, blue, and green. It's only by illuminating tightly-packed adjacent phosphors that the perception of other colors is possible.
Perhaps Apple will offer a similar argument in defense of their LCDs. Perhaps it will be accepted, perhaps not. At this point I don't think it's obvious which way the suit should be decided.
Exclusive to Blu-ray are the first two 'Pirates of the Caribbean' flicks, while exclusive to HD DVD are two different configurations of the 'Matrix' Trilogy
"Exclusive"? All five of these movies are already available on standard DVD as well.
Spam HAS been solved, it's just that most people aren't implementing the fix. Use Gmail if you don't want to set up your own filtering system.
Filtering is not a solution to the spam problem. Not while there' a non-negligible amount of the total mail traffic going over the networks consisting of spam.
It's one thing to prevent spam from being delivered to users' eyes, but it's another thing entirely to prevent it from being sent in the first place. There hasn't been a tenable solution to that problem yet.
I know another game that's in DIRE need of an overhaul: chess. I mean, it's been played pretty much the same way for like 500 years. Gamers are bound to get tired of it real soon now!
And I don't want them to just add new pieces or change the board from squares to hexagons or anything like that! I mean a significant change that affects the whole structure and gameplay!
I'm amazed that none of the high-modded comments so far have addressed the issue of water quality.
You can use the finest beans, at the peak of freshness, roasted and ground to perfection, but if your water's of poor quality the end product is going to be of poor quality as well.
If your local tap water is clean, and not overly chlorinated, fluoridated, or sulfurous, by all means use it to brew. But if you don't like drinking it straight from the tap, don't make coffee with it, either. Your local supermarket is sure to have a variety of spring waters (or even distilled water, if that's your preference) that will improve the taste of your brew.
Vanguard as planned had a lot of potential; unfortunately they planned far more than they could deliver.
I agree. It was overly ambitious of them to design a game that accomplished horizontal AND vertical scrolling on hardware as primitive as the Atari 2600; as a result they had to cut corners on enemy AI, leaving it nothing more than "stop, wiggle, proceed".
Judicious use of dissimilar UI paradigms can emphasize the aspects of your application that are dissimilar to others
Which is fine, if your application MUST be dissimilar to others because the published HI guidelines are insufficient to address its behavior.
If your app only looks and feels different than everything else on your desktop because Marketing thought it would be good for brand recognition, that's a problem. Windows Media Player, I'm looking in your direction here.
Proper planning, good design, code reviews, and disciplined testing is all you need.
Unfortunately there seems to be very few companies willing to budget (in time or resources) for any more than two of these, let alone all four. And even more unfortunately, the past 40 years of commercial software seem to suggest that such miserliness has been a profitable decision.
Super Mario Sunshine is a good example of a game that looked wonderful due to utilizing the special qualities of the Game Cube innovatively (notably with water.)
It's also a cautionary tale about the dangers of focusing on graphics over gameplay. The familiar gameplay mechanics of previous Super Mario games were all but pushed aside so that the GameCube's fluid-rendering capabilities could be showcased fully, and as a result many gamers found it to be a disappointing addition to the series.
The fact that developers are already complaining about the limits of the system means that in another year or two, when the novelty of the motion detector has worn off a bit, the wii's popularity will start to slide.
Nobody cares if the developers are complaining. I'm sure developers on the 2600 complained about only having 128 bytes of RAM to work with, but as long as money was pouring in, they sucked it up. And some of the ways they worked around limitations were nothing short of brilliant; graphics like those seen in Solaris, or even Battlezone, just shouldn't have been possible.
As long as there's still a demand for Wii titles, developers will develop for it. They may complain along the way, but that's just because they like complaining. They'll find ways to do marvelous things within the limits of the hardware, just as they've been doing with every console for the past 30 years.
In the Super Nintendo generation, it was less powerful than the TG16 [...] Its only real competitor in that generation was the Sega Genesis, a console that was less powerful than the Super Nintendo!
I was going to argue with you over these points, over which consoles actually were more powerful in that generation, but I realized there was no reason to; it's as pointless a debate when applied to those consoles as it is to the Wii and Xbox.
Console power is not strongly correlated to enjoyment potential. Yes, I enjoy what the new consoles make possible, but I can also still play Enduro on the Atari 2600 for hours.
There's more to creating beauty than polygon fill rates and shader algorithms.
I think a game like Super Paper Mario, for example, is absolutely gorgeous; it's obvious that a huge amount of effort went into the art direction for the game. Who cares if the graphics could have been generated by a last-generation GPU? They're still beautiful.
it represents a general trend in the Simpsons, away from their working class roots and towards what I can only imagine is what the current crop of writers are more familiar with.
I think you might be letting your imagination run too wild here. Yes, the current group of Simpsons writers are mostly Ivy graduates, but that was true of the writers back during Your Favorite Season also. You can't attribute the change in the show's tone to something that hasn't changed.
Hopefully he will take a cue and make it similar to the "Holiday Special".
Everyone knows that Lucas's original conception of the 20-minute-long holographic tumbling routine was CGI-based, but they had to make compromises because the technology wasn't mature enough at that time.
And this time the holograph table controls will look like a CD player, instead of being borrowed from a Radio Shack tape deck.
Because computer games generally do not feature realistic motion blur, we can see a benefit from increased frame rates well above the 72fps which would be sufficient with perfect motion blur.
Human eyes may not think of motion in terms of discrete frames, but computer display devices do.
If your display has a 75Hz refresh rate, it doesn't matter if the game engine is generating 75 frames per second or 175 frames per second; the same number are going to reach your eye.
(However, higher frame rates can be used to create motion blur in the frames that are displayed, giving the perception of smoother motion.)
So what do I do if I don't want the clutter? Throw them all into a landfill?
A collection of a few hundred CDs only takes up a few cubic feet of space -- less if you recycle the jewelboxes and booklets and store the discs on spindles.
Despite the DRM politics, it's awfully convenient to buy online.
Depends on what you're looking to buy.
I make it a habit every 2 or 3 months to take a trip from Brooklyn to the Princeton Record Exchange and buy a big stack of $1.99 used CDs. Most of what I get is bands that I have never heard of before, and without P-Rex problably never would! Some are fantastic, some are disappointing, but I always feel that my money has been well spent.
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All registrars should prohibit scripted registrations by using human verification picture codes.
That will work for about 2 days before domain squatters discover they can hire a room full of teens in China to click 'reload' on the registrar's website and fill out captchas all day.
In the mean time, I need to figure out how to make sure I can instantly register the domain I want.
Registrars should borrow a page from video game stores and public libraries, and create waitlists. Make a $10 down payment, and the registrar will contact you and give you a brief exclusive opportunity to register a domain the next time it becomes available. If you pass, the next person on the list then gets the opportunity to register it.
Your front yard has a water fountain sitting next to the sidewalk. You pay for the water. The fountain only works by use of a key. But you have a machine sitting next to the fountain that produces a key for anyone who presses a button labelled "Press here to request access to water fountain". Am I committing a crime by pressing the button and then drinking the water?
I'm sorry, your analogy must contain at least one automobile. Please try again.
Racing games, and even most sport games have the penalty of costs. Sure, why don't I drive a 1.3 million dollar car 120 mph the wrong way through Italy, why didn't I think of that.
Whereas a $300 electric guitar and a $60 guitar-shaped game controller actually cost the same amount...?
Sure it's a game, but so are flight sims and look how realistic [as best as you can get on a home PC] they are.
I don't find realistic simulations to be all that much fun, myself. The learning curve is too steep and the activity often too mundane.
I would rather play a game like Afterburner than MS Flight Simulator; who cares about boring details like checking altimeters and retracting the landing gear after takeoff, I just want to get in a firefight with some Russian MiGs already, goddammit.
The same approach is the difference between learning to play guitar and playing Guitar Hero. Enjoying the latter has no effect on whether I should or do enjoy the former.
Unfortunatly the greatest guitar game of all time is missing one of the greatest, if not THE greatest Aussie ever to play the guitar, Angus Young.
I hear they tried doing an AC/DC Guitar Hero track where the player performs as Malcom young, but they found that it was too easy to get a perfect score by just going "chunka chunka" on eighth notes for 3 minutes straight.
How do you dial a PSP? No touch screen, no keypad.
A few possibilities:
1) Push the analog nub around like a rotary phone's dial.
2) Map the D-pad, face buttons, Select, and Start to 0-9, *, and #. Impress your friends by instructing them to call you by entering the Konami Code.
3) Seriously, who even uses a keypad for dialing anymore? I select a name from a contact list when I need to make a call. A lot of automated phone systems even support voice activation instead now.
surely it's long established that "number of colours" refers to the number of possible colours an individual pixel can display, and not using tricks like dithering?
I don't know that it has.
Consider the classic tri-color cathode ray tube. It cannot actually display the color white, or orange or yellow or purple. The only colors that the phosphors can glow are red, blue, and green. It's only by illuminating tightly-packed adjacent phosphors that the perception of other colors is possible.
Perhaps Apple will offer a similar argument in defense of their LCDs. Perhaps it will be accepted, perhaps not. At this point I don't think it's obvious which way the suit should be decided.
Couldn't the student claim it's a parody and eliminate any chance of a case against said student?
Yeah right. A parody of what?
Exclusive to Blu-ray are the first two 'Pirates of the Caribbean' flicks, while exclusive to HD DVD are two different configurations of the 'Matrix' Trilogy
"Exclusive"? All five of these movies are already available on standard DVD as well.
I'm ready to declare a winner in the format war.
Spam HAS been solved, it's just that most people aren't implementing the fix. Use Gmail if you don't want to set up your own filtering system.
Filtering is not a solution to the spam problem. Not while there' a non-negligible amount of the total mail traffic going over the networks consisting of spam.
It's one thing to prevent spam from being delivered to users' eyes, but it's another thing entirely to prevent it from being sent in the first place. There hasn't been a tenable solution to that problem yet.
I know another game that's in DIRE need of an overhaul: chess. I mean, it's been played pretty much the same way for like 500 years. Gamers are bound to get tired of it real soon now!
And I don't want them to just add new pieces or change the board from squares to hexagons or anything like that! I mean a significant change that affects the whole structure and gameplay!
I'm amazed that none of the high-modded comments so far have addressed the issue of water quality.
You can use the finest beans, at the peak of freshness, roasted and ground to perfection, but if your water's of poor quality the end product is going to be of poor quality as well.
If your local tap water is clean, and not overly chlorinated, fluoridated, or sulfurous, by all means use it to brew. But if you don't like drinking it straight from the tap, don't make coffee with it, either. Your local supermarket is sure to have a variety of spring waters (or even distilled water, if that's your preference) that will improve the taste of your brew.
Vanguard as planned had a lot of potential; unfortunately they planned far more than they could deliver.
I agree. It was overly ambitious of them to design a game that accomplished horizontal AND vertical scrolling on hardware as primitive as the Atari 2600; as a result they had to cut corners on enemy AI, leaving it nothing more than "stop, wiggle, proceed".
Judicious use of dissimilar UI paradigms can emphasize the aspects of your application that are dissimilar to others
Which is fine, if your application MUST be dissimilar to others because the published HI guidelines are insufficient to address its behavior.
If your app only looks and feels different than everything else on your desktop because Marketing thought it would be good for brand recognition, that's a problem. Windows Media Player, I'm looking in your direction here.
Firstly, for the love of God, Ubuntu is not dark brown! It's orange.
It's only orange if the circuit in your IBM 5153 display for adjusting CGA color 0x06 has failed.
Proper planning, good design, code reviews, and disciplined testing is all you need.
Unfortunately there seems to be very few companies willing to budget (in time or resources) for any more than two of these, let alone all four. And even more unfortunately, the past 40 years of commercial software seem to suggest that such miserliness has been a profitable decision.
Super Mario Sunshine is a good example of a game that looked wonderful due to utilizing the special qualities of the Game Cube innovatively (notably with water.)
It's also a cautionary tale about the dangers of focusing on graphics over gameplay. The familiar gameplay mechanics of previous Super Mario games were all but pushed aside so that the GameCube's fluid-rendering capabilities could be showcased fully, and as a result many gamers found it to be a disappointing addition to the series.
The fact that developers are already complaining about the limits of the system means that in another year or two, when the novelty of the motion detector has worn off a bit, the wii's popularity will start to slide.
Nobody cares if the developers are complaining. I'm sure developers on the 2600 complained about only having 128 bytes of RAM to work with, but as long as money was pouring in, they sucked it up. And some of the ways they worked around limitations were nothing short of brilliant; graphics like those seen in Solaris, or even Battlezone, just shouldn't have been possible.
As long as there's still a demand for Wii titles, developers will develop for it. They may complain along the way, but that's just because they like complaining. They'll find ways to do marvelous things within the limits of the hardware, just as they've been doing with every console for the past 30 years.
In the Super Nintendo generation, it was less powerful than the TG16 [...] Its only real competitor in that generation was the Sega Genesis, a console that was less powerful than the Super Nintendo!
I was going to argue with you over these points, over which consoles actually were more powerful in that generation, but I realized there was no reason to; it's as pointless a debate when applied to those consoles as it is to the Wii and Xbox.
Console power is not strongly correlated to enjoyment potential. Yes, I enjoy what the new consoles make possible, but I can also still play Enduro on the Atari 2600 for hours.
There's more to creating beauty than polygon fill rates and shader algorithms.
I think a game like Super Paper Mario, for example, is absolutely gorgeous; it's obvious that a huge amount of effort went into the art direction for the game. Who cares if the graphics could have been generated by a last-generation GPU? They're still beautiful.
it represents a general trend in the Simpsons, away from their working class roots and towards what I can only imagine is what the current crop of writers are more familiar with.
I think you might be letting your imagination run too wild here. Yes, the current group of Simpsons writers are mostly Ivy graduates, but that was true of the writers back during Your Favorite Season also. You can't attribute the change in the show's tone to something that hasn't changed.
Hopefully he will take a cue and make it similar to the "Holiday Special".
Everyone knows that Lucas's original conception of the 20-minute-long holographic tumbling routine was CGI-based, but they had to make compromises because the technology wasn't mature enough at that time.
And this time the holograph table controls will look like a CD player, instead of being borrowed from a Radio Shack tape deck.
I have noticed that some pirates have converted this note to a tone, they are calling it C sharp (277hz).
Too late, dude -- they've already released a workaround that changes the period of C sharp to 278Hz. (D flat is 276Hz now, so you're SOL there too.)
Because computer games generally do not feature realistic motion blur, we can see a benefit from increased frame rates well above the 72fps which would be sufficient with perfect motion blur.
Human eyes may not think of motion in terms of discrete frames, but computer display devices do.
If your display has a 75Hz refresh rate, it doesn't matter if the game engine is generating 75 frames per second or 175 frames per second; the same number are going to reach your eye.
(However, higher frame rates can be used to create motion blur in the frames that are displayed, giving the perception of smoother motion.)
So what do I do if I don't want the clutter? Throw them all into a landfill?
A collection of a few hundred CDs only takes up a few cubic feet of space -- less if you recycle the jewelboxes and booklets and store the discs on spindles.
Despite the DRM politics, it's awfully convenient to buy online.
Depends on what you're looking to buy.
I make it a habit every 2 or 3 months to take a trip from Brooklyn to the Princeton Record Exchange and buy a big stack of $1.99 used CDs. Most of what I get is bands that I have never heard of before, and without P-Rex problably never would! Some are fantastic, some are disappointing, but I always feel that my money has been well spent.