IMO the biggest difference between Pandora and PSP is its open source nature, and the receptive attitude OpenPandora has shown towards homebrew development.
Well yes, because the only thing the Pandora platform has is homebrew. It's not backed by Sony, Nintendo nor Microsoft - those are your big 3 game distributors right there.
You won't be able to walk into GameStop and score a bunch of Pandora carts from the pre-owned section. You won't see TV spots about the Pandora. You'll get a 2-minute comment from Adam Sessler on X-Play about the Pandora, and then it will never be mentioned again. It's going to be at least as obscure as the GP2X.
Now I'm not saying the Pandora is a bad idea... I really like the concept, the idea of an open platform with very respectable specs, but you just can't compare something like this to any of the commercial handhelds, because the thing that sells consoles isn't the hardware, it's the software.
In that case, Blizzard should sue all the korean farming groups that are essentially human bots. They add nothing to the game, strip-mine the resources thus inconveniencing legitimate players, and they enable the aforementioned high-level morons who have monster gear yet can't play worth a damn.
To me, there is absolutely no difference between those farmers and MMOGlider. To bash only one of them is hypocritical.
It's not so much that it plays better than a human, but it is certainly more persistant. After killing the same mob over and over for 16 hours to loot rare drops, even a motivated korean farmer will start hating the grind.
MMOGlider, as far as I can tell, simply acted as a virtual player. It didn't "cheat" or use anything not exposed in the interface. It didn't play any differently from the thousands of wage-slaves in organized farming groups.
You could even say MMOGlider is a natural response to the ridiculous amount of boring boring grinding designed into the game. It really is excessive at times, and is used as a substitute for more intellectual balancing mechanics.
Have you even played the game ? Yes, there are some areas that are literally off-limits, because they go outside the boundaries of the map. It's not a free-roaming world, but you're quite free within the bubble they give you, and it's a big enough bubble for an FPS, way bigger than any other FPS I've ever played.
For the record, I have climbed mountains in the game... it required a bit of patience, finding reachable ledges and whatnot, but I did manage to skip entire zones that way. The same was true of its predecessor Far Cry. Sure, they've placed convenient vehicles and weapons along the regular paths, but if you skip them, you can still monkey your way to the dust-off site.
Playing as a North Korean could be interesting, I'll admit, but it's only pertinent in the first few missions anyway. Once you reach that midpoint, it's all humans vs aliens. You want your nanosuit to speak Korean, basically ?
1. RealDVD is an app that breaks the CSS "protection" on DVD movies, rips it to your PC, and wraps the resultant mess in DRM of its own.
2. They're suing the film industry to legitimize the RealDVD application.
So the supposed criminal is suing the predicted plaintiff... What kind of law suit is that ? Pardon my ignorance, but I live in a non-trigger-happy country where lawyers are not kept as house pets, and certainly not fed table food.
If I go steal a car off the lot, should I sue the dealership to assert my dog-given-right to steal cars ?
RealNetworks might as well mail a blank cheque to the MPAA. This is not helping anyone we care about. It's one asshole vs another.
If you lose $20 or $40 while spending an evening socializing and having a few drinks, I'd call that entertainment. How is it any worse than blowing $60 on a video game, or going to the movies ?
Modern, urban entertainment typically costs money. Playing a game of cards with chatty/goofy or clever people can be a great way to kill a few hours. Personally, I don't gamble anything I'm not 100% comfortable losing. I literally walk into the game assuming I'm going to lose. If I win, well my buddy and me will go for dinner/shopping after the game... and if I lose, we'll probably have dinner anyway... whatever!
Most of the people who "play to win", probably shouldn't be playing in the first place. They don't have the right attitude, and they can't afford to lose what they're risking. The moment you start seeing it as work, instead of a game, is the moment you stop having fun.
I'll vouch for #1, but the same could be said of any pastime. I'm not so fond of pissing my money away in casinos, though I do indulge in the occasional poker game with a handful of friends. I never win, but twenty bucks won't kill me.
Meanwhile, I spend on average a couple hundred bucks every month at the pub. To some people, that's every bit as demonic as gambling. To me, it's just a different form of entertainment - networking with a bunch of art-school flunkies never hurt anyone. It's way cheaper than a coke habit and just as mind-boggling:)
Yet again the summary misleads, but it's no secret the Russian authorities don't have the resources to investigate anything of importance, and that problem leads to the iconic corruption that brings it full-circle.'
In such a scenario, the first thing the PHB would ask of IT is to require the company-endorsed security software to be used, and deny connections from "unsecured" hosts.
Which means if you're a Linux guru, or maybe you just don't want to bog your PC down with the joke that is Symantec Antivirus, then you're blocked off.
Don't be surprised, there are companies that specialize in such idiotic solutions. Remember RSA's SecurID ? What the hell did that accomplish, besides making a small heap of cash for the vendor ?
Keep in mind UK prices are atrocious on any imports, compared to the USA.
For $500 you can buy a cheap full-size Dell with a lot more horsepower than the Aspire One or any other so-called netbook. That's the problem.
Everyone still thinks portable means expensive, but the fact is today's laptops are mostly empty shells with cut-out motherboards. If we could do without I/O connectors on one of the sides, they could probably cut the board down to half the size of the chassis! There's no extra cost in "miniaturizing" the notebook, because the standard-sized guts are already small enough to make into EEE's and Aspire One's.
Once the netbooks are priced similarly to a used notebook of similar performance, that's when they will take off. For me, that's $200 or less. It's a laptop, I don't need it to do much... today's laptops are mostly used as thin clients - VNC, RDP, SSH, Citrix and web apps. That's not worth $500 to me.
The fallacy in this argument is that a million Japanese bot-hosts with a million 1Gbps uplinks will not translate to a Petabyte per second of spam, because the bottleneck at the edge of the network remains the same. If anything, it will make such botnets far more noticeable, since high-speed sustained traffic will stand out compared to bursty user activity.
This is EXACTLY what civilized nations should be doing. Gigabit fiber is about as fast as you can go on such a wide-scale before cost shoots to infinity.
They won't have 1Gbps to the rest of the world, but as a local interconnect, it's excellent. The main pipe leading out of Japan will still be the same size, and you'll get the same volume of Viagra spam as always. Actually most of that garbage comes from China, Malaysia and Brazil - Japan actually does have a functional legal system that deters such bastards.
If everyone in the USA could get Gigabit to the home, even if it only translated to 1mbit per user to the outside world, holy crap can you even begin to imagine the uses for that sort of bandwidth ? How about hi-def Youtube ? How about IPTV for the masses ? How about not having to wrestle with QOS tweaks to get goddamned VoIP working properly ?
As long as same-network traffic is unmetered, this kind of deployment can lead to huge cultural changes.
Whoever modded this insightful needs to go back to 4chan.
Crysis, for those of us who actually have "Enthusiast" systems, was actually entertaining. The suit-power gimmick works really well to give you diverse playing styles. I remember playing it several different ways, the first time like a normal FPS, shooting and taking cover. The second time I played a stealth game, using strength-boosted jumps to reach high sniping spots. The third time, I just left it on speed mode and dashed past everyone at ludicrous speed.
Most importantly, it was entertaining every time. Not only did I have to adapt my strategies to each event, but that freedom was available to me, not forced down my throat with fixed paths. Doom, Half-Life, Fear - they all suck at the freedom aspect. They have a detailed storyline that forces you to do follow their exact plan, kill specific bad guys, solve stupid switch puzzles... Crysis has none of that. You're a super-soldier, you do super-soldier missions like recovering intel and disabling enemy forces.
It had its flaws, but overall, for a game company that's only made two games so far, both have been pretty freakin' awesome. Could they benefit from the genius designers at Valve ? Sure. But then again so could Sierra, and id, and even Bungie.
I wouldn't stick this in a server cage, but I most certainly would stick it in a small device or home-automation project where a full-sized computer is either not practical, or not feasible.
This kit is a very cheap, extensible platform that one can build upon. I could see these being used as front-ends for other PIC devices.
For me, it's because I have two different-sized displays. Twinview and Xinerama both led to general weirdness and curiously sluggish performance with Compiz. Having them as separate X servers, they both run at full speed.
I do think it's a problem with the NVidia drivers, but my current setup works fine for me - the lack of draggability between the two displays is no showstopper, as I mostly run full screen apps on one, and my regular desktop on the other.
Perhaps that once worked in the past, but that is no longer true. I even tried installing a different version in a separate directory, I still couldn't run two Firefox processes.
Frankly, I don't know why they even have such restrictions, it's a royal PITA. I often get a little popup saying "Firefox is running but not responding, go to hell!"... apparently it's too hard to ignore the stuck process and launch another.
They get even more pissed off when you tell them your cheap Dell LCD uses the same guts as their Apple LCD that costs twice as much, and never goes on special.
The problem is that Apple LCDs used to be the hotness. They cost an arm and a leg, but they looked better than the competition, in part due to better backlighting yielding more vivid colors. Eight years ago, when someone bought an Apple Cinema Display, it came with bragging rights. That is no longer true in 2008.
If you don't mind having iPhones thrown at your face, feel free to tell your favorite Mac freak that Mac motherboards are made by Foxconn, which also makes Dell motherboards, and it generally regarded as one of the cheapest, junkiest brands in the industry.
IMO, subjective value flew out the window the moment real competition moved into the neighborhood.
I realize people want something that gets the job done, but these days just about any new PC is more than capable of doing most any job a normal user can throw at it. If the $1500 Macbook is made of the same cheap Flextronics-made junk as the $500 Dell, suddenly the Macbook doesn't look like such a great machine anymore. The Mac OS is certainly a contributing factor to Apple's success, but few people work with the operating system, they work with the 3rd party apps like Photoshop and Cubase and Office, apps which run just fine on the cheap Dell.
Perceived value only works when there is no obvious value indicator to trump it.
I'm obviously coming from the dedicated-server camp, and while I know nothing about your application, I am still inclined to think a handful of beefy servers could handle your traffic, for less money, and with less complexity. Hardware has gotten so cheap, any caffeinated twit can build an 8-way Xeon rig under $2k, then all you need is a big fat pipe.
I remember running the numbers for EC2 a while back, and I was quite puzzled as to who would want such an expensive and limited service, when hosting providers are chopping prices all over the place in fierce competition. You can't google "cheap web servers" without tripping over a pallet of $29 single-core deals, and a preconfigured quad can be found under $200. A freakin' quad! That can push out over 9000 splogs:)
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IMO the biggest difference between Pandora and PSP is its open source nature, and the receptive attitude OpenPandora has shown towards homebrew development.
Well yes, because the only thing the Pandora platform has is homebrew. It's not backed by Sony, Nintendo nor Microsoft - those are your big 3 game distributors right there.
You won't be able to walk into GameStop and score a bunch of Pandora carts from the pre-owned section. You won't see TV spots about the Pandora. You'll get a 2-minute comment from Adam Sessler on X-Play about the Pandora, and then it will never be mentioned again. It's going to be at least as obscure as the GP2X.
Now I'm not saying the Pandora is a bad idea... I really like the concept, the idea of an open platform with very respectable specs, but you just can't compare something like this to any of the commercial handhelds, because the thing that sells consoles isn't the hardware, it's the software.
In that case, Blizzard should sue all the korean farming groups that are essentially human bots. They add nothing to the game, strip-mine the resources thus inconveniencing legitimate players, and they enable the aforementioned high-level morons who have monster gear yet can't play worth a damn.
To me, there is absolutely no difference between those farmers and MMOGlider. To bash only one of them is hypocritical.
It's not so much that it plays better than a human, but it is certainly more persistant. After killing the same mob over and over for 16 hours to loot rare drops, even a motivated korean farmer will start hating the grind.
MMOGlider, as far as I can tell, simply acted as a virtual player. It didn't "cheat" or use anything not exposed in the interface. It didn't play any differently from the thousands of wage-slaves in organized farming groups.
You could even say MMOGlider is a natural response to the ridiculous amount of boring boring grinding designed into the game. It really is excessive at times, and is used as a substitute for more intellectual balancing mechanics.
Those hypocrisies come from the same camps that demonize homosexuality and free thought. Go figure!
kill me instantly and without cause or warning
Have you even played the game ? Yes, there are some areas that are literally off-limits, because they go outside the boundaries of the map. It's not a free-roaming world, but you're quite free within the bubble they give you, and it's a big enough bubble for an FPS, way bigger than any other FPS I've ever played.
For the record, I have climbed mountains in the game... it required a bit of patience, finding reachable ledges and whatnot, but I did manage to skip entire zones that way. The same was true of its predecessor Far Cry. Sure, they've placed convenient vehicles and weapons along the regular paths, but if you skip them, you can still monkey your way to the dust-off site.
Playing as a North Korean could be interesting, I'll admit, but it's only pertinent in the first few missions anyway. Once you reach that midpoint, it's all humans vs aliens. You want your nanosuit to speak Korean, basically ?
Facts:
1. RealDVD is an app that breaks the CSS "protection" on DVD movies, rips it to your PC, and wraps the resultant mess in DRM of its own.
2. They're suing the film industry to legitimize the RealDVD application.
So the supposed criminal is suing the predicted plaintiff... What kind of law suit is that ? Pardon my ignorance, but I live in a non-trigger-happy country where lawyers are not kept as house pets, and certainly not fed table food.
If I go steal a car off the lot, should I sue the dealership to assert my dog-given-right to steal cars ?
RealNetworks might as well mail a blank cheque to the MPAA. This is not helping anyone we care about. It's one asshole vs another.
You're right... Both have socialized health care, I can't even tell them apart!
If you lose $20 or $40 while spending an evening socializing and having a few drinks, I'd call that entertainment. How is it any worse than blowing $60 on a video game, or going to the movies ?
Modern, urban entertainment typically costs money. Playing a game of cards with chatty/goofy or clever people can be a great way to kill a few hours. Personally, I don't gamble anything I'm not 100% comfortable losing. I literally walk into the game assuming I'm going to lose. If I win, well my buddy and me will go for dinner/shopping after the game... and if I lose, we'll probably have dinner anyway... whatever!
Most of the people who "play to win", probably shouldn't be playing in the first place. They don't have the right attitude, and they can't afford to lose what they're risking. The moment you start seeing it as work, instead of a game, is the moment you stop having fun.
I'll vouch for #1, but the same could be said of any pastime. I'm not so fond of pissing my money away in casinos, though I do indulge in the occasional poker game with a handful of friends. I never win, but twenty bucks won't kill me.
Meanwhile, I spend on average a couple hundred bucks every month at the pub. To some people, that's every bit as demonic as gambling. To me, it's just a different form of entertainment - networking with a bunch of art-school flunkies never hurt anyone. It's way cheaper than a coke habit and just as mind-boggling :)
Amen! That's why I spend all my money on hookers and booze!
Yet again the summary misleads, but it's no secret the Russian authorities don't have the resources to investigate anything of importance, and that problem leads to the iconic corruption that brings it full-circle.'
In such a scenario, the first thing the PHB would ask of IT is to require the company-endorsed security software to be used, and deny connections from "unsecured" hosts.
Which means if you're a Linux guru, or maybe you just don't want to bog your PC down with the joke that is Symantec Antivirus, then you're blocked off.
Don't be surprised, there are companies that specialize in such idiotic solutions. Remember RSA's SecurID ? What the hell did that accomplish, besides making a small heap of cash for the vendor ?
So that person's claim to fame was using ISOBuster to save an "optimized" ISO ?
Wow.
No really, I'm impressed. I mean, it took some serious cojones to actually click that checkbox.
Keep in mind UK prices are atrocious on any imports, compared to the USA.
For $500 you can buy a cheap full-size Dell with a lot more horsepower than the Aspire One or any other so-called netbook. That's the problem.
Everyone still thinks portable means expensive, but the fact is today's laptops are mostly empty shells with cut-out motherboards. If we could do without I/O connectors on one of the sides, they could probably cut the board down to half the size of the chassis! There's no extra cost in "miniaturizing" the notebook, because the standard-sized guts are already small enough to make into EEE's and Aspire One's.
Once the netbooks are priced similarly to a used notebook of similar performance, that's when they will take off. For me, that's $200 or less. It's a laptop, I don't need it to do much... today's laptops are mostly used as thin clients - VNC, RDP, SSH, Citrix and web apps. That's not worth $500 to me.
The fallacy in this argument is that a million Japanese bot-hosts with a million 1Gbps uplinks will not translate to a Petabyte per second of spam, because the bottleneck at the edge of the network remains the same. If anything, it will make such botnets far more noticeable, since high-speed sustained traffic will stand out compared to bursty user activity.
Slow down, you're just jealous.
This is EXACTLY what civilized nations should be doing. Gigabit fiber is about as fast as you can go on such a wide-scale before cost shoots to infinity.
They won't have 1Gbps to the rest of the world, but as a local interconnect, it's excellent. The main pipe leading out of Japan will still be the same size, and you'll get the same volume of Viagra spam as always. Actually most of that garbage comes from China, Malaysia and Brazil - Japan actually does have a functional legal system that deters such bastards.
If everyone in the USA could get Gigabit to the home, even if it only translated to 1mbit per user to the outside world, holy crap can you even begin to imagine the uses for that sort of bandwidth ? How about hi-def Youtube ? How about IPTV for the masses ? How about not having to wrestle with QOS tweaks to get goddamned VoIP working properly ?
As long as same-network traffic is unmetered, this kind of deployment can lead to huge cultural changes.
Whoever modded this insightful needs to go back to 4chan.
Crysis, for those of us who actually have "Enthusiast" systems, was actually entertaining. The suit-power gimmick works really well to give you diverse playing styles. I remember playing it several different ways, the first time like a normal FPS, shooting and taking cover. The second time I played a stealth game, using strength-boosted jumps to reach high sniping spots. The third time, I just left it on speed mode and dashed past everyone at ludicrous speed.
Most importantly, it was entertaining every time. Not only did I have to adapt my strategies to each event, but that freedom was available to me, not forced down my throat with fixed paths. Doom, Half-Life, Fear - they all suck at the freedom aspect. They have a detailed storyline that forces you to do follow their exact plan, kill specific bad guys, solve stupid switch puzzles... Crysis has none of that. You're a super-soldier, you do super-soldier missions like recovering intel and disabling enemy forces.
It had its flaws, but overall, for a game company that's only made two games so far, both have been pretty freakin' awesome. Could they benefit from the genius designers at Valve ? Sure. But then again so could Sierra, and id, and even Bungie.
I wouldn't stick this in a server cage, but I most certainly would stick it in a small device or home-automation project where a full-sized computer is either not practical, or not feasible.
This kit is a very cheap, extensible platform that one can build upon. I could see these being used as front-ends for other PIC devices.
It's not Metrosexual, it's a bunch of hairy dudes that want to feel pretty.
I must say, I'm quite impressed. I was expecting far worse... thanks for taking the time :)
For me, it's because I have two different-sized displays. Twinview and Xinerama both led to general weirdness and curiously sluggish performance with Compiz. Having them as separate X servers, they both run at full speed.
I do think it's a problem with the NVidia drivers, but my current setup works fine for me - the lack of draggability between the two displays is no showstopper, as I mostly run full screen apps on one, and my regular desktop on the other.
Perhaps that once worked in the past, but that is no longer true. I even tried installing a different version in a separate directory, I still couldn't run two Firefox processes.
Frankly, I don't know why they even have such restrictions, it's a royal PITA. I often get a little popup saying "Firefox is running but not responding, go to hell!"... apparently it's too hard to ignore the stuck process and launch another.
They get even more pissed off when you tell them your cheap Dell LCD uses the same guts as their Apple LCD that costs twice as much, and never goes on special.
The problem is that Apple LCDs used to be the hotness. They cost an arm and a leg, but they looked better than the competition, in part due to better backlighting yielding more vivid colors. Eight years ago, when someone bought an Apple Cinema Display, it came with bragging rights. That is no longer true in 2008.
If you don't mind having iPhones thrown at your face, feel free to tell your favorite Mac freak that Mac motherboards are made by Foxconn, which also makes Dell motherboards, and it generally regarded as one of the cheapest, junkiest brands in the industry.
IMO, subjective value flew out the window the moment real competition moved into the neighborhood.
I realize people want something that gets the job done, but these days just about any new PC is more than capable of doing most any job a normal user can throw at it. If the $1500 Macbook is made of the same cheap Flextronics-made junk as the $500 Dell, suddenly the Macbook doesn't look like such a great machine anymore. The Mac OS is certainly a contributing factor to Apple's success, but few people work with the operating system, they work with the 3rd party apps like Photoshop and Cubase and Office, apps which run just fine on the cheap Dell.
Perceived value only works when there is no obvious value indicator to trump it.
I'm obviously coming from the dedicated-server camp, and while I know nothing about your application, I am still inclined to think a handful of beefy servers could handle your traffic, for less money, and with less complexity. Hardware has gotten so cheap, any caffeinated twit can build an 8-way Xeon rig under $2k, then all you need is a big fat pipe.
I remember running the numbers for EC2 a while back, and I was quite puzzled as to who would want such an expensive and limited service, when hosting providers are chopping prices all over the place in fierce competition. You can't google "cheap web servers" without tripping over a pallet of $29 single-core deals, and a preconfigured quad can be found under $200. A freakin' quad! That can push out over 9000 splogs :)