Heh, I've got a great music memory. Most of the time theres a song running in my head, I just can't stop it! So carrying music isn't a real problem for me. And if I ever get some money, I'll probably invest in a nice solid state mp3 player.
I've got a EastSport backback from walmart that does a perfect job. Sure, its a clone product that steals half its name from EastPak and half from JanSport. But hey, the main compartment is good for files or a laptop, one back pocket is good for holding floppies and related useless gear, and the "secret compartment" holds similarly useless cables. The compartment above that is handy for holding my cellphone and writing utensils, and the little flippy "looks like it holds the pak together" compartment is great for holding a Gameboy... err my z80 based calculater.
Of couse, you'll look hopelessly sophmoric on the business front, but honestly, if you're in business, you'll quickly learn the more wired you are the faster the boss-man can call your ass while you're on vacation, asleep, in the bar dodging work, etc.
It will be quite hard to tell who made the worm. Sure, the defacing said "hacked by the Chinese." But the first report was from a chinese server. For all we know this "Chinese" deal is just a cover. In addition, the original was built with a self terminating date, but reviews of the code show that the code is has several points where a single byte change can greatly alter the life cycle of the worm. And eEye aren'y the only people in town who can read the code. With a hex editor and a little knowledge of what the code is doing, nearly anybody could restart it at any time with a copy of the virus.
I have a feeling its not on the top ten for the same reason Ender's Game the AP isn't a "novel of literary merit." Specifically, the AP says Ender's Game is too new, but maybe years from now it will have merit. Which makes little sense. The novel hasn't changed.
Similarly, the list was compiled by polling Gamespy staff and several "prominent" PC developers' top 10 games of all time. Which means you get a list mostly by people who had a NES rather than a 300 baud modem. And the general elitist view on CS is that its a "mod" not a game. Yea. Its bullshit too. But Half-Life is number 2, so hey!
First off, I'd like to point out that an inferior solution doesn't mean the current one isn't ass.
The fun factor. That term "game journalists" coined to qualify the fact that some games are fun, even addicting, while some don't warrant another look. Its a start, but a horribly shoddy one. Rather than deconstruct the gameplay involved into what works and what doesn't, we get a number, from one to ten, telling us how fun everybody must think it is. Of course, this is far from the truth, or everybody would be busy playing masterpieces like Might and Magic 4, or Jumping Flash! The reality is that different games appeal differently to different people. The tendancy is to like games you're good at, and not like games you're bad at. I think a good start would be to look at why games are played. Zoologists tell you animals play games as practice for the real hunt. Your roommate says you play games to evade the fact that you have no life. Your thirteen year old brother loves games because theres lots of blood everywhere.
Its psychological. Game playing is fundamentally a developmental activity. Whether physically, socially or mentally, we seek to improve ourselves. I think the most valid analysis of game design will come from the field of developmental psychology. Ender's Game is a popular book, especially among gamers and game developers. Not for the "suprise" ending, nor the campy sci-fi atmosphere, but because of how psychological the novel is. Every moment is accomanied by what Ender is thinking. Good designers need to understand psychology. Which is why its hard to find good designers, and subsequently, good games. Great console designers have something similar to focus groups. Miyamato frequently watches player test groups to see what parts of his games players enjoy and which they don't. That doesn't mean taking out the ones that don't, just ensuring that the parts they don't like (aka dying) were the expected parts. Much like if nobody laughs at a joke in a test screening in a theater, if players get frustrated with a game's controls, its a problem that needs to be addressed.
Single-player games are an oddity in a few ways. Like television, Single Player games have only come to popularity as of late. Players still seek to play for social connection, but now with the game, rather than other players. This is similar to television, where a person (or ironically, a group of persons) watch for a social need. This is where Operant Conditioning (the reward/punishment deal, I hope I got that right) can really shine. The most addictive games tend to be the ones that reward players just right. Enough to keep playing but not enough to make the rewards pointless. And occasionally even punishing the player. Consider Tetris. Commonly agreed as the most addictive game ever, the game uses many reward schemes to encourage the player, and any mistakes made are only indirectly punishing (no lines cleared, and another line closer to death).
Obviously my comments are superficial and barely scratching the surface of how psychology can unearth the plague of the Fun Factor.
I agree that games tend to be on the forefront of UI, even more so than you're probably aware (Secret of Mana and Ring Menus). The largest problem with menus and mice is how inefficient they are. Consider a menu manipulated by a "joypad" or arrow keys comapred to a clickdown menu operated by a mouse, or even a Pie Menu. I think an interesting study would be to compare differant menus, but also to compare the results with a keyboard vs results with a mouse. The real problem here is that games need mice. Games that use the keyboard are usually that more complex, requiring you to press a button to move, press a differant one to pick something up, another to use it, etc. On the other hand, can be good for integrating the UI.
In the end I guess its a tradeoff. Console games like FF have mastered the keyboard/joypad interface and are faster, but the integrated UI style of the mouse is rather useful for a game design. All in all, Pie Menus are quickly becoming another tool in the belt to bring mice closer to the joypad interface.
An OEM Agent is a publisher. Most PC game publishers handle things like Q&A, testing, distrobution and support. Publishers want a help line to call, and the like. Publishers are concerned with saving money, especially lately with the slowdown. They don't want to train apathetic employees how do fix a Linux install, or spend money and time for developers to throw out a Linux only patch. Thats why they about whats on the CD. Because they're not just CD Pressers.
Blaming Nintendo for not translating every game ever made to English.
Theres really no such thing as a blank cartridge. If you mean flashcarts/prototype carts, of course they're expensive. Especially back then when the parts were much rarer and less widely used. If you mean the fact that you had to pay Nintendo to make a Nintendo game, I think you're forgetting the context. Three years ago, Atari and its publishers had flooded the market with games nobody was buying. Nintendo made that move to ensure that they didn't suffer the same fate. That aspect seems to still haunt them today, in how aggressively they do things. It might not have been the best idea, but it worked well enough to keep them alive while Sega, Atari and Colecovision died. Remeber that Atari was Tengen.
There are plenty of NON-Nintendo games. I don't really want them, but they are there. EA Sports games, Team Sonic games, Acclaim, Midway, etc. Theres plenty of games in the works that marketing from various companies doesn't want to let people know about yet. Thank god for friends in the QA biz.
Zelda 64 was released in Japan a whole month before it was released in the States. The sequal saw simulatneous releases.
As far as the Zelda 2 fiasco, I can't say I recall that one, but then, I don't think my family had given in to buying one yet. If it helps, it wasn't exactly the best game around. Crystalis was much better.
Actually, the lastest word on Gamecube is (at least in Japan, but probably in the US too) a purple only launch, and they'll introduce new colors every month. That way they're not wasting time during the production time switching out colors, managing how many of what they'll need, etc, and shortly before the "I need a gamecube" frenzy ends they'll have more choices to attract customers.
As others have mentioned, the NGC will have miniDVD's- a propriety format, which should cut down on piracy. Take that how you will. DVD isnt an open standard, you have to pay the DVD consortium twenty dollars to use it. The Mashushita/Panasonic version should retail at about the same price as the XBox, but will play DVD, comes with a remote controller for the DVDs, and other high fi features. Note that the XBox won't play DVDs out of the box, but will require a 30 dollar remote control to enable it.
As far as actual storage is concerned, making two instead of one of those DVDs isnt that much more expensive. Since the NGC has built in texture compression at a nearly 5:1 ratio (average), those shouldn't be an issue. But if GT is your thing, PS2 is your thing as well.
Right. You didn't just say that Gamecube will suffer because of a lack of gameplay. Because that would be outright ignorant of the facts. 1080. Excitebike. Smash Brothers. ZELDA. METROID. Punchout.
Those are all definitive console games of ALL TIME. Anyways, you do have a slight point in that we shouldn't judge games before they're available, but saying that you can't decide anything without hands on experience means a lot of renting.
And just to be a little honest, graphically, Gamecube's games so far don't compare to Dead or Alive 3. I don't know why it is, and neither does anybody who's name doesn't start with an "N" and end in "amco." I have a feeling that they look good because of talented artists, which would translate easily to another system. But nobody is going to pay three hundred dollars for and XBox and a "bouncing breasts" option. Thats what DoA 2 on DC is for;).
covering the launch have asked industry leaders about whether the number of consoles actually increases consumers or just competes for the same dollar. General consensus is that more consoles attracts more people and more money. However the fact that the market can really only support two consoles seems to indicate otherwise.
Lately, the attitude from developers and the media is that the PS2 is pretty crappy but it will live thanks to its allready existing userbase and a couple of killer titles, and the XBox seems to be less impressive daily. HALO was once a killer title but changes in game design have had a less than enthusiatic response from fans. Thoughts on Gamecube tend to bounce between "kiddie machine" and "My God Rouge Squadron/Pikmin/Luigi's Mansion/Smash Brothers looks elite." Nintendo's strategy seems to be gather a majority of exclusive titles, especially in the more mature range, in addition to reinforcing the near gridlock they have on children's games. Miyamato stated with the Edge magazine that they were trying to expand their game's appeal past the cartoony play of the n64 that captured so many kids last time around.
It boils down to three things.
MS needs a giant ace up their sleeves to survive, if not a joker.
PS2 is still thought of as the place to play all the great RPGs.
Gamecube will survive at the very least thanks to Pokemon and Animal Planet (emulates NES games!), and most likely thrive with games like Eternal Darkness (the game sounds greatly based on Lovecraft), Rouge Squadron.
Think of the n64 as the NES of Polygons and the Gamecube as the SNES. Massive amounts of features enabled with the switching of a bit.
So what you're telling me is that the standard oversimplified version of how airplanes work doesnt apply because the air on top is moving even faster than we assume.
Like I said, theres a ton of other considerations, but I'm gonna leave it to the people at JPL to know them unless I get a job offer there. Of course, they wouldnt hire me unless I knew the aforementioned considerations, but oh well.
Perhaps the FTC should mandate that all web engines have the following label... "Due to [howmany ever dollars] worth of circumstances beyond our control, the results shown may or may not be the most relevant to your query.
All in all, I'm not liking the commoditizing of the net. I don't know how things got paid for before the eBusiness era, but things are looking much worse now, with everybody and everything looking out for the allmighty dollar. I wonder if hosting costs went up because of demand for bandwidth, or down because of the increasing supply...
Part of your comment I forgot to mention... planes don't really fly upside down, they fall upside down. I would also imagine theres an angle at which the upward force of the propellers match the downward force of the wings, resulting in going forward at some speed, but its probably too much of an angle and would result in too much drag and would interrupt the airflow.
Bernoulli's principle merely states that the faster a gas is moving, the lower its pressure. Modern aviation is just an application of this concept. The top of the wing/"aerofoil" is curved, and the bottom is relatively flat, making the perimeter of the top longer than the bottom. Since the wing is moving through the air, the air on top travels over a longer distance than the air on bottom in the same amount of time. Rearrange the formula Distance=Time*Rate and you'll see that the larger the distance the faster the air must travel (duh). So now the aerofoil is dividing the air into two masses, a faster lower pressure section on top and a slower, higher pressure section. The higher pressure on bottom pushes on the wing.
Of course, theres some additional considerations that make aerospace engineers worth their money, like the fact that theres a relationship between the curve on top and the amount of surface area, and making the wing aerodynamic enough so that local compression along the wing doesn't happen. Thats probably why the wings are tilted like so.
If you've ever been to or taken a kid to a science museum, a lot of them have a "how airplanes fly" section with a windblower and a wing section you can play with. you'll notice that even at a downward angle, the wing still pulls upward, defeating your angle of attack theory. Sorry to burst a bubble..
If you didn't realize it, the Rodney King case was pointed out because it would have been illegal under the current system. The law prohibits all secret recordings, even those in public. The judge was pointing this out because he wasn't in favor it the ruling. Its called a "dissenting opinion;" something courts with multiple judges can only have.
In fact, the article states that your point is exactly the defense Hyde tried to use. The 'people should have no expectation of privacy in public' defense, and he lost with it.
Look for a showing of this case in your nearest US Supreme Court.
As part of the agreement to drop the case, New Mexico will receive reimbursement from Microsoft for legal fees and other costs incurred during the case and "the benefit of any and all remedies imposed on Microsoft in the resolution of this lawsuit with any and all of the remaining litigating states and the U.S. Department of Justice," Madrid said.
Of course if everybody takes those terms, then MS will only have to pay lawyer's fees...
Splitting in ops had become a common practice of taking over a channel that EFnet went to a NoOps on Split mode to prevent people from trying it. Of course, this makes it all the harder to change things should something go awry.
So out goes that reason. My only guess is that some people wanted to take down EFnet itself after they were refused ircops. But life and EFnet will go on.
Of course, you have to trust that server. I have to admit that not many people would offer to run a server in the goodness of their own heart, especially EFnet, DDoS HQ.
it was bad behavior that started the trend to I-linging servers. There was a time where I could get on EFnet most anywhere. Then EFnet delinked AOL's server, and nearly unilaterally k-lined *.aol.com. I didn't use AOL, but it certainly set the tone for future problems, and now I have a hard time getting anywhere with my @home hostmask.
Do I then, blame people for being aggrovated at the overreaching bans that the same people have caused a need for? Yes I do.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats kinda the point.
Heh, I've got a great music memory. Most of the time theres a song running in my head, I just can't stop it! So carrying music isn't a real problem for me. And if I ever get some money, I'll probably invest in a nice solid state mp3 player.
Of couse, you'll look hopelessly sophmoric on the business front, but honestly, if you're in business, you'll quickly learn the more wired you are the faster the boss-man can call your ass while you're on vacation, asleep, in the bar dodging work, etc.
Think "copy-cat" incidents like Columbine.
Similarly, the list was compiled by polling Gamespy staff and several "prominent" PC developers' top 10 games of all time. Which means you get a list mostly by people who had a NES rather than a 300 baud modem. And the general elitist view on CS is that its a "mod" not a game. Yea. Its bullshit too. But Half-Life is number 2, so hey!
The fun factor. That term "game journalists" coined to qualify the fact that some games are fun, even addicting, while some don't warrant another look. Its a start, but a horribly shoddy one. Rather than deconstruct the gameplay involved into what works and what doesn't, we get a number, from one to ten, telling us how fun everybody must think it is. Of course, this is far from the truth, or everybody would be busy playing masterpieces like Might and Magic 4, or Jumping Flash! The reality is that different games appeal differently to different people. The tendancy is to like games you're good at, and not like games you're bad at. I think a good start would be to look at why games are played. Zoologists tell you animals play games as practice for the real hunt. Your roommate says you play games to evade the fact that you have no life. Your thirteen year old brother loves games because theres lots of blood everywhere.
Its psychological. Game playing is fundamentally a developmental activity. Whether physically, socially or mentally, we seek to improve ourselves. I think the most valid analysis of game design will come from the field of developmental psychology. Ender's Game is a popular book, especially among gamers and game developers. Not for the "suprise" ending, nor the campy sci-fi atmosphere, but because of how psychological the novel is. Every moment is accomanied by what Ender is thinking. Good designers need to understand psychology. Which is why its hard to find good designers, and subsequently, good games. Great console designers have something similar to focus groups. Miyamato frequently watches player test groups to see what parts of his games players enjoy and which they don't. That doesn't mean taking out the ones that don't, just ensuring that the parts they don't like (aka dying ) were the expected parts. Much like if nobody laughs at a joke in a test screening in a theater, if players get frustrated with a game's controls, its a problem that needs to be addressed.
Single-player games are an oddity in a few ways. Like television, Single Player games have only come to popularity as of late. Players still seek to play for social connection, but now with the game, rather than other players. This is similar to television, where a person (or ironically, a group of persons) watch for a social need. This is where Operant Conditioning (the reward/punishment deal, I hope I got that right) can really shine. The most addictive games tend to be the ones that reward players just right. Enough to keep playing but not enough to make the rewards pointless. And occasionally even punishing the player. Consider Tetris. Commonly agreed as the most addictive game ever, the game uses many reward schemes to encourage the player, and any mistakes made are only indirectly punishing (no lines cleared, and another line closer to death).
Obviously my comments are superficial and barely scratching the surface of how psychology can unearth the plague of the Fun Factor.
In the end I guess its a tradeoff. Console games like FF have mastered the keyboard/joypad interface and are faster, but the integrated UI style of the mouse is rather useful for a game design. All in all, Pie Menus are quickly becoming another tool in the belt to bring mice closer to the joypad interface.
An OEM Agent is a publisher. Most PC game publishers handle things like Q&A, testing, distrobution and support. Publishers want a help line to call, and the like. Publishers are concerned with saving money, especially lately with the slowdown. They don't want to train apathetic employees how do fix a Linux install, or spend money and time for developers to throw out a Linux only patch. Thats why they about whats on the CD. Because they're not just CD Pressers.
Blaming Nintendo for not translating every game ever made to English.
Theres really no such thing as a blank cartridge. If you mean flashcarts/prototype carts, of course they're expensive. Especially back then when the parts were much rarer and less widely used. If you mean the fact that you had to pay Nintendo to make a Nintendo game, I think you're forgetting the context. Three years ago, Atari and its publishers had flooded the market with games nobody was buying. Nintendo made that move to ensure that they didn't suffer the same fate. That aspect seems to still haunt them today, in how aggressively they do things. It might not have been the best idea, but it worked well enough to keep them alive while Sega, Atari and Colecovision died. Remeber that Atari was Tengen.
There are plenty of NON-Nintendo games. I don't really want them, but they are there. EA Sports games, Team Sonic games, Acclaim, Midway, etc. Theres plenty of games in the works that marketing from various companies doesn't want to let people know about yet. Thank god for friends in the QA biz.
Zelda 64 was released in Japan a whole month before it was released in the States. The sequal saw simulatneous releases.
As far as the Zelda 2 fiasco, I can't say I recall that one, but then, I don't think my family had given in to buying one yet. If it helps, it wasn't exactly the best game around. Crystalis was much better.
While those photos can't really give you a perspective on it, this page helps by putting a gbc and n64 next to it for comparison.
As others have mentioned, the NGC will have miniDVD's- a propriety format, which should cut down on piracy. Take that how you will. DVD isnt an open standard, you have to pay the DVD consortium twenty dollars to use it. The Mashushita/Panasonic version should retail at about the same price as the XBox, but will play DVD, comes with a remote controller for the DVDs, and other high fi features. Note that the XBox won't play DVDs out of the box, but will require a 30 dollar remote control to enable it.
As far as actual storage is concerned, making two instead of one of those DVDs isnt that much more expensive. Since the NGC has built in texture compression at a nearly 5:1 ratio (average), those shouldn't be an issue. But if GT is your thing, PS2 is your thing as well.
Those are all definitive console games of ALL TIME. Anyways, you do have a slight point in that we shouldn't judge games before they're available, but saying that you can't decide anything without hands on experience means a lot of renting.
And just to be a little honest, graphically, Gamecube's games so far don't compare to Dead or Alive 3. I don't know why it is, and neither does anybody who's name doesn't start with an "N" and end in "amco." I have a feeling that they look good because of talented artists, which would translate easily to another system. But nobody is going to pay three hundred dollars for and XBox and a "bouncing breasts" option. Thats what DoA 2 on DC is for ;).
Lately, the attitude from developers and the media is that the PS2 is pretty crappy but it will live thanks to its allready existing userbase and a couple of killer titles, and the XBox seems to be less impressive daily. HALO was once a killer title but changes in game design have had a less than enthusiatic response from fans. Thoughts on Gamecube tend to bounce between "kiddie machine" and "My God Rouge Squadron/Pikmin/Luigi's Mansion/Smash Brothers looks elite." Nintendo's strategy seems to be gather a majority of exclusive titles, especially in the more mature range, in addition to reinforcing the near gridlock they have on children's games. Miyamato stated with the Edge magazine that they were trying to expand their game's appeal past the cartoony play of the n64 that captured so many kids last time around.
It boils down to three things.
MS needs a giant ace up their sleeves to survive, if not a joker.
PS2 is still thought of as the place to play all the great RPGs.
Gamecube will survive at the very least thanks to Pokemon and Animal Planet (emulates NES games!), and most likely thrive with games like Eternal Darkness (the game sounds greatly based on Lovecraft), Rouge Squadron.
Think of the n64 as the NES of Polygons and the Gamecube as the SNES. Massive amounts of features enabled with the switching of a bit.
Might I suggest grand pianos and anvils as "payloads" for this scheme?
According to them the current top queries are 1. "neuroticfish no instruments" 2. "lester flatt, earl scruggs &" and 3. "divx"
Most notible is that the top searches garner a whole .3 percent of the queries.
Like I said, theres a ton of other considerations, but I'm gonna leave it to the people at JPL to know them unless I get a job offer there. Of course, they wouldnt hire me unless I knew the aforementioned considerations, but oh well.
Hey Trep, wtf is going on with EFnet? I can't even get to the website to grab a recent list of servers to try to connect to.
All in all, I'm not liking the commoditizing of the net. I don't know how things got paid for before the eBusiness era, but things are looking much worse now, with everybody and everything looking out for the allmighty dollar. I wonder if hosting costs went up because of demand for bandwidth, or down because of the increasing supply...
Part of your comment I forgot to mention... planes don't really fly upside down, they fall upside down. I would also imagine theres an angle at which the upward force of the propellers match the downward force of the wings, resulting in going forward at some speed, but its probably too much of an angle and would result in too much drag and would interrupt the airflow.
Of course, theres some additional considerations that make aerospace engineers worth their money, like the fact that theres a relationship between the curve on top and the amount of surface area, and making the wing aerodynamic enough so that local compression along the wing doesn't happen. Thats probably why the wings are tilted like so.
If you've ever been to or taken a kid to a science museum, a lot of them have a "how airplanes fly" section with a windblower and a wing section you can play with. you'll notice that even at a downward angle, the wing still pulls upward, defeating your angle of attack theory. Sorry to burst a bubble..
In fact, the article states that your point is exactly the defense Hyde tried to use. The 'people should have no expectation of privacy in public' defense, and he lost with it.
Look for a showing of this case in your nearest US Supreme Court.
So out goes that reason. My only guess is that some people wanted to take down EFnet itself after they were refused ircops. But life and EFnet will go on.
Of course, you have to trust that server. I have to admit that not many people would offer to run a server in the goodness of their own heart, especially EFnet, DDoS HQ.
it was bad behavior that started the trend to I-linging servers. There was a time where I could get on EFnet most anywhere. Then EFnet delinked AOL's server, and nearly unilaterally k-lined *.aol.com. I didn't use AOL, but it certainly set the tone for future problems, and now I have a hard time getting anywhere with my @home hostmask. Do I then, blame people for being aggrovated at the overreaching bans that the same people have caused a need for? Yes I do.