Do what I do for my grandma. I made her a "custom" desktop that has very few very large icons to launch the programs she uses. The pc is setup with gdm and autologin. It's gentoo. Sure, my grandma has no idea what's going on. But I have some cron jobs in there doing routine maintenance and e-mailing me. And on occasion I ssh in and do a little emerge -uDva world.
Linux is designed as a multi-user system. The best way for it to work is via the client server model. You want someone who knows what they are doing to maintain the system itself, because it will never be easy. Then life for the clients is a dream come true. Thunderbird, Firefox, OpenOffice, Gaim, rox, xmms, giftui and gimp. Maybe sunbird in the future. 99% of people can get by on just that and be happy forever. Especially since its incredibly fast, feature rich, good looking, stable and secure.
I didn't read any comments for this story, and I'm posting late. So I don't know if anyone else pointed this out. But there is one very large downfall of making all this high-end computer graphics software open-source. The general public will have access to it. What does this mean? It means that slashdot geeks are going to start making Pixar quality movies in their basements.
Sure, they don't have the cpu power to render entire movies. That is obvious. But they can do low quality quick-renders on scene at a time while they make the film. When their work is complete they will easily find a render farm to turn it into a finished product. If their work is quality of course. If they make a piece of junk nobody is going to give them the time of day.
So Pixar isn't worried about giving Dreamworks new hair software. They're worried about giving you and me hair software. Right now we have to pay companies like Alias thousands of dollars. Or suffer blender and its icky interface. It's not about helping the competition. It's about not creating new competition. And its about not giving away something for free that cost them a lot of money.
If the code is all open sourced, the film companies will fire all their coders. They will wait on the open source project to do it for them. But then, since nobody is coding on it they have to hire coders. Since they have to hire coders still, there isn't really a benefit. They aren't saving money if they keep all those coders on salary.
The fascination with google is simple. In today's broken capitalist economy it is very hard to get ahead. The biggest most powerful corporations are those that do "evil" and use lots of advertising and lies to get ahead. Google is the first company to hit it big in a long time in the true Adam Smith capitalist sense. They made the best product, they did right by the customer and they have a policy of "no evil". People voted with their dollars and now google is on top. If only the same thing happened in all markets and not just web search engines we might live in a much better place.
Imagine if your car was as good at being a car as google is at being a search engine. Imagine if the tv channels and radio stations you watched had a similar advertising policy to googles.
Google is fascinating because it proves you can get ahead without underhanded business tactics, coercion and lies. You can just make a product that is better than everyone elses, quality wise, and that's enough.
I have too much time on my hands, and I have a little bit of spare cash to buy new games. But new games just aren't coming out. The last video game I bought was Mega Man Anniversary collection, which is just a re-release of old mega man games. Before that it had been a long time since I got a new game.
There just aren't a plethora of new good games out. Back in the NES days I would go to toys 'r' us and have trouble picking a game out. Nowadays I read about all the games online and I know exactly which ones I want. When one gets released I go to the store and get it. But quality is severely lacking. One or two good games being released every few months is about the current rate. It's really pretty sad.
The DS is a guaranteed winner. In the very best situation it rocks, has a lot of games that rock and everything is awesome. At the very worst it ends up like virtual boy, and you get to be the cool kid on the block who has a virtual boy.
Remember back in the day gameboy vs. game gear? Even Nintendo admits openly the game gear was superior technically. But gameboy won because it had Tetris. It had portable games. The PSP is going to have console games. Taking PlayStation games and making them portable will fail for the same reason that taking PC games and putting them on console systems fails so miserably. Just because you can take a game with you in the car doesn't make it a portable game in the same way that playing Quake 2 on the N64 doesn't make Quake 2 a console game. You get it? Nintendo is the only company that seems to understand this. Look at advance wars, that's a portable game. It wouldn't work any other way. But it looks like Sony is just going to try to miniaturize the playstation, and it wont work for the same reason the game gear didn't work.
Nintendo knows this. Nintendo is making portable games. Sony is making a really small console. You can read it here, straight from the horses mouth.
I've got one solution that works for both sides. Do nothing different than what we do now.
The liberal can still get all their mature content.
The conservative wants to keep things out of their children's hands. All they have to do is remove all televisions, computers, and printed publications from their house. Maybe telephones too. There simply is no other way to absolutely guarantee your kids cannot get their hands on mature content. Oh, you also have to not let them leave the house without you. And they can't get on the school bus. And they can't go to public school. Hell, not even the supermarket is safe. Better lock them in their rooms and not let them out until they are 18.
While this seems like an exaggeration, its not. If you want to keep absolutely everything that may be violent or sexual in nature out of your kids brain, that is what you have to do. There is no other way about it without tromping all over the rights of others. So the solution is for those conservative types to simply do the best they can. There are things they can do to limit what their children see. But without doing everything I listed above your children WILL see things you don't want them to. So you have to be a good parent and teach them right from wrong instead of letting the TV do it for you. That is the only answer.
Yes, this is also the argument I use. Very logical.
A) Smoking Tobacco CAUSES lung disease. Everyone who inhales smoke recieves an amount of damage to their lungs.
B) Violent video games do NOT cause violence. Not everyone who plays violent video games hurts others.
In fact, the number of people who do hurt others is an extremely large minority of those who play violent games and watch violent media.
This is just another case of post hoc ergo procter hoc. I think I speak for everyone here when we say that bad parents, schools and the attitude of our society are to blame.
There is an anime movie, the name is "Grey: Digital Target". I've heard good things about the manga, but after watching the movie I can safely say it is the worst evar.
Ok, most of the time I see this as a requirement there is an obvious reason. Sometimes there is an existing system component that is in windows already. Sometimes the target is all platforms and windows can't be left out. Usually you can hold all the linux zealots back with a very good reason why running on windows is a valid requirement.
In this case, I do not see such a reason. Why can't your friend's cybercafe run on linux? If you did run on linux not only would this problem of cybercafe software be relatively trivial, but the other advantages including security, would be numerous obvious and unecessary to enumerate. I'm not saying that there isn't a reason the cybercafe must run windows, I'm just wondering what it is. And saying the customers want it or need it in some fashion is not a good reason. Neither is lack or knowledge on the proprietor's part.
Oh, and to answer the question, there really isn't free cybercafe software for windows. Even the pay software is easilly cracked. The best bet is hardware control. you can get dongles with timers that cut off the mice/keyboards/monitors and allow them to switch on for set amounts of time. Some are coin operated also.
Also, with vnc you can make a hacky solution. Just set a passwords on all the boxen. Then to unlock them vnc into them and do the deed. Set a timer and lock them again when time is up.
While MS is doing this and it seems like a bad thing this can be looked at from another viewpoint. MS is giving recognition to Settlers! A big and real company has recognized german board games. Hopefully in the future we will see some real and high quality computer versions of Puerto Rico, Tigris and Euphrates and all the other great board games most people have never heard of.
I've thought about coding them myself in the past, but I've never found the time or will to actually go through with it. I'm also slightly worried about getting sued. I know for some games there exist computerized versions in various formats, but none of them are particularly high quality. Most of them are actually almost unplayable due to crummy interface. And of those that are playable it is often very difficult to actually get in a game with real people who stay and play to the end due to either too much or too little popularity. Java settlers would be the prime example there.
Here's the future popularity of "real" board games in the US, yar!
There's not much more to say about this other than yes yes yes! With more clever thinking like this we can achieve "real" VR without having to jack wires into our brains. All we need now is a body suit that makes you feel things and tracks the motion of your entire body.
If you combine the tiles, vr goggles, a body suit and a light gun peripheral you've got the first quality VR fps. No more wasting money on airsoft or paintball. I can't believe nobody ever though of this before...
What I want to see is a 3d hologram platform/table. That would revolutionize display technology forever. We could play Star Wars chess. We could watch sporting events like baseball, hockey and football while really seeing the entire field. And think of the video games you could play on it... oh yeah.
Also cool would be a display that shows a different picture depending on the angle of viewing. With just one television in the room you can have one person watching a dvd, another playing a video game and yet another channel surfing. Depending on where you are in relation to the screen in the room changes what you see, and everyone gets their own remote. Far superior to buying multiple displays.
A 3d display like this one really isn't that revolutionary or useful for me.
These days, of course, the dividing line between children and adult audiences has blurred.
A major factor to this phenomena is literature that so generically entertaining that anyone can read it. LOTR is the chief example.
But the other factor is obviously the lower level of intelligence of adults in our society. As people get dumber the more difficult books sell fewer copies. If LOTR was released today, for the first time, with no movies, fame or promotion how well would it do? How much of that has to do with the average adult reading level?
Re:I'm still waiting for a feature
on
Bash 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I agree that however much better the gmail interface is than the other webmail interfaces, its still webmail. I still want IMAP and Thunderbird. If you want a Gmail type search on your own e-mail you will have to write that software yourself. But, the Thunderbird guys could possibly be working on something like that for future versions. I don't see a use for it myself since I don't have more e-mail in my Inbox than I can see at one time. So searching through it is kind of useless.
What I would like, however, is for google to release gmail as a downloadable product. That way I can replace Squirrel Mail with gmail. Imagine running your own e-mail server with gmail running the web interface for it. THAT is teh hotness. I think that this is the department where google can really shine. If they do something like this and make it quality they can start to take market share away from things like Exchange.
That simulation was pretty impressive when I looked at it. Until I realized something. None of the cars are turning left or right. Theories and math and simulations work great and are often impressive. But real world factors will almost always mess them up.
So one day when there is a way to get from everywhere on earth to every other place on earth without turning left or right give me a call. Until then, let's stop and let people turn left.
I tried to checkout www.ilovebees.com to see what the story was. But visiting it with firefox 0.91 on gentoo linux causes firefox to crash and burn. Anyone else have a problem?
DDR has definitely been on the downturn recently. I first discovered it 4 years ago and was reluctant to play because it looked so stupid. But of course, as soon as I gave it a try I was hooked. At first we played 3rd and 4th mix. We picked fun songs and tried to find ways to do cool stuff. DDR was at its peak around the time 5th mix came out. These were the days when ddrfreak would have videos of crazy freestyles that were just plain unbelievable. DJ8ball's videos are still amazing.
Then around the time 6th mix came out and the hold arrows appeared its been going down. For a multitude of reasons most tournaments nowadays, the ones that still exist, are just hit the arrows tournaments. Every new version of DDR stresses harder and harder arrow combinations that go faster and faster. Playing for fun is non-existant. If you go to an arcade and do some fun songs on trick you'll have normal people gaping with the usual oohs and aahs. But the punk kids who can hit every arrow on MAX300 will scoff at you.
Just to show an example. Last year at the boardwalk in wildwood, NJ there were DDR machines ranging from 3rd mix all the way up. This year, every single DDR machine has been upgraded to Extreme. Fourth Mix Plus is still the best DDR ever, but finding it is almost impossible now.
It's the tragedy of the modern arcade industry. Pac-Man gets replace with Ms. Pac-man. Cruis'n World replaced with Cruis'n Exotica. And most arcade games now only seperate themselves from the home console due to non-standard interfaces. Gun games, dance games, racing games, etc. So even if they get released for PC/Console its not the same, even if you get cobalt flux. So games in arcades that get sequels and upgrades run the risk of being lost forever. And if a game has a culture surrounding it, like DDR, then that culture is at the mercy of arcade owners and the game's manufacturer despite the gamers opinion. For home games the gamers decide what to buy and what not to. But with arcades the arcade owner decides, and guess what, most arcade owners aren't gamers.
The only reason E3 matters is because it is a set time for when all the video game companies save announcements for. If game companies made announcements as they come it wouldn't nearly be as suspenseful, hyped, etc.
What they do is they make a pile of secret new games and systems and all that jazz. Then when E3 comes around, bang! they show you all at once. You have lots of anticipation prior to the event and lots of talk generated during and after the event.
If the announcements of new games were spread out they wouldn't have as much oomph in their announcement. Of couse this has harms too. Smaller games get lost in the folds of E3. The big companies make such big announcements, and that makes otherwise huge ones from small companies look small.
I'm a CS guy. I'm going to buy the same games no matter what any of these companies do at trade shows or otherwise. So let the marketing guys do whatever they want.
Yeah, it's assholish of me. But this is exactly what I do. The only site I really make anymore is my blog. I test it against the w3c validator for XHTML and I keep twiddling with it until it passes. I also make sure to do valid CSS also. When I have both those things I twiddle it until it looks exactly how I want in Firefox. I know that my site looks wrong in IE, but I don't care.
Of course, this isn't an option if you are making websites for profit as well as fun. But for my personal website for my personal uses I personally give IE users a big 'ol middle finger.
Just about every word in the english language has multiple definitions. You know, when you look in the dictionary and there are numbers 1,2,3, etc. Lets' take a look at one in the OED.
I. 1. a. Pleasant pastime; entertainment or amusement; recreation, diversion.
If you use that one, then yes, math can be a sport for some people.
d. Participation in games or exercises, esp. those of an athletic character or pursued in the open air; such games or amusements collectively.
That one depends on how you do the math.
c. spec. Pastime afforded by the endeavour to take or kill wild animals, game, or fish. Freq. with adjs. referring to the result achieved.
no, math is not a sport. Unless you can make a funny joke about how doing math kills wild animals. See replies to this post for witty comments.
F1 cars don't run windows. They run very specialized very specific software that has to be inspected and approved by the FIA. I can pretty much guarantee that neither Windows or Linux will ever run on a Formula Machine.
Also, the fact that Ferrari wins every time shows how true a sport F1 is. The idea of a competition is to determine who is the best at a particular sport. But if you look at something like Baseball or Football there are too many other factors. If the best team plays the worst team the worst team might win once in awhile. But in F1 the best team wins every time. The other teams just need to get off their ass and make a decent car. Although it is kind of hard to compete with a Ferrari. That's because it's fucking FERRARI. Maybe if Lambourghini made F1 cars they could compete. Oh wait, Lambourghini's can't steer. Oh well.
Maybe they should just put 20 Ferraris out on the track and see who the best driver is...
Going by the games on this list it looks very wrong. Not that its untrue, but it seems like they are trying to simply make another Playstation, only small enough to carry around with you. Different gaming platforms require different games. Sure, some types of games work well in different departments. Fighting games work well in arcades and on consoles. Turn based strategy games work well just about anywhere.
But going by this list it seems like a bunch of sequels for existing playstation games. None of these games stand out as portable games. If you look at the GBA you get games like Advance Wars and Pokemon. These are portable games. They just wouldn't work out too well on consoles or pcs. Pokemon are something you carry around with you and battle your friends with. Advance Wars is the ultimate penis size measurer on long road trips. These PSP titles seem to me like they are reruns of popular 1 player Playstation games.
The PSP seems to me like its going to be a console you can take with you as opposed to a portable gaming platform. The game gear lost to the game boy for the same reason. It was sonic the hedgehog in full color versus Tetris in spinach green. We know who won.
Slashdot Mirror
Do what I do for my grandma. I made her a "custom" desktop that has very few very large icons to launch the programs she uses. The pc is setup with gdm and autologin. It's gentoo. Sure, my grandma has no idea what's going on. But I have some cron jobs in there doing routine maintenance and e-mailing me. And on occasion I ssh in and do a little emerge -uDva world.
Linux is designed as a multi-user system. The best way for it to work is via the client server model. You want someone who knows what they are doing to maintain the system itself, because it will never be easy. Then life for the clients is a dream come true. Thunderbird, Firefox, OpenOffice, Gaim, rox, xmms, giftui and gimp. Maybe sunbird in the future. 99% of people can get by on just that and be happy forever. Especially since its incredibly fast, feature rich, good looking, stable and secure.
I didn't read any comments for this story, and I'm posting late. So I don't know if anyone else pointed this out. But there is one very large downfall of making all this high-end computer graphics software open-source. The general public will have access to it. What does this mean? It means that slashdot geeks are going to start making Pixar quality movies in their basements.
Sure, they don't have the cpu power to render entire movies. That is obvious. But they can do low quality quick-renders on scene at a time while they make the film. When their work is complete they will easily find a render farm to turn it into a finished product. If their work is quality of course. If they make a piece of junk nobody is going to give them the time of day.
So Pixar isn't worried about giving Dreamworks new hair software. They're worried about giving you and me hair software. Right now we have to pay companies like Alias thousands of dollars. Or suffer blender and its icky interface. It's not about helping the competition. It's about not creating new competition. And its about not giving away something for free that cost them a lot of money.
If the code is all open sourced, the film companies will fire all their coders. They will wait on the open source project to do it for them. But then, since nobody is coding on it they have to hire coders. Since they have to hire coders still, there isn't really a benefit. They aren't saving money if they keep all those coders on salary.
The fascination with google is simple. In today's broken capitalist economy it is very hard to get ahead. The biggest most powerful corporations are those that do "evil" and use lots of advertising and lies to get ahead. Google is the first company to hit it big in a long time in the true Adam Smith capitalist sense. They made the best product, they did right by the customer and they have a policy of "no evil". People voted with their dollars and now google is on top. If only the same thing happened in all markets and not just web search engines we might live in a much better place.
Imagine if your car was as good at being a car as google is at being a search engine. Imagine if the tv channels and radio stations you watched had a similar advertising policy to googles.
Google is fascinating because it proves you can get ahead without underhanded business tactics, coercion and lies. You can just make a product that is better than everyone elses, quality wise, and that's enough.
I have too much time on my hands, and I have a little bit of spare cash to buy new games. But new games just aren't coming out. The last video game I bought was Mega Man Anniversary collection, which is just a re-release of old mega man games. Before that it had been a long time since I got a new game.
There just aren't a plethora of new good games out. Back in the NES days I would go to toys 'r' us and have trouble picking a game out. Nowadays I read about all the games online and I know exactly which ones I want. When one gets released I go to the store and get it. But quality is severely lacking. One or two good games being released every few months is about the current rate. It's really pretty sad.
The DS is a guaranteed winner. In the very best situation it rocks, has a lot of games that rock and everything is awesome. At the very worst it ends up like virtual boy, and you get to be the cool kid on the block who has a virtual boy.
Remember back in the day gameboy vs. game gear? Even Nintendo admits openly the game gear was superior technically. But gameboy won because it had Tetris. It had portable games. The PSP is going to have console games. Taking PlayStation games and making them portable will fail for the same reason that taking PC games and putting them on console systems fails so miserably. Just because you can take a game with you in the car doesn't make it a portable game in the same way that playing Quake 2 on the N64 doesn't make Quake 2 a console game. You get it? Nintendo is the only company that seems to understand this. Look at advance wars, that's a portable game. It wouldn't work any other way. But it looks like Sony is just going to try to miniaturize the playstation, and it wont work for the same reason the game gear didn't work.
Nintendo knows this. Nintendo is making portable games. Sony is making a really small console.
You can read it here, straight from the horses mouth.
I've got one solution that works for both sides. Do nothing different than what we do now.
The liberal can still get all their mature content.
The conservative wants to keep things out of their children's hands. All they have to do is remove all televisions, computers, and printed publications from their house. Maybe telephones too. There simply is no other way to absolutely guarantee your kids cannot get their hands on mature content. Oh, you also have to not let them leave the house without you. And they can't get on the school bus. And they can't go to public school. Hell, not even the supermarket is safe. Better lock them in their rooms and not let them out until they are 18.
While this seems like an exaggeration, its not. If you want to keep absolutely everything that may be violent or sexual in nature out of your kids brain, that is what you have to do. There is no other way about it without tromping all over the rights of others. So the solution is for those conservative types to simply do the best they can. There are things they can do to limit what their children see. But without doing everything I listed above your children WILL see things you don't want them to. So you have to be a good parent and teach them right from wrong instead of letting the TV do it for you. That is the only answer.
Yes, this is also the argument I use. Very logical.
A) Smoking Tobacco CAUSES lung disease. Everyone who inhales smoke recieves an amount of damage to their lungs.
B) Violent video games do NOT cause violence. Not everyone who plays violent video games hurts others.
In fact, the number of people who do hurt others is an extremely large minority of those who play violent games and watch violent media.
This is just another case of post hoc ergo procter hoc. I think I speak for everyone here when we say that bad parents, schools and the attitude of our society are to blame.
There, I said it so nobody else has to.
There is an anime movie, the name is "Grey: Digital Target". I've heard good things about the manga, but after watching the movie I can safely say it is the worst evar.
the software has to work on Windows
Ok, most of the time I see this as a requirement there is an obvious reason. Sometimes there is an existing system component that is in windows already. Sometimes the target is all platforms and windows can't be left out. Usually you can hold all the linux zealots back with a very good reason why running on windows is a valid requirement.
In this case, I do not see such a reason. Why can't your friend's cybercafe run on linux? If you did run on linux not only would this problem of cybercafe software be relatively trivial, but the other advantages including security, would be numerous obvious and unecessary to enumerate. I'm not saying that there isn't a reason the cybercafe must run windows, I'm just wondering what it is. And saying the customers want it or need it in some fashion is not a good reason. Neither is lack or knowledge on the proprietor's part.
Oh, and to answer the question, there really isn't free cybercafe software for windows. Even the pay software is easilly cracked. The best bet is hardware control. you can get dongles with timers that cut off the mice/keyboards/monitors and allow them to switch on for set amounts of time. Some are coin operated also.
Also, with vnc you can make a hacky solution. Just set a passwords on all the boxen. Then to unlock them vnc into them and do the deed. Set a timer and lock them again when time is up.
While MS is doing this and it seems like a bad thing this can be looked at from another viewpoint. MS is giving recognition to Settlers! A big and real company has recognized german board games. Hopefully in the future we will see some real and high quality computer versions of Puerto Rico, Tigris and Euphrates and all the other great board games most people have never heard of.
I've thought about coding them myself in the past, but I've never found the time or will to actually go through with it. I'm also slightly worried about getting sued. I know for some games there exist computerized versions in various formats, but none of them are particularly high quality. Most of them are actually almost unplayable due to crummy interface. And of those that are playable it is often very difficult to actually get in a game with real people who stay and play to the end due to either too much or too little popularity. Java settlers would be the prime example there.
Here's the future popularity of "real" board games in the US, yar!
There's not much more to say about this other than yes yes yes! With more clever thinking like this we can achieve "real" VR without having to jack wires into our brains. All we need now is a body suit that makes you feel things and tracks the motion of your entire body.
If you combine the tiles, vr goggles, a body suit and a light gun peripheral you've got the first quality VR fps. No more wasting money on airsoft or paintball. I can't believe nobody ever though of this before...
3d monitor? big whoop. Wont be useful for me.
What I want to see is a 3d hologram platform/table. That would revolutionize display technology forever. We could play Star Wars chess. We could watch sporting events like baseball, hockey and football while really seeing the entire field. And think of the video games you could play on it... oh yeah.
Also cool would be a display that shows a different picture depending on the angle of viewing. With just one television in the room you can have one person watching a dvd, another playing a video game and yet another channel surfing. Depending on where you are in relation to the screen in the room changes what you see, and everyone gets their own remote. Far superior to buying multiple displays.
A 3d display like this one really isn't that revolutionary or useful for me.
Yes, I'm sure a lot of people are going to dress up as him on Halloween. it was popular last year, probably moreso this year.
quoth the article
These days, of course, the dividing line between children and adult audiences has blurred.
A major factor to this phenomena is literature that so generically entertaining that anyone can read it. LOTR is the chief example.
But the other factor is obviously the lower level of intelligence of adults in our society. As people get dumber the more difficult books sell fewer copies. If LOTR was released today, for the first time, with no movies, fame or promotion how well would it do? How much of that has to do with the average adult reading level?
gnome-terminal, duh.
I agree that however much better the gmail interface is than the other webmail interfaces, its still webmail. I still want IMAP and Thunderbird. If you want a Gmail type search on your own e-mail you will have to write that software yourself. But, the Thunderbird guys could possibly be working on something like that for future versions. I don't see a use for it myself since I don't have more e-mail in my Inbox than I can see at one time. So searching through it is kind of useless.
What I would like, however, is for google to release gmail as a downloadable product. That way I can replace Squirrel Mail with gmail. Imagine running your own e-mail server with gmail running the web interface for it. THAT is teh hotness. I think that this is the department where google can really shine. If they do something like this and make it quality they can start to take market share away from things like Exchange.
Go Google.
That simulation was pretty impressive when I looked at it. Until I realized something. None of the cars are turning left or right. Theories and math and simulations work great and are often impressive. But real world factors will almost always mess them up.
So one day when there is a way to get from everywhere on earth to every other place on earth without turning left or right give me a call. Until then, let's stop and let people turn left.
I tried to checkout www.ilovebees.com to see what the story was. But visiting it with firefox 0.91 on gentoo linux causes firefox to crash and burn. Anyone else have a problem?
DDR has definitely been on the downturn recently. I first discovered it 4 years ago and was reluctant to play because it looked so stupid. But of course, as soon as I gave it a try I was hooked. At first we played 3rd and 4th mix. We picked fun songs and tried to find ways to do cool stuff. DDR was at its peak around the time 5th mix came out. These were the days when ddrfreak would have videos of crazy freestyles that were just plain unbelievable. DJ8ball's videos are still amazing.
Then around the time 6th mix came out and the hold arrows appeared its been going down. For a multitude of reasons most tournaments nowadays, the ones that still exist, are just hit the arrows tournaments. Every new version of DDR stresses harder and harder arrow combinations that go faster and faster. Playing for fun is non-existant. If you go to an arcade and do some fun songs on trick you'll have normal people gaping with the usual oohs and aahs. But the punk kids who can hit every arrow on MAX300 will scoff at you.
Just to show an example. Last year at the boardwalk in wildwood, NJ there were DDR machines ranging from 3rd mix all the way up. This year, every single DDR machine has been upgraded to Extreme. Fourth Mix Plus is still the best DDR ever, but finding it is almost impossible now.
It's the tragedy of the modern arcade industry. Pac-Man gets replace with Ms. Pac-man. Cruis'n World replaced with Cruis'n Exotica. And most arcade games now only seperate themselves from the home console due to non-standard interfaces. Gun games, dance games, racing games, etc. So even if they get released for PC/Console its not the same, even if you get cobalt flux. So games in arcades that get sequels and upgrades run the risk of being lost forever. And if a game has a culture surrounding it, like DDR, then that culture is at the mercy of arcade owners and the game's manufacturer despite the gamers opinion. For home games the gamers decide what to buy and what not to. But with arcades the arcade owner decides, and guess what, most arcade owners aren't gamers.
The only reason E3 matters is because it is a set time for when all the video game companies save announcements for. If game companies made announcements as they come it wouldn't nearly be as suspenseful, hyped, etc.
What they do is they make a pile of secret new games and systems and all that jazz. Then when E3 comes around, bang! they show you all at once. You have lots of anticipation prior to the event and lots of talk generated during and after the event.
If the announcements of new games were spread out they wouldn't have as much oomph in their announcement. Of couse this has harms too. Smaller games get lost in the folds of E3. The big companies make such big announcements, and that makes otherwise huge ones from small companies look small.
I'm a CS guy. I'm going to buy the same games no matter what any of these companies do at trade shows or otherwise. So let the marketing guys do whatever they want.
Yeah, it's assholish of me. But this is exactly what I do. The only site I really make anymore is my blog. I test it against the w3c validator for XHTML and I keep twiddling with it until it passes. I also make sure to do valid CSS also. When I have both those things I twiddle it until it looks exactly how I want in Firefox. I know that my site looks wrong in IE, but I don't care.
Of course, this isn't an option if you are making websites for profit as well as fun. But for my personal website for my personal uses I personally give IE users a big 'ol middle finger.
Just about every word in the english language has multiple definitions. You know, when you look in the dictionary and there are numbers 1,2,3, etc. Lets' take a look at one in the OED.
I. 1. a. Pleasant pastime; entertainment or amusement; recreation, diversion.
If you use that one, then yes, math can be a sport for some people.
d. Participation in games or exercises, esp. those of an athletic character or pursued in the open air; such games or amusements collectively.
That one depends on how you do the math.
c. spec. Pastime afforded by the endeavour to take or kill wild animals, game, or fish. Freq. with adjs. referring to the result achieved.
no, math is not a sport. Unless you can make a funny joke about how doing math kills wild animals. See replies to this post for witty comments.
Could it possible be that Nokia is losing money on *gasp* the N-GAGE????
Naw, that couldn't be it.
F1 cars don't run windows. They run very specialized very specific software that has to be inspected and approved by the FIA. I can pretty much guarantee that neither Windows or Linux will ever run on a Formula Machine.
Also, the fact that Ferrari wins every time shows how true a sport F1 is. The idea of a competition is to determine who is the best at a particular sport. But if you look at something like Baseball or Football there are too many other factors. If the best team plays the worst team the worst team might win once in awhile. But in F1 the best team wins every time. The other teams just need to get off their ass and make a decent car. Although it is kind of hard to compete with a Ferrari. That's because it's fucking FERRARI. Maybe if Lambourghini made F1 cars they could compete. Oh wait, Lambourghini's can't steer. Oh well.
Maybe they should just put 20 Ferraris out on the track and see who the best driver is...
Going by the games on this list it looks very wrong. Not that its untrue, but it seems like they are trying to simply make another Playstation, only small enough to carry around with you. Different gaming platforms require different games. Sure, some types of games work well in different departments. Fighting games work well in arcades and on consoles. Turn based strategy games work well just about anywhere.
But going by this list it seems like a bunch of sequels for existing playstation games. None of these games stand out as portable games. If you look at the GBA you get games like Advance Wars and Pokemon. These are portable games. They just wouldn't work out too well on consoles or pcs. Pokemon are something you carry around with you and battle your friends with. Advance Wars is the ultimate penis size measurer on long road trips. These PSP titles seem to me like they are reruns of popular 1 player Playstation games.
The PSP seems to me like its going to be a console you can take with you as opposed to a portable gaming platform. The game gear lost to the game boy for the same reason. It was sonic the hedgehog in full color versus Tetris in spinach green. We know who won.