I've actually found that clerks in stores have a much greater opinion of Nintendo than most Halo fanboys. I attribute this to the fact that they are trained to sell things and will say all products on sale are good. But I also attribute it to the fact that clerks in game stores have a lot of time to sit around playing lots of games. People who actually play Nintendo games and give them a chance tend to like them. The only people who dislike them are the prejudiced punk kids.
Easy. In present days there are some assembly instructions that can be executed simultaneously. With a chip like this however, all bets would be off. Instead of just a meager few instructions that could be executed simultaneously you would be able to execute any number of instructions simultaneously.
So if you have a function that say does 10 additions and 10 moves you would first figure out if any of them needed to be done before or after each other. Then see which ones don't matter. Then write the function to do as many at once as possible.
It really doesn't matter for anyone other than the compiler writers. Those guys will write the compiler to do this kind of assembly level optimization for you. The trick is writing a high level language, or modifying an existing one, so the compiler can tell which things must be executed in order and which can be executed side by side.
WRONG WRONG WRONG. Read what I wrote in my blog about my own troubles with Linux sound. My pc has two well supported alsa sound cards. The SB Live! Value AND the on-board nforce chip both supported very well by alsa. It's rather easy to get reliable sound where mp3s and movies and everything just work.
Surround sound fails miserably. 4.1 audio? 5.1? Digital output? Just kill yourself. In windows it just works and great. Not to mention how even the stereo sound in windows is of significantly higher audio quality.
IMHO Ubunutu is as close as we are to Linux being ready for the desktop. But honestly, until there is a single sound system that just works flawlessly no chance. I run Linux, so do my parents. But I don't expect anyone who actually cares about audio to do it. Unless they have a supported sound card and only want 2.1.
fyi I run gentoo on computers I care about and Ubuntu on computers I don't.
This is a stab at the revolution. In the current gen lots of people get xboxes full of roms. In the next round people will be getting PS3s full of roms. Kind of diminishes the revolution where you have to pay for the roms and only have a small amount of flash memory to put them in.
The rest of the revolution better be as amazing as they say, or Nintendo's current only "revolutionary" feature is shut out. Maybe Nintendo is right that if they reveal what is revolutionary so soon that the other companies are going to steal it. If they can just hold out to the point where MS and Sony can't reasonably make big modifications to their final system designs fast enough, then they can reveal all without fear of counter-attacks like this.
I know a guy who was the primary programmer at a similarly sized company and also the lone admin. He consistently worked weeks of over 40 hours. Since programming was his first priority he rarely did admin stuff. Low priority admin tasks would never get done unless the projects really really dried up. High priority admin tasks would mean overnights and terrible times.
The boss likely doesn't want to hire a separate admin since that person doesn't make direct money for the company. A programmer makes software which brings revenue. An admin makes computers work, but doesn't bring in any direct revenue.
If you are moving there will be a lot of up front admin work. If you can set something up that is really kickass from the get go, then you can probably keep the amount of admin time per week in the future really low, but not down to 1%. Of course, this requires basically not programming for awhile just to plan and set everything up. But if you don't then the admin work will be this ghost constantly haunting your higher priority programming.
Pole Position IS indeed better than MC3 (don't even know what that is) and Burnout 3. And Outrun is better than Outrun 2. Forza, Initial D v3, and Gran Turismo 4 are better than the others.
Just because a game has better graphics doesn't make it a better game. But also, just because a game has worse graphics doesn't make it a better game either. A better game is a better game regardless of graphics. For example, Virtua Racing is better than any of the Need for Speed games, but not better than the above mentioned.
Do it. Anyone who thinks cell towers are ugly can shove it. When I can't ride a commuter train and get a PCMCIA EV-DO air card working for the whole trip, that's a problem.
If your building is sufficiently distant from the tower, you need not worry much about cancer or interference. Just don't go any closer to it than you have to. There are laws that prevent them from putting it too close to where people go, and there will be sufficient warning signs near the base.
At the same time though, get your money's worth. Demand free phone service for everyone and as much cash as you can get. Other than perfect reception at work the best part about getting a cell tower on your property is all the great stuff the phone company will give you. Maybe you can get some OC3 action in the house.
No, you'd be surprised at how much internet they have there. It's not exactly South Korea, but it aint shabby either. Dial up is not uncommon in most middle eastern countries. Why don't we hear more about this in the middle east? Because it isn't really happening so much. They aren't really censoring the Internet out there, they're letting it go.
Some people are real gamers. They care about games. These people don't care about graphics, only gameplay.
There are others who are not gamers. They just happen to be people who play or enjoy playing games. These people are often prejudice against games with less graphics and towards those with better.
Just like people who care about movies often go to see movies based on quality regardless of budget, while people who simply enjoy movies see big budget blockbusters.
The key is that the big money is in making the big games with fancy graphics. Because there just aren't that many people who actually care about games as opposed to people who just enjoy them.
Need proof? Play counter strike. You make a lot more money selling some fancy looking piece of poop to those shitcockers than you would selling a balanced work of art to the 100 guys who actually care. Look at the MMOs where you have people addicted to collecting worthless digital items and customizing avatars that look cool, obviously they never played a MUD. And of course, the people who didnt like Wind Waker before ever even playing it based on it's looks. They do realize that at heart it is essentially the same game that Zelda 64 was and the new one is going to be? No, because they aren't real gamers.
Those of us left who ARE real gamers have to stick together. Gotta make sure that quality games keep getting made for us to enjoy regardless whatever fancy graphics crap comes out. I have high hopes for Civilization 4 and the Revolution. Let's see if they can be fulfilled or not.
In other words, set a policy, don't hunt for them, but if you happen to come across one randomly then shoot it. You don't want them to take your booty, arr!
GTA the most american game there is is the most single player game there is.
Nintendogs is a wireless multiplayer game. In fact, most nintendo games are social experiences, mario party, mario tennis, FF:CC, four swords. Playstation and XBoX seem to have the single player games like the RPGs and the 3d platform shooters and such. And Nintendo is more popular in japan.
Yes, yes they can. Remember, we're talking about Japan here. Where in the US something like Katamari or Nintendogs will be a cult hit by people who can get over themselves and enjoy something that is fun. In Japan people go crazy for it and buy a zillion copies. Why do you think japanese culture is becoming the awesome stuff that US geeks love?
I predict that Nintendogs will sell well to people in the US, but only to people who wouldn't be embarassed to be caught playing it.
Right now the only succesful games on the PC are the hardcore fpses (HL2), the MMOs and the tiny games like Snood for people to play at work. The XBoX killed off everything else.
Look at every genre of game which was succesful on the PC, the XBox basically took over. Microsoft kind of shot themselves in the foot on this one too. Sure, everyone gets an XBox. But now there are so few new awesome games on the PC that needing to run Windows for games is less and less of an issue. If Steam didn't exist or it ran on Linux, Windows would be absolutely useless. Thanks to the XBoX.
We've got the electric motor to make the car go. Do we have the power source to juice it up? How much electricity does it take? Will a few fuel cells do the trick? How about some batteries? How long will the car drive? That's what really counts.
I read this a few days ago, but I gotta agree with a lot of what this guy is saying. Some of his points can be debated, like save spots, but most of them are just dead on, like bad AI. I was thinking previously that in the next gen sony and MS were just going to make more of the same games, and that hopefully Nintendo would give us a real revolution in which there are new gaming experiences. However, after reading this I remember there IS still room for shittons of innovation in the current gaming paradigm of a screen, speakers and a gamepad. Nintendo is sort of taking an easy way out by innovating in other areas than these fundamental, obvious and real problems. If the other guys who are making plain old video games with the same old interface can address many of these issues you can be ready for some games that will sell by the millions. Maybe this is how there will be a PC gaming comes back. If the next gen consoles dont' fix these things, perhaps some newer PC games will buck the trend and we'll have us a revival.
This is great. I've been using nforce 2 IGP for awhile now with great results. Every computer I've built since its release that wasn't going to be playing games got a Micro ATX mobo with nforce IGP. Now that it's getting an upgrade I think I might hold off on buying new machines until it's available. As far as I'm concerned anyone not playing the latest and greatest games shoudl get an IGP mobo with built in sound and ethernet, MSI makes some pretty good ones. I mean, for the price of just a motherboard you get a soundcard, NIC and video card for free. You just can't beat that price.
Because every piece of open source software is something that was reverse engineered, and none of those awesome new features are things that people came up with on their own.
The happy hacking keyboard seen there is much better. I got my relatively new employer to purchase the black USB lite 2 version for me. It's so amazing that I'm getting another one for home. Best keyboard I ever used, I'm so used to it now. The pro version is super expensive, boasts the same features as das keyboard with a different layout. But best of all it has actual springs in the keys rather than the membranes. High quality.
I do somewhat miss the media keys of my old logitech, but I just came up with decent key combinations for the functions I actually used. i.e: meta+up = volume up. Just have to be careful not to use any combos already in use by other programs. At least I don't have the problem where I have a ton of media keys all over and only maybe 5 of them I actually use.
What the hell took so long for this to happen? There are thousands of viruses all around and most of them are so benign. They just eat system resources, send spam, show ads and other bs. It took way too long for someone to make a virus that actually compromises data. I hope soon someone makes one that takes important data files and uploads them to a web server for public view. And another one that overwrites the hard drives 3 or 4 times to prevent data recovery.
Maybe when this happens people will actually pay more attention to computer security, instead of just putting up with the inconvenience.
What about everything else besides embedded Linux? It's no simple task to make software for blackberry, qualcomm phones, palm, symbianos, ngage or any other mobile computing platform. Some have freely available dev kits and some don't. But none of them are simple, free and open simultaneously. If they were then cell providers wouldn't be able to rip people off by selling them Tetris.
Sure, look for me, I'll be wearing a metroid shirt. My roommate will be wearing a pirate shirt, he has long hair and you might mistake him for a woman. Don't expect a good game though, I kind of suck:(
Slashdot Mirror
I've actually found that clerks in stores have a much greater opinion of Nintendo than most Halo fanboys. I attribute this to the fact that they are trained to sell things and will say all products on sale are good. But I also attribute it to the fact that clerks in game stores have a lot of time to sit around playing lots of games. People who actually play Nintendo games and give them a chance tend to like them. The only people who dislike them are the prejudiced punk kids.
Easy. In present days there are some assembly instructions that can be executed simultaneously. With a chip like this however, all bets would be off. Instead of just a meager few instructions that could be executed simultaneously you would be able to execute any number of instructions simultaneously.
So if you have a function that say does 10 additions and 10 moves you would first figure out if any of them needed to be done before or after each other. Then see which ones don't matter. Then write the function to do as many at once as possible.
It really doesn't matter for anyone other than the compiler writers. Those guys will write the compiler to do this kind of assembly level optimization for you. The trick is writing a high level language, or modifying an existing one, so the compiler can tell which things must be executed in order and which can be executed side by side.
WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Read what I wrote in my blog about my own troubles with Linux sound. My pc has two well supported alsa sound cards. The SB Live! Value AND the on-board nforce chip both supported very well by alsa. It's rather easy to get reliable sound where mp3s and movies and everything just work.
Surround sound fails miserably. 4.1 audio? 5.1? Digital output? Just kill yourself. In windows it just works and great. Not to mention how even the stereo sound in windows is of significantly higher audio quality.
IMHO Ubunutu is as close as we are to Linux being ready for the desktop. But honestly, until there is a single sound system that just works flawlessly no chance. I run Linux, so do my parents. But I don't expect anyone who actually cares about audio to do it. Unless they have a supported sound card and only want 2.1.
fyi I run gentoo on computers I care about and Ubuntu on computers I don't.
This is a stab at the revolution. In the current gen lots of people get xboxes full of roms. In the next round people will be getting PS3s full of roms. Kind of diminishes the revolution where you have to pay for the roms and only have a small amount of flash memory to put them in.
The rest of the revolution better be as amazing as they say, or Nintendo's current only "revolutionary" feature is shut out. Maybe Nintendo is right that if they reveal what is revolutionary so soon that the other companies are going to steal it. If they can just hold out to the point where MS and Sony can't reasonably make big modifications to their final system designs fast enough, then they can reveal all without fear of counter-attacks like this.
I know a guy who was the primary programmer at a similarly sized company and also the lone admin. He consistently worked weeks of over 40 hours. Since programming was his first priority he rarely did admin stuff. Low priority admin tasks would never get done unless the projects really really dried up. High priority admin tasks would mean overnights and terrible times.
The boss likely doesn't want to hire a separate admin since that person doesn't make direct money for the company. A programmer makes software which brings revenue. An admin makes computers work, but doesn't bring in any direct revenue.
If you are moving there will be a lot of up front admin work. If you can set something up that is really kickass from the get go, then you can probably keep the amount of admin time per week in the future really low, but not down to 1%. Of course, this requires basically not programming for awhile just to plan and set everything up. But if you don't then the admin work will be this ghost constantly haunting your higher priority programming.
Pole Position IS indeed better than MC3 (don't even know what that is) and Burnout 3. And Outrun is better than Outrun 2. Forza, Initial D v3, and Gran Turismo 4 are better than the others.
Just because a game has better graphics doesn't make it a better game. But also, just because a game has worse graphics doesn't make it a better game either. A better game is a better game regardless of graphics. For example, Virtua Racing is better than any of the Need for Speed games, but not better than the above mentioned.
Do it. Anyone who thinks cell towers are ugly can shove it. When I can't ride a commuter train and get a PCMCIA EV-DO air card working for the whole trip, that's a problem.
If your building is sufficiently distant from the tower, you need not worry much about cancer or interference. Just don't go any closer to it than you have to. There are laws that prevent them from putting it too close to where people go, and there will be sufficient warning signs near the base.
At the same time though, get your money's worth. Demand free phone service for everyone and as much cash as you can get. Other than perfect reception at work the best part about getting a cell tower on your property is all the great stuff the phone company will give you. Maybe you can get some OC3 action in the house.
No, you'd be surprised at how much internet they have there. It's not exactly South Korea, but it aint shabby either. Dial up is not uncommon in most middle eastern countries. Why don't we hear more about this in the middle east? Because it isn't really happening so much. They aren't really censoring the Internet out there, they're letting it go.
Some people are real gamers. They care about games. These people don't care about graphics, only gameplay.
There are others who are not gamers. They just happen to be people who play or enjoy playing games. These people are often prejudice against games with less graphics and towards those with better.
Just like people who care about movies often go to see movies based on quality regardless of budget, while people who simply enjoy movies see big budget blockbusters.
The key is that the big money is in making the big games with fancy graphics. Because there just aren't that many people who actually care about games as opposed to people who just enjoy them.
Need proof? Play counter strike. You make a lot more money selling some fancy looking piece of poop to those shitcockers than you would selling a balanced work of art to the 100 guys who actually care. Look at the MMOs where you have people addicted to collecting worthless digital items and customizing avatars that look cool, obviously they never played a MUD. And of course, the people who didnt like Wind Waker before ever even playing it based on it's looks. They do realize that at heart it is essentially the same game that Zelda 64 was and the new one is going to be? No, because they aren't real gamers.
Those of us left who ARE real gamers have to stick together. Gotta make sure that quality games keep getting made for us to enjoy regardless whatever fancy graphics crap comes out. I have high hopes for Civilization 4 and the Revolution. Let's see if they can be fulfilled or not.
In other words, set a policy, don't hunt for them, but if you happen to come across one randomly then shoot it. You don't want them to take your booty, arr!
GTA the most american game there is is the most single player game there is.
Nintendogs is a wireless multiplayer game. In fact, most nintendo games are social experiences, mario party, mario tennis, FF:CC, four swords. Playstation and XBoX seem to have the single player games like the RPGs and the 3d platform shooters and such. And Nintendo is more popular in japan.
Your point has much merit, but not in this case.
Yes, yes they can. Remember, we're talking about Japan here. Where in the US something like Katamari or Nintendogs will be a cult hit by people who can get over themselves and enjoy something that is fun. In Japan people go crazy for it and buy a zillion copies. Why do you think japanese culture is becoming the awesome stuff that US geeks love?
I predict that Nintendogs will sell well to people in the US, but only to people who wouldn't be embarassed to be caught playing it.
Right now the only succesful games on the PC are the hardcore fpses (HL2), the MMOs and the tiny games like Snood for people to play at work. The XBoX killed off everything else.
Look at every genre of game which was succesful on the PC, the XBox basically took over. Microsoft kind of shot themselves in the foot on this one too. Sure, everyone gets an XBox. But now there are so few new awesome games on the PC that needing to run Windows for games is less and less of an issue. If Steam didn't exist or it ran on Linux, Windows would be absolutely useless. Thanks to the XBoX.
Maybe now AIM file transfers will work reliably in gaim.
We've got the electric motor to make the car go. Do we have the power source to juice it up? How much electricity does it take? Will a few fuel cells do the trick? How about some batteries? How long will the car drive? That's what really counts.
Great, now i have a list of username which can easily be cracked with a dictionary crack.
I read this a few days ago, but I gotta agree with a lot of what this guy is saying. Some of his points can be debated, like save spots, but most of them are just dead on, like bad AI.
I was thinking previously that in the next gen sony and MS were just going to make more of the same games, and that hopefully Nintendo would give us a real revolution in which there are new gaming experiences. However, after reading this I remember there IS still room for shittons of innovation in the current gaming paradigm of a screen, speakers and a gamepad. Nintendo is sort of taking an easy way out by innovating in other areas than these fundamental, obvious and real problems. If the other guys who are making plain old video games with the same old interface can address many of these issues you can be ready for some games that will sell by the millions.
Maybe this is how there will be a PC gaming comes back. If the next gen consoles dont' fix these things, perhaps some newer PC games will buck the trend and we'll have us a revival.
This is great. I've been using nforce 2 IGP for awhile now with great results. Every computer I've built since its release that wasn't going to be playing games got a Micro ATX mobo with nforce IGP. Now that it's getting an upgrade I think I might hold off on buying new machines until it's available. As far as I'm concerned anyone not playing the latest and greatest games shoudl get an IGP mobo with built in sound and ethernet, MSI makes some pretty good ones. I mean, for the price of just a motherboard you get a soundcard, NIC and video card for free. You just can't beat that price.
Because every piece of open source software is something that was reverse engineered, and none of those awesome new features are things that people came up with on their own.
Firefox, BitTorrent.
I'll allow replies to provide more examples.
http://store.yahoo.com/pfuca-store/haphackeyser.ht ml
The happy hacking keyboard seen there is much better. I got my relatively new employer to purchase the black USB lite 2 version for me. It's so amazing that I'm getting another one for home. Best keyboard I ever used, I'm so used to it now. The pro version is super expensive, boasts the same features as das keyboard with a different layout. But best of all it has actual springs in the keys rather than the membranes. High quality.
I do somewhat miss the media keys of my old logitech, but I just came up with decent key combinations for the functions I actually used. i.e: meta+up = volume up. Just have to be careful not to use any combos already in use by other programs. At least I don't have the problem where I have a ton of media keys all over and only maybe 5 of them I actually use.
The littlest violin is playing for your business model.
Take a look
What the hell took so long for this to happen? There are thousands of viruses all around and most of them are so benign. They just eat system resources, send spam, show ads and other bs. It took way too long for someone to make a virus that actually compromises data. I hope soon someone makes one that takes important data files and uploads them to a web server for public view. And another one that overwrites the hard drives 3 or 4 times to prevent data recovery.
Maybe when this happens people will actually pay more attention to computer security, instead of just putting up with the inconvenience.
What about everything else besides embedded Linux? It's no simple task to make software for blackberry, qualcomm phones, palm, symbianos, ngage or any other mobile computing platform. Some have freely available dev kits and some don't. But none of them are simple, free and open simultaneously. If they were then cell providers wouldn't be able to rip people off by selling them Tetris.
If it's communism, then isn't every computer in Cuba owned by the state?
Sure, look for me, I'll be wearing a metroid shirt. My roommate will be wearing a pirate shirt, he has long hair and you might mistake him for a woman. Don't expect a good game though, I kind of suck :(