480p on my 32" Sharp Aquos LCD looks stunning. Even DirecTV standard resolution looks better than it did on my old 22" CRT.
Some HDTVs simply do a poor job upconverting lower resolutions. Unfortunately for you, it sounds like your Sony is one of them.
I'd hazard a guess that a 32" HDTV is likely to be way more commonplace in average households than the 50"+ behemoths. So I suspect 480p is adequate for a game console.
I have a GameCube, I did play Eternal Darkness, and one game is not enough. There are a handful of other games on the GameCube I want to play: Beyond Good and Evil, Metroid, er...
Burnout 2 was good, but the newer games in the series aren't available for GameCube. Wind Waker was too similar to Ocarina Of Time, dragged on a bit, and ultimately a bit saccharine. I was left feeling like I'd eaten a whole box of chocolates.
I freakin' hate Mario and Pokemon, and I don't play sports games. So that leaves me with... er...
So I've gone back to the PS2, where there's Jak 3, Sly 3, Ratchet and Clank, Burnout 3, Katamari Damacy, MGS:3, Ace Combat 5,...
I'm seriously running short of games I want to play on the cube. I definitely won't buy a Revolution unless I see that Nintendo have turned the situation around and gone for more diversity of games.
It's a shame, because the cube is a much nicer piece of hardware. But hardware isn't enough.
It has System V intellectual property in it, meaning it's legitimately at risk from SCO.
Its license isn't GPL-compatible.
There's no commercial support available for it.
I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume the bugginess has improved drastically since Solaris 2.6 days. Still, it doesn't seem compelling to me.
That sounds hip and jaded, but it also belies a disturbing lack of faith in society. Next you'll declare that all employees care about, by definition, is their paycheck -- therefore they don't care if their job consists of beating children with baseball bats, as long as it pays the bills.
I don't see any shortage of people working for Microsoft, BAT, BAe Systems, and so on.
You won't find it written anywhere but Microsoft gurantees that you're machine will not crash (BSOD) if you use certified drivers and MSI installed software.
So on the one hand, we have you claiming that there's a secret unwritten guarantee that Windows won't crash if you use all-certified drivers.
And on the other hand, we have the Windows XP EULA, which explicitly says in writing that:
Any supplements or updates to the Software, including without limitation, any (if any) service packs or hot fixes provided to you after the expiration of the ninety day Limited Warranty period are not covered by any warranty or condition, express, implied or statutory.
So, shall I believe you that Microsoft guarantees certified drivers won't crash? Or shall I believe the written license that tells me installed drivers, certified or not, are never covered by any kind of warranty?
If TFA's speculation about the reasons for the switching are correct, then it's very bad news for Linux on the desktop
Of course, it doesn't have to be. If the Linux community threw their weight behind OpenStep instead of wasting it on GNOME, we could end up in a world where most Mac applications could easily be ported to run on Linux as well.
Yes, "import" is a problem. It's such a PITA to identify the actual bits you need, that most code just imports huge chunks of the API.
Furthermore, "import" has no dependency handling. For instance, org.xml.sax.XMLReader is no use without org.xml.sax.helpers.XMLReaderFactory. Rather than have to manually hunt down the dependencies in the few functions they use, most programmers import org.xml.sax.*.
In C/C++/Objective-C, at least include files tend to include their dependencies.
Note to Yahoo!: Try "don't be evil"
on
Yahoo's Geek Statue
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
In April 2004, a Communist Party official told Chinese journalist Shi Tao how to report the upcoming 15th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre.
Shi Tao took notes at the meeting, wrote up what he had been told to write, and e-mailed a copy to a pro-democracy web site in New York.
Unfortunately, Shi Tao used Yahoo web mail to send his e-mail. When the Chinese government approached Yahoo and asked them to reveal the personal information of the person who had signed up for the account, they gladly did so.
Asked about this at a conference in China, Yahoo's Taiwanese co-founder Jerry Yang said:
"To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law."
Since then, people have pointed out that the journalist hadn't been convicted of any crime. A Chinese lawyer--as in, a lawyer who actually practices law in China--has said that Yahoo was under no legal obligation to reveal the journalist's name. It certainly seems that no legal action was taken against Yahoo to force them to rat out the guy.
It's a pity there's no Adolf Eichmann Award for Excellence in Only Following Orders, Jerry Yang would have a good chance of winning.
I was hoping for such great things from this game. I loved Ico, it's one of those games I haven't resold because it's such a work of art.
Unfortunately...I hate boss fights. Hate hate hate. They are the lamest, most overdone cliché in the video game world.
Give me exploration. Give me puzzles. Give me suspense, fear, foreboding, thought-provoking scenarios, convoluted plots, mysteries. Don't give me some humongous robot killing machine and tell me I have to hack at it repeatedly with a small pointy thing. Grr.
Somebody obviously loves boss fights, because it seems like games are heading that way. "Ratchet: Deadlocked" apparently dispenses with the beautiful and interesting environments that made that game series so great, in favor of non-stop arena combat and boss fights. I guess combat is cheaper than having to come up with a world that's complex enough to be interesting.
By taking away their right to send that advertisement with their own money you are restricting their free speech rights.
Web hosting isn't free either. Nobody's suggesting that I should be prohibited from posting political rants or printing them out and handing them out on street corners. What's being suggested is that people should be prohibited from paying me to do so.
Right now, the two big parties have a nice cosy system. They can buy all the coverage they like from the corporate media, and say what they like to an audience of millions. Third parties can't--even if they have the money, their ads are often refused.
If the law is changed so that the only way to get coverage is to say or do something that warrants proper news coverage, or to actually go out and do grassroots events, it will be very painful for the two big parties. They'll be put on the same basis as the third party candidates.
Here in Mexico City, governor wants to use polls for everything, so that the easily-manipulable people will vote in favor of whatever the government tells them. The same thing is done by Hugo Chavez. All decisions aren't taken by him, but by the uninformed / misinformed people.
That's nothing. Here in America decisions to go to war are taken by a small number of elected misinformed people.
And that's not the only problem with the GFDL. There's also the fact that it doesn't preserve the freedom to modify and redistribute which was the whole point of the GPL--authors can specify bits of documentation which you're not allowed to change.
I've been tempted to release documentation under the GFDL with protected sections saying that the GFDL is misguided and that Richard Stallman is an ass.
Then there are the problems with GPL that as far as I know nobody is interested in solving--like the fact that it's possible to take GPLed software and make it effectively proprietary, by locking it to proprietary hardware or data files.
For example, even though Linux is under the GPL, I can't change the software I was sold on my TiVo. It hasn't protected my rights at all.
1. End all fixed width field requirements. (Not so much a SQL misfeature as a database misfeature, but still...)
2. Implement standard data types for dates, currency, names, and so on. Give them some smarts, so you can read a date and have it return the actual correct value, not some string that could be formatted in any random way and has a missing time zone.
3. Make the grammar less fussy. Half the problem I have with writing SQL queries is that when I'm done, I have to mess with the pieces of the query until I get them in the right order that the system will accept them. Or even better...
4. Get rid of that stupid English-like syntax and give us a proper notation based on Scheme or Ruby or something.
5. Standardize the bits that aren't standardized yet but every real database needs, like referential integrity constraints.
If you want to crack TPM protection on OS X x86 for the glory, then it doesn't matter; if you want to avoid paying another two hundred bucks for an x86 Mac, it'll never be worth it [...]
Neither. I want OS X on Intel to be cracked because I want a goddamn tablet Mac, and Steve has a religious objection to releasing one.
Where does this idea come from that spending money is speech? There's no restriction on speech per se here. What's being restricted is the right to be a paid shill.
If Joe wants to post about how great Bush is, there's nothing in the law to stop him. It's only if he wants to earn money from saying how great Bush is that there's a problem, and it's the money part which is the cause of the restriction.
It's actually kinda like the iTunes DRM thing. A lot of people on Slashdot trash the iPod for having DRM, and ignore the fact that you are completely free to put unrestricted MP3s on it and never have any DRM restrictions imposed on you. The iPod does not restrict your use of music; it's buying from the iTunes music store that causes the restrictions to come into play.
I've got a network disk, it came with my PS2, which has the network adaptor built in. When I booted the disk to see what was on it, it offered to set up some kind of account for me, but since I've yet to see a game I want to play online there didn't seem to be much point.
I did use the network adaptor to download the latest updates for my Action Replay Max, but that's all I've used it for. I didn't need to use the network disk for that.
Basically, I only have the online capability because I had to buy a new PS2 and it came with everything. I wouldn't have bothered to buy it separately.
This is the kind of thing that has always pissed me off about consoles, they bundle the console and force a certain package on you.
They're just doing it because it's a good strategy, and it's a good strategy because dumbasses like you keep falling for it. So you ought to be pissed off at yourself.
I'm just not interested in gaming with a bunch of immature, bitch-happy teen and pre-teen strangers, and I unfortunately (or fortunately?) do not have a little community of online geek friends around me to play games with.
Yes! I've played two PS2 games that had online play, but I didn't bother to try it out for either of them--even though I have all the hardware and just need to run an Ethernet cable across to the router.
Hardly anyone seems to have managed to make online gaming which is actually a sociable cooperative experience, that doesn't cost ridiculous amounts for a few hours a month of gameplay. The game makers keep churning out games to appeal to the same 10% of the gaming audience who are online already, ignoring what might draw in the other 90%.
Huh. I run all my software, even my linux box, on a non free, non modifiable CPU. Why do you draw the line at the software/hardware boundry?
I don't. Last time I bought a PC, I restricted myself to systems which had free open source drivers for all the hardware. If there were free CPU designs available, I'd look into those too.
(I love the smell of burning strawman in the morning.)
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We already know what the Nintendo Revolution's game lineup is going to be:
Plus Madden 2006, NBA 2006, and NHL 2006. The titles might be slightly different, but I'm pretty sure that'll be the game library.
480p on my 32" Sharp Aquos LCD looks stunning. Even DirecTV standard resolution looks better than it did on my old 22" CRT.
Some HDTVs simply do a poor job upconverting lower resolutions. Unfortunately for you, it sounds like your Sony is one of them.
I'd hazard a guess that a 32" HDTV is likely to be way more commonplace in average households than the 50"+ behemoths. So I suspect 480p is adequate for a game console.
I have a GameCube, I did play Eternal Darkness, and one game is not enough. There are a handful of other games on the GameCube I want to play: Beyond Good and Evil, Metroid, er...
...
Burnout 2 was good, but the newer games in the series aren't available for GameCube. Wind Waker was too similar to Ocarina Of Time, dragged on a bit, and ultimately a bit saccharine. I was left feeling like I'd eaten a whole box of chocolates.
I freakin' hate Mario and Pokemon, and I don't play sports games. So that leaves me with... er...
So I've gone back to the PS2, where there's Jak 3, Sly 3, Ratchet and Clank, Burnout 3, Katamari Damacy, MGS:3, Ace Combat 5,
I'm seriously running short of games I want to play on the cube. I definitely won't buy a Revolution unless I see that Nintendo have turned the situation around and gone for more diversity of games.
It's a shame, because the cube is a much nicer piece of hardware. But hardware isn't enough.
It has poor driver support.
It has System V intellectual property in it, meaning it's legitimately at risk from SCO.
Its license isn't GPL-compatible.
There's no commercial support available for it.
I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume the bugginess has improved drastically since Solaris 2.6 days. Still, it doesn't seem compelling to me.
I don't see any shortage of people working for Microsoft, BAT, BAe Systems, and so on.
The way I read it, an installed device driver is a supplement to the Windows XP software.
So on the one hand, we have you claiming that there's a secret unwritten guarantee that Windows won't crash if you use all-certified drivers.
And on the other hand, we have the Windows XP EULA, which explicitly says in writing that:
So, shall I believe you that Microsoft guarantees certified drivers won't crash? Or shall I believe the written license that tells me installed drivers, certified or not, are never covered by any kind of warranty?
Gosh, that's a tough one.
Except I've a horrible feeling you're probably serious.
"a convenience for the programmer"? This must be some strange new usage of the word "convenience"...
I don't want to learn a new text editor--and a horrendously complicated one at that--just to write Java programs.
Of course, it doesn't have to be. If the Linux community threw their weight behind OpenStep instead of wasting it on GNOME, we could end up in a world where most Mac applications could easily be ported to run on Linux as well.
Yes, "import" is a problem. It's such a PITA to identify the actual bits you need, that most code just imports huge chunks of the API.
Furthermore, "import" has no dependency handling. For instance, org.xml.sax.XMLReader is no use without org.xml.sax.helpers.XMLReaderFactory. Rather than have to manually hunt down the dependencies in the few functions they use, most programmers import org.xml.sax.*.
In C/C++/Objective-C, at least include files tend to include their dependencies.
In April 2004, a Communist Party official told Chinese journalist Shi Tao how to report the upcoming 15th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre.
Shi Tao took notes at the meeting, wrote up what he had been told to write, and e-mailed a copy to a pro-democracy web site in New York.
Unfortunately, Shi Tao used Yahoo web mail to send his e-mail. When the Chinese government approached Yahoo and asked them to reveal the personal information of the person who had signed up for the account, they gladly did so.
Asked about this at a conference in China, Yahoo's Taiwanese co-founder Jerry Yang said:
"To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law."
Since then, people have pointed out that the journalist hadn't been convicted of any crime. A Chinese lawyer--as in, a lawyer who actually practices law in China--has said that Yahoo was under no legal obligation to reveal the journalist's name. It certainly seems that no legal action was taken against Yahoo to force them to rat out the guy.
It's a pity there's no Adolf Eichmann Award for Excellence in Only Following Orders, Jerry Yang would have a good chance of winning.
I was hoping for such great things from this game. I loved Ico, it's one of those games I haven't resold because it's such a work of art.
Unfortunately...I hate boss fights. Hate hate hate. They are the lamest, most overdone cliché in the video game world.
Give me exploration. Give me puzzles. Give me suspense, fear, foreboding, thought-provoking scenarios, convoluted plots, mysteries. Don't give me some humongous robot killing machine and tell me I have to hack at it repeatedly with a small pointy thing. Grr.
Somebody obviously loves boss fights, because it seems like games are heading that way. "Ratchet: Deadlocked" apparently dispenses with the beautiful and interesting environments that made that game series so great, in favor of non-stop arena combat and boss fights. I guess combat is cheaper than having to come up with a world that's complex enough to be interesting.
Web hosting isn't free either. Nobody's suggesting that I should be prohibited from posting political rants or printing them out and handing them out on street corners. What's being suggested is that people should be prohibited from paying me to do so.
Right now, the two big parties have a nice cosy system. They can buy all the coverage they like from the corporate media, and say what they like to an audience of millions. Third parties can't--even if they have the money, their ads are often refused.
If the law is changed so that the only way to get coverage is to say or do something that warrants proper news coverage, or to actually go out and do grassroots events, it will be very painful for the two big parties. They'll be put on the same basis as the third party candidates.
That's nothing. Here in America decisions to go to war are taken by a small number of elected misinformed people.
And that's not the only problem with the GFDL. There's also the fact that it doesn't preserve the freedom to modify and redistribute which was the whole point of the GPL--authors can specify bits of documentation which you're not allowed to change.
I've been tempted to release documentation under the GFDL with protected sections saying that the GFDL is misguided and that Richard Stallman is an ass.
Then there are the problems with GPL that as far as I know nobody is interested in solving--like the fact that it's possible to take GPLed software and make it effectively proprietary, by locking it to proprietary hardware or data files.
For example, even though Linux is under the GPL, I can't change the software I was sold on my TiVo. It hasn't protected my rights at all.
1. End all fixed width field requirements. (Not so much a SQL misfeature as a database misfeature, but still...)
2. Implement standard data types for dates, currency, names, and so on. Give them some smarts, so you can read a date and have it return the actual correct value, not some string that could be formatted in any random way and has a missing time zone.
3. Make the grammar less fussy. Half the problem I have with writing SQL queries is that when I'm done, I have to mess with the pieces of the query until I get them in the right order that the system will accept them. Or even better...
4. Get rid of that stupid English-like syntax and give us a proper notation based on Scheme or Ruby or something.
5. Standardize the bits that aren't standardized yet but every real database needs, like referential integrity constraints.
Neither. I want OS X on Intel to be cracked because I want a goddamn tablet Mac, and Steve has a religious objection to releasing one.
If Xboxes were only available in bundles, maybe you should have, oh, perhaps gotten a PS2 instead?
Where does this idea come from that spending money is speech? There's no restriction on speech per se here. What's being restricted is the right to be a paid shill.
If Joe wants to post about how great Bush is, there's nothing in the law to stop him. It's only if he wants to earn money from saying how great Bush is that there's a problem, and it's the money part which is the cause of the restriction.
It's actually kinda like the iTunes DRM thing. A lot of people on Slashdot trash the iPod for having DRM, and ignore the fact that you are completely free to put unrestricted MP3s on it and never have any DRM restrictions imposed on you. The iPod does not restrict your use of music; it's buying from the iTunes music store that causes the restrictions to come into play.
I've got a network disk, it came with my PS2, which has the network adaptor built in. When I booted the disk to see what was on it, it offered to set up some kind of account for me, but since I've yet to see a game I want to play online there didn't seem to be much point.
I did use the network adaptor to download the latest updates for my Action Replay Max, but that's all I've used it for. I didn't need to use the network disk for that.
Basically, I only have the online capability because I had to buy a new PS2 and it came with everything. I wouldn't have bothered to buy it separately.
They're just doing it because it's a good strategy, and it's a good strategy because dumbasses like you keep falling for it. So you ought to be pissed off at yourself.
Yes! I've played two PS2 games that had online play, but I didn't bother to try it out for either of them--even though I have all the hardware and just need to run an Ethernet cable across to the router.
Hardly anyone seems to have managed to make online gaming which is actually a sociable cooperative experience, that doesn't cost ridiculous amounts for a few hours a month of gameplay. The game makers keep churning out games to appeal to the same 10% of the gaming audience who are online already, ignoring what might draw in the other 90%.
I don't. Last time I bought a PC, I restricted myself to systems which had free open source drivers for all the hardware. If there were free CPU designs available, I'd look into those too.
(I love the smell of burning strawman in the morning.)