The quote listed in the summary really has little to do with the content of the actual article. (Indeed, the first page has little to do with the rest of the article.) While the first page does seem to predict the end of the GBA, the rest of article is 5 pages of reviews/previews/hopes for upcoming GBA games. The final paragraph of the article reads: The Game Boy line is reaching the end of its road, at least for this generation. But between the Micro, the DS' backwards-compatibility and a slow trickle of quality software, there should be enough kick left in the system to keep the name alive until Nintendo chooses to unveil the Game Boy's true successor.
Clearly they are not predicting the demise of the GBA, rather the eventual end of that particular piece of hardware but the continuing support of the codebase.
Every slashdot book review has the book linked with an affiliate link, with the same source id. Presumably that's one method slashdot uses to generate income. (that, and ad-supported dupes.)
the author rightly points out that the benchmark may not be accurately testing the right things. he lists different criteria for different types of games, using FPSs and racing games as the extreme examples. However, he doesn't really explain why the hair's breadth of a difference observed between nVidia and ATI in the benchmark translates to the very dramatic differences in real world performance and more importantly, he never really fully addresses the issue of different games (as the only directX game examined was HL2). If you're going to mention racing games and GTA, why not test GTA? A much more convincing article would have looked at several games spanning the genres (and graphical demands).
I'm a little surprised that no one has mentioned SimEarth in any of the Spore discussions. Spore really is the grandchild of Wil's earlier efforts in this arena. SimEarth basically was an evolution sim, however you had less direct control over the species but lots of control over the environment. Plate techtonics, ocean currents, etc. could all be adjusted to provide the proper environment for whatever little slime you wanted to cultivate through to sentience. And it's clear that Wil's dream hasn't changed much. Just like in Spore, the obvious goal of SimEarth was to evolve dinosaurs with guns that would eventually rocketship off the planet.
As a sim it was interesting, but you never really felt connected or that you had much control over anything, so it got old fast (at least for me). Spore looks amazing. He's clearly taken all that has happened in computer games over the past 15 years and applied them to his original SimEarth concept and made what looks like the single most amazing sandbox ever...
Pumping warm water back into the ocean is not going to make that much of a difference on the oceans.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. In Huntington Beach, California, for the past several years, the beaches have had to be closed during the summer due to bacterial pollution. The obvious cause was the wastewater treatment plant dumping partially treated sewage 7 miles off shore, and that was somehow coming back onshore. Models, however, demonstrated that this was very unlikely because of water column stratification based on temperature (colder water, more dense, can't come up).
One factor not included in the models was an electrical generator station on the beach that drew in ocean water for cooling. It would discharge the warm water back to the ocean. However, it discharged the warm water at depth. Warm water, being less dense, rose to the surface, creating a nice thermal pump that would carry with it the colder water at that depth, some of which was certainly co-mingled with the discharged sewage. (this wasn't the entire reason for the beach pollution, but certainly was a contributing cause.)
So, yes, discharging warm water back into the ocean can have unintended effects.
The game that got all the Blizz fanboys in a frenzy when it was announced to be console only, something like 3 years ago. Remember this outstanding press release: in order to meet our goals and deliver the outstanding gameplay experience our customers have come to expect from Blizzard products, we have decided to extend our StarCraft: Ghost development schedule through the end of 2003. The Ghost development team however, remains hard at work, and will deliver the tactical-action console game in 2004.
Still not out, still projected to be for the GC, PS2 and Xbox; despite having a release date in 2006 (when all the new systems will be out). Backward compatibility saves the day...
Anyone know what's going on with Blizzard these days? Blizz North lost most (all?) of their senior developers and has been silent for years. the Arena.net people are already releasing their first game, so I can only assume that Blizz North has been shuttered? The RTS team at the Irvine office hasn't announced anything since finishing WC3X. Really, all that Blizz has going now is WoW (since Ghost technically wasn't under their direct control until recently).
I've been using thunderbird since 0.7 or so, and I'm not entirely in love with it's spam filtering. I've had it turned on since the feature was introduced, so it's had a long time to learn what is spam (95% of my email) and what's not (the other 5%). My most recent download of my earthlink email (which i've just about given up on), had about 60 messages, only 1 of which wasn't spam. But of the 59 spam, 17 weren't marked as spam (despite me junking very similar emails a few days earlier). Perhaps the spam database it's been compiling has been corrupted and I need to start over. I don't know.
a friend of mine did this as well. His reasoning was that he wanted to experience a (hopefully) decent version of the story prior to the movie, so that he could go into the movie with a sense of whether it was a crap story or just that Lucas was a crap director with some crappy actors. I think its a case of Lucas just setting the bar so low on the first two prequels, that some fans want to raise it up, and if they find it in a novelization, so be it...
You can install the games to their profile yourself so that they can only play games you allow them to play.
I was gonna post something similar. Until I realized that those parent's who aren't aware which games their children are playing or what those games are rated, probably are the same parents who haven't a clue about profiles.
besides, children are quite clued in, and chances are they'll figure out how to bypass this fairly easily. (i have a friend who's 2 year old figured out how to open the cd drive, put in the disc, and play his favorite game; some Mac educational thing. If he knew that at 2, imagine what he could do at 10...)
one can make similar arguments about oil deposits. in fact, for years, people have been claiming that we'll run out of oil in 20 years, and every 20 years, we still have oil to burn. why? because technology advances. oil reserves that were not economical or feasible to pump from 20 years ago are now very viable. we've got these nifty steam injection techniques that can extract from oil sands which have oil concentrations that are far below what previously would have been considered justification for even installing a well.
I'm sure the same could apply to uranium. What isn't viable today to process, could well be quite viable in 20 years if we approached the problem head on.
Every time I hear this game mentioned (the original actually), I can't help but think this would be a perfect Gamecube title. "Stick everything in your big ball o' crap" fits beautifully next to "town full of animals that trade shirts" and "diminutive astronaut throwing sprouts at pill bugs". I wish Nintendo would be a bit more proactive when it comes to nudging developers to release games for their system.
To charge me 40 dollars + tax just to read the paper once, is IMO just plain greedier than Boss Hog ever thought on being.
no one's charging you anything. Just because the online version from the publisher's website costs, doesn't mean that you can't get access to the article for free. Just go to any decent college library and read it off the shelf. You can even spend 5 cents per page and take a copy home with you for less than a dollar. journals have to finance their publication somehow, and selling subscriptions is the way they do it (advertising leads to the realm of potential conflict of interest).
Re:IMHO DS is far better and the review is compari
on
PSP And DS Duke It Out
·
· Score: 1
Neverwhere was a BBC miniseries before the book was written. IIRC, Gaiman wrote the miniseries, all sorts of neat stuff had to be cut, so he kinda wrote the book to put back in all his ideas. It's available at amazon, i blieve. or manybe A&E (I think that's why I'm on their mailing list...)
The flipside of this, when you create table in Writer and as the first character in one of the cells, you enter "=" it will immediately assume you're entering a formula and causes all sorts of headaches. The only way I've found to get around this is to actually paste an equal sign in.
OO 1.97 routinely mangles formulas entered in Writer. I'm trying to type up notes for my students. Maybe 7-10 page documents with a few formulas per page. Guaranteed when I reload the complete document at a later point, equations will have been modified beyond recognition. Half the time its copied earlier formulas in place of later formulas. Other half, it's odd bits of half formulas. Usually they involve really odd size changes as well (original formula's frame size with new formula either stretched of crammed in). That's the only frustrating aspect I've come across.
i doubt this is really writer's block, but rather an attempt to help an organization he genuinely likes to help. He's been involved with a number of auctions with proceeds going to CBLDF.
Certainly he can come up with a name for a boat; just about every character in his writing has an interesting name. This is likely just a case of "I'm going through draft 0 of the story and realized I still have USS (insert name here) in the text and need to correct that. Let's try something fun and unusual and worthwhile for one of my fav organizations."
why? so that people are force to buy either an nintendo adapter that will be expensive and impossible to find or supply their own that may or may not work (see tivo and it's wonderful wireless network connection mess for a perfect example of the latter).
Nintendo is far better off including it built-in to the Revolution. Developers will then know that all users have wireless capabilities and can design games accordingly. There's now an incentive to create network games, rather than the unknown "we'll wait until enough people are online before we work on a game" which always clashes with "i'm not buying an online adapter if there's no games available yet." compare how many games came out that utilized the PS2's external hard drive add-on vs. how many games utilized the XBOX's internal hard drive?
but don't people do stupid shit they see in movies too?
yes they do. Found that trying to track down the story of the kids lying in the road after seeing it in a movie. That's a scene from The Program. And it lead to a death and a serious injury from idiots who got run over. I'm sure one could come up with examples of people doing incredibly stupid things under the influence of just about any piece of media. There must have been Shakespeare inspired killers at some point.
well, sure, that's good and all, except this is the opposite case. Here, MS is being sued by Eolas and the University of California system for violations of a patent that might be invalid because of prior art. if we're going to knee-jerk, we might as well argue the correct direction and fine Eolas / UC for abusing the patent and legal system.
"The company initially denied that the break-in compromised consumers outside of California"
Did they actually deny that no one outside of California was compromised, or was it just that they weren't legally obligated to inform anyone outside of the state? From Monday's story, I got the distinct impression that it was the latter (i.e., no legal obligation), rather than outright deception. Regardless, it's still a really crappy thing to have happened.
(on a personal note, given that the break-in happened months ago, and i just got my yearly free credit reports from the 3 agencies and didn't see anything suspicious, I guess I'm a lucky SoCalifornian...)
SC Ghost had the best fanboy reaction when it was announced. All these idiots complaining that blizzard was neglecting them and their PC heritage, forcing them to buy a console, how it was going to have a crappy control setup, etc. It was rather laughable. And that was what, 2-3 years ago? Now, one can buy a new gamecube for about the same price as HL2 silver edition, or just about $10 more than SCGhost when it is finally released...
UC Irvine had a number of scandals several years back (late 90s - 2000 ish) with their Med School and cadaver program. Here's an article I quickly found that highlights some of the problems. Parts getting lost (i.e., they don't know who belonged to who), parts being sold to med students. Of course, this scandal broke at about the same time that UC Irvine was going through their fertility clinic scandal, where eggs/embryos were taken from women without their consent. Those were good times to be a student.
is what the school gets in return. This article points out that the school got some computer equipment donated to them. However, according to the version of this story at MSNBC: "InCom has paid the school several thousand dollars for agreeing to the experiment, and has promised a royalty from each sale if the system takes off, said the company's co-founder, Michael Dobson, who works as a technology specialist in the town's high school. Brittan's technology aide also works part-time for InCom."
Seems more like this is less of a "it's for the safety of the kids" and more of a "let's make money by tagging our kids like cattle."
RDS support in the US is spotty. My 99 Audi's factory stereo has it, and RDS signal broadcasting is mixed. Public radio tends to be very good about broadcasting it, while some stations broadcast it intermittently (maybe a particular dj, often it'll be several songs behind, sometime poor spelling), and still others never broadcast the signal.
I was a little dissapointed when my wife bought the ipod radio broadcaster thingy (iWhatchamacallit?), and it didn't have an RDS signal broadcasting the mp3 tag info. Seems that would have been perfect feature to include.
Slashdot Mirror
The quote listed in the summary really has little to do with the content of the actual article. (Indeed, the first page has little to do with the rest of the article.) While the first page does seem to predict the end of the GBA, the rest of article is 5 pages of reviews/previews/hopes for upcoming GBA games. The final paragraph of the article reads: The Game Boy line is reaching the end of its road, at least for this generation. But between the Micro, the DS' backwards-compatibility and a slow trickle of quality software, there should be enough kick left in the system to keep the name alive until Nintendo chooses to unveil the Game Boy's true successor.
Clearly they are not predicting the demise of the GBA, rather the eventual end of that particular piece of hardware but the continuing support of the codebase.
Every slashdot book review has the book linked with an affiliate link, with the same source id. Presumably that's one method slashdot uses to generate income. (that, and ad-supported dupes.)
the author rightly points out that the benchmark may not be accurately testing the right things. he lists different criteria for different types of games, using FPSs and racing games as the extreme examples. However, he doesn't really explain why the hair's breadth of a difference observed between nVidia and ATI in the benchmark translates to the very dramatic differences in real world performance and more importantly, he never really fully addresses the issue of different games (as the only directX game examined was HL2). If you're going to mention racing games and GTA, why not test GTA? A much more convincing article would have looked at several games spanning the genres (and graphical demands).
I'm a little surprised that no one has mentioned SimEarth in any of the Spore discussions. Spore really is the grandchild of Wil's earlier efforts in this arena. SimEarth basically was an evolution sim, however you had less direct control over the species but lots of control over the environment. Plate techtonics, ocean currents, etc. could all be adjusted to provide the proper environment for whatever little slime you wanted to cultivate through to sentience. And it's clear that Wil's dream hasn't changed much. Just like in Spore, the obvious goal of SimEarth was to evolve dinosaurs with guns that would eventually rocketship off the planet.
As a sim it was interesting, but you never really felt connected or that you had much control over anything, so it got old fast (at least for me). Spore looks amazing. He's clearly taken all that has happened in computer games over the past 15 years and applied them to his original SimEarth concept and made what looks like the single most amazing sandbox ever...
Pumping warm water back into the ocean is not going to make that much of a difference on the oceans.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. In Huntington Beach, California, for the past several years, the beaches have had to be closed during the summer due to bacterial pollution. The obvious cause was the wastewater treatment plant dumping partially treated sewage 7 miles off shore, and that was somehow coming back onshore. Models, however, demonstrated that this was very unlikely because of water column stratification based on temperature (colder water, more dense, can't come up).
One factor not included in the models was an electrical generator station on the beach that drew in ocean water for cooling. It would discharge the warm water back to the ocean. However, it discharged the warm water at depth. Warm water, being less dense, rose to the surface, creating a nice thermal pump that would carry with it the colder water at that depth, some of which was certainly co-mingled with the discharged sewage. (this wasn't the entire reason for the beach pollution, but certainly was a contributing cause.)
So, yes, discharging warm water back into the ocean can have unintended effects.
The game that got all the Blizz fanboys in a frenzy when it was announced to be console only, something like 3 years ago. Remember this outstanding press release: in order to meet our goals and deliver the outstanding gameplay experience our customers have come to expect from Blizzard products, we have decided to extend our StarCraft: Ghost development schedule through the end of 2003. The Ghost development team however, remains hard at work, and will deliver the tactical-action console game in 2004.
Still not out, still projected to be for the GC, PS2 and Xbox; despite having a release date in 2006 (when all the new systems will be out). Backward compatibility saves the day...
Anyone know what's going on with Blizzard these days? Blizz North lost most (all?) of their senior developers and has been silent for years. the Arena.net people are already releasing their first game, so I can only assume that Blizz North has been shuttered? The RTS team at the Irvine office hasn't announced anything since finishing WC3X. Really, all that Blizz has going now is WoW (since Ghost technically wasn't under their direct control until recently).
I've been using thunderbird since 0.7 or so, and I'm not entirely in love with it's spam filtering. I've had it turned on since the feature was introduced, so it's had a long time to learn what is spam (95% of my email) and what's not (the other 5%). My most recent download of my earthlink email (which i've just about given up on), had about 60 messages, only 1 of which wasn't spam. But of the 59 spam, 17 weren't marked as spam (despite me junking very similar emails a few days earlier). Perhaps the spam database it's been compiling has been corrupted and I need to start over. I don't know.
a friend of mine did this as well. His reasoning was that he wanted to experience a (hopefully) decent version of the story prior to the movie, so that he could go into the movie with a sense of whether it was a crap story or just that Lucas was a crap director with some crappy actors. I think its a case of Lucas just setting the bar so low on the first two prequels, that some fans want to raise it up, and if they find it in a novelization, so be it...
You can install the games to their profile yourself so that they can only play games you allow them to play.
I was gonna post something similar. Until I realized that those parent's who aren't aware which games their children are playing or what those games are rated, probably are the same parents who haven't a clue about profiles.
besides, children are quite clued in, and chances are they'll figure out how to bypass this fairly easily. (i have a friend who's 2 year old figured out how to open the cd drive, put in the disc, and play his favorite game; some Mac educational thing. If he knew that at 2, imagine what he could do at 10...)
*off to the USPTO
don't the flintstones have prior art on that one?
one can make similar arguments about oil deposits. in fact, for years, people have been claiming that we'll run out of oil in 20 years, and every 20 years, we still have oil to burn. why? because technology advances. oil reserves that were not economical or feasible to pump from 20 years ago are now very viable. we've got these nifty steam injection techniques that can extract from oil sands which have oil concentrations that are far below what previously would have been considered justification for even installing a well.
I'm sure the same could apply to uranium. What isn't viable today to process, could well be quite viable in 20 years if we approached the problem head on.
Every time I hear this game mentioned (the original actually), I can't help but think this would be a perfect Gamecube title. "Stick everything in your big ball o' crap" fits beautifully next to "town full of animals that trade shirts" and "diminutive astronaut throwing sprouts at pill bugs". I wish Nintendo would be a bit more proactive when it comes to nudging developers to release games for their system.
To charge me 40 dollars + tax just to read the paper once, is IMO just plain greedier than Boss Hog ever thought on being.
no one's charging you anything. Just because the online version from the publisher's website costs, doesn't mean that you can't get access to the article for free. Just go to any decent college library and read it off the shelf. You can even spend 5 cents per page and take a copy home with you for less than a dollar. journals have to finance their publication somehow, and selling subscriptions is the way they do it (advertising leads to the realm of potential conflict of interest).
Neverwhere was a BBC miniseries before the book was written. IIRC, Gaiman wrote the miniseries, all sorts of neat stuff had to be cut, so he kinda wrote the book to put back in all his ideas. It's available at amazon, i blieve. or manybe A&E (I think that's why I'm on their mailing list...)
The flipside of this, when you create table in Writer and as the first character in one of the cells, you enter "=" it will immediately assume you're entering a formula and causes all sorts of headaches. The only way I've found to get around this is to actually paste an equal sign in.
OO 1.97 routinely mangles formulas entered in Writer. I'm trying to type up notes for my students. Maybe 7-10 page documents with a few formulas per page. Guaranteed when I reload the complete document at a later point, equations will have been modified beyond recognition. Half the time its copied earlier formulas in place of later formulas. Other half, it's odd bits of half formulas. Usually they involve really odd size changes as well (original formula's frame size with new formula either stretched of crammed in). That's the only frustrating aspect I've come across.
i doubt this is really writer's block, but rather an attempt to help an organization he genuinely likes to help. He's been involved with a number of auctions with proceeds going to CBLDF.
Certainly he can come up with a name for a boat; just about every character in his writing has an interesting name. This is likely just a case of "I'm going through draft 0 of the story and realized I still have USS (insert name here) in the text and need to correct that. Let's try something fun and unusual and worthwhile for one of my fav organizations."
why? so that people are force to buy either an nintendo adapter that will be expensive and impossible to find or supply their own that may or may not work (see tivo and it's wonderful wireless network connection mess for a perfect example of the latter).
Nintendo is far better off including it built-in to the Revolution. Developers will then know that all users have wireless capabilities and can design games accordingly. There's now an incentive to create network games, rather than the unknown "we'll wait until enough people are online before we work on a game" which always clashes with "i'm not buying an online adapter if there's no games available yet." compare how many games came out that utilized the PS2's external hard drive add-on vs. how many games utilized the XBOX's internal hard drive?
but don't people do stupid shit they see in movies too?
yes they do. Found that trying to track down the story of the kids lying in the road after seeing it in a movie. That's a scene from The Program. And it lead to a death and a serious injury from idiots who got run over. I'm sure one could come up with examples of people doing incredibly stupid things under the influence of just about any piece of media. There must have been Shakespeare inspired killers at some point.
well, sure, that's good and all, except this is the opposite case. Here, MS is being sued by Eolas and the University of California system for violations of a patent that might be invalid because of prior art. if we're going to knee-jerk, we might as well argue the correct direction and fine Eolas / UC for abusing the patent and legal system.
"The company initially denied that the break-in compromised consumers outside of California"
Did they actually deny that no one outside of California was compromised, or was it just that they weren't legally obligated to inform anyone outside of the state? From Monday's story, I got the distinct impression that it was the latter (i.e., no legal obligation), rather than outright deception. Regardless, it's still a really crappy thing to have happened.
(on a personal note, given that the break-in happened months ago, and i just got my yearly free credit reports from the 3 agencies and didn't see anything suspicious, I guess I'm a lucky SoCalifornian...)
SC Ghost had the best fanboy reaction when it was announced. All these idiots complaining that blizzard was neglecting them and their PC heritage, forcing them to buy a console, how it was going to have a crappy control setup, etc. It was rather laughable. And that was what, 2-3 years ago? Now, one can buy a new gamecube for about the same price as HL2 silver edition, or just about $10 more than SCGhost when it is finally released...
UC Irvine had a number of scandals several years back (late 90s - 2000 ish) with their Med School and cadaver program. Here's an article I quickly found that highlights some of the problems. Parts getting lost (i.e., they don't know who belonged to who), parts being sold to med students. Of course, this scandal broke at about the same time that UC Irvine was going through their fertility clinic scandal, where eggs/embryos were taken from women without their consent. Those were good times to be a student.
is what the school gets in return. This article points out that the school got some computer equipment donated to them. However, according to the version of this story at MSNBC:
"InCom has paid the school several thousand dollars for agreeing to the experiment, and has promised a royalty from each sale if the system takes off, said the company's co-founder, Michael Dobson, who works as a technology specialist in the town's high school. Brittan's technology aide also works part-time for InCom."
Seems more like this is less of a "it's for the safety of the kids" and more of a "let's make money by tagging our kids like cattle."
RDS support in the US is spotty. My 99 Audi's factory stereo has it, and RDS signal broadcasting is mixed. Public radio tends to be very good about broadcasting it, while some stations broadcast it intermittently (maybe a particular dj, often it'll be several songs behind, sometime poor spelling), and still others never broadcast the signal.
I was a little dissapointed when my wife bought the ipod radio broadcaster thingy (iWhatchamacallit?), and it didn't have an RDS signal broadcasting the mp3 tag info. Seems that would have been perfect feature to include.