No, you're wrong on that front. Official title bestowing is still the one of the best ways the state can reward achievement. What about all the people who work for charities? Or volunteer for schools? Or actually change people's lives? All you hear about is the celebrities, but even then they usually deserve it. Just because you don't care whether they have one or not doesn't mean they aren't important to the majority, and to those who receive them.
The people who turn them down either have: a) A problem with royalty (Benjamin Zephania or however you spell it turned it down for this reason). b) A problem with the state c) A tax problem (was this not Mick Jagger's excuse?)
That's cool, I'd turn down things from people I didn't respect either. But that certainly does not make the OBE, or any other official title, a joke.
WoW needs to place a lot of textures into memory, which is causing all the swaps. Once that's in, you should be able to max pretty much everything.
My 1.5Ghz G4 isn't enough for all the extra processing that needs to be done for the terrain. I only get 20fps tops, usually about 8. I can run at whatever resolution and fancy effects I like, as my top-of-the-PB-line 128Mb GPU isn't being tested. Neither is my 1GB of RAM. It's just the CPU, which is sadly something not so easily fixed:(
Konami's Winning Eleven football (soccer) games used to be plauged by their inability to wrestle the FIFA license from EA, so they had to license every world team individually.
Many times they didn't get it for release. So what they did was use the country's name (place names copyright free, so Green Bay is entirely usable) and rename all the players slightly differently. All the stats were there, and it was obvious who it was. For example, Michael Owen became Michael Oren.
I remember one European release back in 96 (I think) actually included all the player names as a printed sheet inside the box for "personal information purposes" or some such. It was interesting that the games have always let you change the names:)
It's not over for ESPN, it just means that the street-cred with casual gamers has been lost. And they always buy EA anyway. People who loved the games will still go and fix all the names if given the opportunity. What is a shame is that this really screws up the commentary, for which there is no fix.
Ah yes, but the OW implementation has a couple of plus points: - The thumbnails are resizable. If I thin out the drawer, the screens thin out also, allowing more on the screen (but I to admit that this entirely obscures the text.
- You can switch to standard text mode at any time.
It's not ideal by any means. How about automatically switching to text when real-estate runs out with thumbnails, for example? Or overlaying the title text translucently over the screenshot (more space that way, so more text to go on).
But it is better. When I have more than about 4 tabs open I usually forget what they are!
I'm glad somebody is noticing! I love OmniWeb, but sometimes it's a bit broken (see bungie.net, Flickr). Thumbnail tabs should have been worked on by the Mozilla guys as soon as they saw them in OW: from a usability point of view they speed up comprehension of the tab contents a lot. It's one of the things that's keeping me from going back to Camino (which works with all the sites I've ever used it with, but no funky tabs:( ).
Hopefully the fact that AOL(!) is doing things that the Mozilla Foundation isn't will add some impetus to what is a great feature.
Dude, seriously, you have a problem with that? Windows is, has, and always will be, completely non-standard, for good reason. Jesus, the drivers you need to even see the screen will be some third-party, propreitary, non-free thing. Having some drivers for your iPod is the last thing that should be bothering you about Windows. At least they run a small chance of crashing your machine.
You really need to chill out. Hit the decaff, and get over it.
Sadly it doesn't. I've found a lot of extensions aren't that great for Firefox anyway. The search box is customizable, and Mike Pinkerton, the lead guy on Camino, is very open to suggestions. *fingers crossed on the always open new windows in new tabs:)*
To all those people who, for some reason, seem to enjoy insane load times and lack of real nativity at the Altar of Firefox, please try Camino. It is actually now quicker at rendering than Safari (or at least it appears to human usage), and is written in full Cocoa. Do try it if you're using anything else. If development keeps apace, I don't think even Safari 2 would make me change.
If your CS lab is forcing you to code in Windows, they're doing something wrong. You should be coding platform-independant C, which you sure as heck won't be getting on Windows (unless you're using a godawful DOS prompt).
Like the other reply, our lab was full Sun Solaris before moving to full Red Hat 9 this year. We have no Windows machines at all.
Call me cynical, but I highly doubt Google are going to release anything useful. Maybe an update to the API.
What I'm thinking is they'll make a big fanfare about PageRank, and release the same thesis paper Brin and Page wrote at Stanford again, with a couple of tweaks.
Amen to that. I like the idea of playing a game where I feel in control. Madden is way too fast, it's an arcade game in NFL clothing. The NFL2K games are so much better it's not funny. It's shocking that Sega are trailing so badly, especially against the immaculate 2K presentation. How can anyone enjoy hearing Madden repeat a single line for the 379th time, that had absolutely no relevance to the play that unfolded? I've been playing ESPN NFL on my shiny new Xbox, and hearing Dan Stevens and Pete O'Keefe banter and comment on plays (and replays) is just spectacular, especially coupled with the precise ESPN branding, it's a wonder why they don't get these (fictional) guys actually on the TV. And the commentary just keeps getting better, year on year.
Can you please take out Ninja Gaiden from the "challenging game" list? Ninja Gaiden is not challenging. It is unfair.
F-Zero GX and Viewtiful Joe are perfect examples of hardcore gaming. You are punished harshly for mistakes. But everytime you are, the game slaps you into line and almost shows you what you did wrong, right before it tears into your chest and pulls out your heart. That split-second of clarity: "Oh f**k, I should have gone left" Challenging? Yes. Joypad breaking? Yes. Unfair? No. You just need to be better.
I'd class myself as a hardcore gamer. But I play games to have fun. I don't mind being challenged, just as I don't mind being cotton-wooled through a game, as long as the experience is sound. Ninja Gaiden was a tedious game of "On your tenth death, maybe I'll let you progress, but you won't know what you did differently". It is the first, and only game, I have ever taken back to the store. It was ridiculous. I could lose 3/4 (if not all) of my health for simply not blocking for the 3ms I thought I might get a hit in. And if I did block all the time, well then heck, let's let the enemies hurt you some other way, instead (slitting your throat, throwing you around). And that was fine. A quick class in Don't Be A Wuss 101. And then the ninjas came. With exploding shuirkens. If you were stupid enough to stop blocking: a) You'd get a shuriken on your ass, and BOOM. b) You'd get chopped up. There was no middle ground. I never felt like I had any other choice, but to be punished. Any hits I landed were luck, not skill. I have absolutely no intention of playing a game for 20 hours before I have fun. I suggest people that don't get it should grab a dictionary and look up the noun "game".
Ninja Gaiden's difficulty is not something that guy should be proud of. He should be utterly ashamed that he felt so damn clever that he was willing to sacrifice what could well be a bloody great game to the Alter of Hardcore. Give us the damn option of how much we want to be hurt, don't tell us.
As it stands, Prince of Persia remains the far better game, despite the fact it was damn easy. My second round through yielded a finish of five and a half hours. But damn, I looked and felt cool doing it.
Ninja Gaiden was desparate to make you look like an idiot.
The difference is that, like it or not, we are pretty screwed when it comes to DRM. It's coming. It's already here. Whatever. The open-source community cannot stop that happening now.
What we can do is start messing things up for everyone else. The DRM being used in FairPlay is, actually, quite fair. You pay less for the song you want, you get less rights. I find it quite difficult, however, to see how I would want to move out of the generous (relatively) rights FairPlay gives you. The music can be on more than one computer, copied to an iPod and burned to a CD. Sounds pretty good, and it's a lot better than the sort of "one purchase = one medium" rules that the RIAA would like.
By advocating PlayFair, you're essentially supporting the idea that FairPlay should be abolished, even though it's alright. Great. What comes in it's place? Something the RIAA would like a lot more I expect. Apple have done a pretty good job of pushing them to the limit thus far, a little bit more and they'll withdraw their songs from iTMS and start pushing them with some harder DRM instead.
Then we're all screwed. What needs to be done is have the authentication system opened to software developers so they can be played on OSs such as Linux. I'm sure the idea hasn't escaped Apple's mind, but that is where effort should be placed.
DeCSS is very different. DVDs were already done and dusted. Messing with them was not going to result in anything but bad news for Jon. PlayFair could result in bad news for everyone.
Siding with Apple is making the best of a bad situation.
About 25 quid (by my very quick reckoning) is peanuts to watch Miyamoto's translator talk about games:) The decomposition of games is fun, and is important to people who just want to buy games. If you understand what you enjoy, you can see why you preferred Unreal Tournament over Quake III (I know I did), when, to all intents and purposes, they are the same game.
Miyamoto is a games genius not through divine intervention but through a unique understanding of what makes games great. Although actually expressing his views is very difficult, it is definitely worth the money to see him. I wish I could be there, and hear exactly what he has to say. I've only ever heard snippits of his ideas, but he once said that the way games control is one of the most important aspects. Prince of Persia was an astonishing game built solely on that aspect, that could probably have been a lot longer coming had it not been for Super Mario 64. That game was so groundbreaking because of control in a 3D environment, not because of the 3D itself. The thinking needed to design such a system is not easy, and the industry is better off with visionaries like him.
I once went to a roundtable of an American female games journalist, the head of Rockstar in the UK, Dene Carter (of Fable fame), Miles Jacobson (of Championship Manager fame) and David Brabham (I have absolutely no intention of filling you in if you don't know;) ). Games encompass so much, marketing, psychology, art, that listening to these people's differing views was quite eye-opening.
Of note: The American female journalist was discussing how empowering Lara Croft was as a female superhero, and throwing up explanations as to why males could identify her. Dene Carter was sat out of peripheral vision, making large breast gesticulations.
Fair point, well made.
And hey, if you don't like watching people speaking about games, go and buy the latest tat from EA. There isn't much innovation to deconstruct there;)
This is certainly a very interesting idea, and has good points to it. I would hazard, however, that the CLI is most definitely not the way to go to get new users up and running with computers. The author is almost there in his article, but doesn't seem to make the leap...
Using the example that the author used, he says Tilly multitasks, but doesn't do more than one thing at once. When she wants to leave something for later, she puts it to one side. This is an almost exact description of minimizing windows. It isn't suspending programs, or moving them into the background, like UNIX. It's just putting what you're doing out of the way for the moment.
Tilly goes to the grocers and tells him what she wants. Why not point at what you want? I want my mail, click the big envelope. I want to type something, click the Word icon.
It's arguable that some of the easiest programs that run in a terminal are those that are like GUIs, just without the mouse. Pine is a perfect example. It has labelled buttons at the bottom, except you interact with them using your keyboard instead.
GUIs are still the best way of getting general users interacting with computers, it's just certain elements of GUI design that scares them witless. Working on a helpdesk for my University residential network, I reguarly hear what could almost be called fear in a voice when a dialog box or something pops up that I didn't expect, and warn the user was going to happen. GUI design is very imperitive. Boxes appear saying "DEAL WITH ME NOW" and giving themselves the utmost importance. This is what scares people. They think that because something took the time to alarm them in such a massive way, something amazingly bad must be happening. These windows often pop-up from applications that aren't being worked with. By preventing these, everyone would be a lot happier. The Mozilla new mail notification is an absolutely excellent way of telling the user something is happening, it pops up in the corner, says there's some mail, and disappears. It doesn't ding. It doesn't grab focus. It doesn't appear in the middle. It just gives you a quiet hint.
GUIs are also far too ready to boot up programs of their own accord. When users get notifications from something they didn't run explicitly, they get the fear. CLI doesn't do that, it only shows you output from things you've done.
The author says that users are scared to click buttons, in case of something going wrong. But they feel that a CLI can't do any harm. Users *do* want to point and click their way around buttons, and GUIs do complain of something wrong in essentially the same way as CLIs. Maybe it's because they have no visual feedback when they type sudo rm -rf / ? I think it's just a residual fear from the constant shouting that current GUIs do.
GUIs are currently too noisy, and the essential quietness are what these users are responding to. I would hazard that as soon as the users want to do something more difficult (that would need a pipe), they'll be desparate for a GUI interface instead.
Are you sure? That's just the way *I* feel about it. The fact is, the game does still follow basic carrot-and-stick game mechanics. You do well, you get a cut-scene. I'm under the impression that if you start giving this stuff out to children/teenagers during formative ages, then something bad is bound to happen at some point. And I've never felt that way before about any game.
The argument for Manhunt is that it happens in movies, why not games? I agree, these games do deserve to be released. But games need to have as strict regulation as movies do.
Could I play Manhunt? Probably not. I don't want to be put in a position where my hand is forced in such a way that I *have* to *murder*. Manhunt breaks some very new ground and taboos, it's simply not enough to apply the old rules, *especially* if that means that minors have easy access.
As a gun-fearing UK-type, I'm actually quite astonished that this is new for you guys. It's no wonder Senator Libermann hasn't been locked up yet!
Ever since Night Trap on the Mega CD, games have been regulated by the Britsh Board of File Classification. They're *video* games, and have been treated as such under the law. The publishers submit their games to be rated voluntarily in the main, but the BBFC would have had no qualms about slamming an 18 certificate on Manhunt, submission or no.
I don't see how people can seriously argue against this. I now fully understand why the whole selling games to minors (was that Washington?) was such a big deal! Here I was thinking that retailers were just disregarding the law:) These games shouldn't be in the hands of minors, a voluntary ESRB rating simply isn't enough to justify controlling a character who chokes people to death with a plastic bag and then the player is "rewarded" with a pretty cut-scene of it. The fact that I personally find that quite disturbing and morally reprehensible doesn't really bother me, it's been given an 18 certificate and firmly stamped as being for adults. What more can you ask for? Censorship above that which we have in movies now? No thanks.
The current problem in the UK in regards to this are the retailers (hence my previous confusion). They're quite happy to sell 18 games to parents who'll then give the game to their children, without even pointing out the certificate in the first place. I always made a point of telling parents that the game was certified 15 or 18, and the response was always the same: "Really? But it's just a game!" I'd then proceed to tell them the actual content of Grand Theft Auto III, and that was the end of that. The game would be put back, and not given into the hands of the child whom the BBFC has decided really shouldn't play it. And that's how it should be.
Not that the blame lies entirely there. Games magazines aimed at minors were shipping with demo discs that contained adult content and had a 15 certificate. I had to refuse selling a magazine to kids because of irresponsible disc compilation.
So yeah, the system in the UK doesn't work, but the idea is there:)
Thank god for that. I was about to fire off a simple "Not here, buddy" comment, but I'm glad that someone who is actually a TA sorted it out.
I'm studying at the University of Bristol right now, and we've been taught pretty well so far, I think. We started off with C (that guy wants assembler? Seriously?!) and then worked to Java, which helps a lot. Getting thrown in at the segmentation fault deep-end has it's advantages:)
As soon as we moved to Java, it's been taught as part of the Software Engineering units, so it's put into the context of The Real World, rather than just: "This is the Java syntax, now write me some programs." We're all aware that the marking itself is done by unit testing (it's even stated on the submission page where we upload the work), and our lecturer has made us write programs where we used JUnit testing on it. If the program was great, you still only got 50%. The testing also had to prove something in order to start getting the next 50%. We were also encouraged from the outset to Javadoc as much as possible.
So yeah, we've always been taught comments + testing == good, lazy == bad. I really couldn't believe that that was a rarity.
This doesn't explain the poor broadband pricing in the UK.
Our broadband is so expensive/poor because BT have a monopoly, and generally appear to sit around twiddling their thumbs as opposed to doing anything. They literally seem to own everything, and the idea of competition is just that. You get billed by someone else, but BT runs the whole show, and it's up to them how much they're going to charge and how shoddy their DSL supply is.
I was about to say exactly the same thing. Good on you. It amazes me how many people will look everywhere but their doctor.
See your GP. The fact is, it might be a placebo. The headaches might not be from a caffeine addiction for all most/. readers know, and no GP worth his salt is going to give a diagnosis online. It's just as likely to be stress related, in which case it needs looking at before it gets worse.
I think the old age defence really, really doesn't cut it. People do not get stupid when they get old. Old people are, in my experience, *cleverer*. They are far more aware of social workings than I. That's life experience. As the other reply says, there is nothing new here. The fact that it was performed over the Internet makes it no less obvious what's going on.
Let's say I take my car to the mechanics. I know nothing about the mechanics of a car (I'm only worried about the horses, baby!:) ), but I can see when I'm being screwed by the guys there. It's very easy to find some more problems. I just get them to fix what it was there for. As I am sure you, and many other people do. It's about spotting a scam. Many people are far less suspicious. That's cool. Good luck to them. But they're not losing hundreds of thousands of dollars for that extra sparkplug! When you hit triple figures for anything the yellow alert starts up for anyone who isn't making some real cheddar. And dear goodness, when the police tell you not to do something you should damn well listen!
Arena you don't fully understand + Scam != Excuse
Sorry, my reply ended in a rant as well. Merry Slashdot Christmas;D
I've been trying to switch a couple of my friends. The one I mentioned in my parent post is a prime example. I brought around my Powerbook, showed him how it did everything he wanted it to. He agreed that it did.
But, unfortunately, the Mac myths are still prevalent in the UK. I tried to convince him that I could swap files with PC users.
Him: "But where is the floppy drive?" Me: "No-one uses floppy drives anymore, just burn it onto a CD-RW" Him: "Hmm, my lecturers might want floppies" Me: "Then email it to them!"
Eventually, I managed to beat him down to the simple fact that he wasn't going to switch unless Doom III was coming with him. That's fair enough, I suppose, but 1400 for one game? Please. That's the weakest excuse ever. There's some sort of horrific Mac stigma that Apple really need to shake off. No amount of geek evangelism is going to help, because people assume that because you're a geek you *would* find it easy to use anyway. There's a bit of that, my little brother got an iMac and I came back from Uni to set it up for him. He has Jaguar and he had to keep going into the Applications folder just to launch a program. He, quite rightly, was pretty annoyed at how long it took. I dragged the application folder into his dock, and hey, it's like a start menu. OS X comes with some pretty bad default settings.
Apple needs to fix that, and then it needs to fix the people. The Switch campaign touched on it (the ads didn't reach the UK anyway), but never really drummed it in:
Macs work with Windows. Macs can read Windows files. Macs can write Windows files. Macs can do everything you want. Macs *work*.
It's not about an ego trip (Mmm, ego stroking). Honest!:)
It's like this. We all know someone who's a total petrol-head, always tinkering with his car, reading all the magazines, etc. Who's the first person you talk to when you're buying a new one?
I've long since accepted the Alpha Geek mantle pushed onto me by my friends. Whenever something is going screwy, they come and give me a call.
Now let's think about the petrolhead. Say you don't speak to him and come back with a shiny new Lada (really bad Russian car, in case they aren't in the US). Then it breaks in two days. As it would. Is your car friend going to help you? Probably not. He'd probably say you should have asked him first.
He's a more extreme case, but it was what I was shooting at. Of course I'm going to help my friends with their PC problems, but I'm not going to be happy if it was a problem they wouldn't have had by going somewhere else. Like poor after-sales. Or no expandability. Or a big sticker on the box that says "You invalidate your warranty by opening this case."
After a house and a car (or, for some, ahead of the car!) a PC is the most expensive thing you will buy. Why would you not check on your friend's knowledge?
Slashdot Mirror
No, you're wrong on that front. Official title bestowing is still the one of the best ways the state can reward achievement. What about all the people who work for charities? Or volunteer for schools? Or actually change people's lives? All you hear about is the celebrities, but even then they usually deserve it. Just because you don't care whether they have one or not doesn't mean they aren't important to the majority, and to those who receive them.
The people who turn them down either have:
a) A problem with royalty (Benjamin Zephania or however you spell it turned it down for this reason).
b) A problem with the state
c) A tax problem (was this not Mick Jagger's excuse?)
That's cool, I'd turn down things from people I didn't respect either. But that certainly does not make the OBE, or any other official title, a joke.
Its your RAM chief.
:(
WoW needs to place a lot of textures into memory, which is causing all the swaps. Once that's in, you should be able to max pretty much everything.
My 1.5Ghz G4 isn't enough for all the extra processing that needs to be done for the terrain. I only get 20fps tops, usually about 8. I can run at whatever resolution and fancy effects I like, as my top-of-the-PB-line 128Mb GPU isn't being tested. Neither is my 1GB of RAM. It's just the CPU, which is sadly something not so easily fixed
Konami's Winning Eleven football (soccer) games used to be plauged by their inability to wrestle the FIFA license from EA, so they had to license every world team individually.
:)
Many times they didn't get it for release. So what they did was use the country's name (place names copyright free, so Green Bay is entirely usable) and rename all the players slightly differently. All the stats were there, and it was obvious who it was. For example, Michael Owen became Michael Oren.
I remember one European release back in 96 (I think) actually included all the player names as a printed sheet inside the box for "personal information purposes" or some such. It was interesting that the games have always let you change the names
It's not over for ESPN, it just means that the street-cred with casual gamers has been lost. And they always buy EA anyway. People who loved the games will still go and fix all the names if given the opportunity. What is a shame is that this really screws up the commentary, for which there is no fix.
Ah yes, but the OW implementation has a couple of plus points:
- The thumbnails are resizable. If I thin out the drawer, the screens thin out also, allowing more on the screen (but I to admit that this entirely obscures the text.
- You can switch to standard text mode at any time.
It's not ideal by any means. How about automatically switching to text when real-estate runs out with thumbnails, for example? Or overlaying the title text translucently over the screenshot (more space that way, so more text to go on).
But it is better. When I have more than about 4 tabs open I usually forget what they are!
I'm glad somebody is noticing! I love OmniWeb, but sometimes it's a bit broken (see bungie.net, Flickr). Thumbnail tabs should have been worked on by the Mozilla guys as soon as they saw them in OW: from a usability point of view they speed up comprehension of the tab contents a lot. It's one of the things that's keeping me from going back to Camino (which works with all the sites I've ever used it with, but no funky tabs :( ).
Hopefully the fact that AOL(!) is doing things that the Mozilla Foundation isn't will add some impetus to what is a great feature.
It means that I wouldn't be looking to give it up any time soon, so I could do things like feed my family.
It would appear you have never had to look for a job in an industry that's outsourcing its workers during a global economic downturn.
How is you new job in burger-flipping going for you? I understand you had no trouble switching from salting the fries at that chicken joint.
Dude, seriously, you have a problem with that? Windows is, has, and always will be, completely non-standard, for good reason. Jesus, the drivers you need to even see the screen will be some third-party, propreitary, non-free thing. Having some drivers for your iPod is the last thing that should be bothering you about Windows. At least they run a small chance of crashing your machine.
You really need to chill out. Hit the decaff, and get over it.
Sadly it doesn't. I've found a lot of extensions aren't that great for Firefox anyway. The search box is customizable, and Mike Pinkerton, the lead guy on Camino, is very open to suggestions. *fingers crossed on the always open new windows in new tabs :)*
To all those people who, for some reason, seem to enjoy insane load times and lack of real nativity at the Altar of Firefox, please try Camino. It is actually now quicker at rendering than Safari (or at least it appears to human usage), and is written in full Cocoa. Do try it if you're using anything else. If development keeps apace, I don't think even Safari 2 would make me change.
If your CS lab is forcing you to code in Windows, they're doing something wrong. You should be coding platform-independant C, which you sure as heck won't be getting on Windows (unless you're using a godawful DOS prompt).
Like the other reply, our lab was full Sun Solaris before moving to full Red Hat 9 this year. We have no Windows machines at all.
Call me cynical, but I highly doubt Google are going to release anything useful. Maybe an update to the API.
What I'm thinking is they'll make a big fanfare about PageRank, and release the same thesis paper Brin and Page wrote at Stanford again, with a couple of tweaks.
No more.
Amen to that. I like the idea of playing a game where I feel in control. Madden is way too fast, it's an arcade game in NFL clothing. The NFL2K games are so much better it's not funny. It's shocking that Sega are trailing so badly, especially against the immaculate 2K presentation. How can anyone enjoy hearing Madden repeat a single line for the 379th time, that had absolutely no relevance to the play that unfolded? I've been playing ESPN NFL on my shiny new Xbox, and hearing Dan Stevens and Pete O'Keefe banter and comment on plays (and replays) is just spectacular, especially coupled with the precise ESPN branding, it's a wonder why they don't get these (fictional) guys actually on the TV. And the commentary just keeps getting better, year on year.
Madden really needs to up it's game.
Can you please take out Ninja Gaiden from the "challenging game" list? Ninja Gaiden is not challenging. It is unfair.
F-Zero GX and Viewtiful Joe are perfect examples of hardcore gaming. You are punished harshly for mistakes. But everytime you are, the game slaps you into line and almost shows you what you did wrong, right before it tears into your chest and pulls out your heart. That split-second of clarity: "Oh f**k, I should have gone left" Challenging? Yes. Joypad breaking? Yes. Unfair? No. You just need to be better.
I'd class myself as a hardcore gamer. But I play games to have fun. I don't mind being challenged, just as I don't mind being cotton-wooled through a game, as long as the experience is sound. Ninja Gaiden was a tedious game of "On your tenth death, maybe I'll let you progress, but you won't know what you did differently". It is the first, and only game, I have ever taken back to the store. It was ridiculous. I could lose 3/4 (if not all) of my health for simply not blocking for the 3ms I thought I might get a hit in. And if I did block all the time, well then heck, let's let the enemies hurt you some other way, instead (slitting your throat, throwing you around). And that was fine. A quick class in Don't Be A Wuss 101. And then the ninjas came. With exploding shuirkens. If you were stupid enough to stop blocking:
a) You'd get a shuriken on your ass, and BOOM.
b) You'd get chopped up.
There was no middle ground. I never felt like I had any other choice, but to be punished. Any hits I landed were luck, not skill. I have absolutely no intention of playing a game for 20 hours before I have fun. I suggest people that don't get it should grab a dictionary and look up the noun "game".
Ninja Gaiden's difficulty is not something that guy should be proud of. He should be utterly ashamed that he felt so damn clever that he was willing to sacrifice what could well be a bloody great game to the Alter of Hardcore. Give us the damn option of how much we want to be hurt, don't tell us.
As it stands, Prince of Persia remains the far better game, despite the fact it was damn easy. My second round through yielded a finish of five and a half hours. But damn, I looked and felt cool doing it.
Ninja Gaiden was desparate to make you look like an idiot.
The difference is that, like it or not, we are pretty screwed when it comes to DRM. It's coming. It's already here. Whatever. The open-source community cannot stop that happening now.
What we can do is start messing things up for everyone else. The DRM being used in FairPlay is, actually, quite fair. You pay less for the song you want, you get less rights. I find it quite difficult, however, to see how I would want to move out of the generous (relatively) rights FairPlay gives you. The music can be on more than one computer, copied to an iPod and burned to a CD. Sounds pretty good, and it's a lot better than the sort of "one purchase = one medium" rules that the RIAA would like.
By advocating PlayFair, you're essentially supporting the idea that FairPlay should be abolished, even though it's alright. Great. What comes in it's place? Something the RIAA would like a lot more I expect. Apple have done a pretty good job of pushing them to the limit thus far, a little bit more and they'll withdraw their songs from iTMS and start pushing them with some harder DRM instead.
Then we're all screwed. What needs to be done is have the authentication system opened to software developers so they can be played on OSs such as Linux. I'm sure the idea hasn't escaped Apple's mind, but that is where effort should be placed.
DeCSS is very different. DVDs were already done and dusted. Messing with them was not going to result in anything but bad news for Jon. PlayFair could result in bad news for everyone.
Siding with Apple is making the best of a bad situation.
About 25 quid (by my very quick reckoning) is peanuts to watch Miyamoto's translator talk about games :) The decomposition of games is fun, and is important to people who just want to buy games. If you understand what you enjoy, you can see why you preferred Unreal Tournament over Quake III (I know I did), when, to all intents and purposes, they are the same game.
;) ). Games encompass so much, marketing, psychology, art, that listening to these people's differing views was quite eye-opening.
;)
Miyamoto is a games genius not through divine intervention but through a unique understanding of what makes games great. Although actually expressing his views is very difficult, it is definitely worth the money to see him. I wish I could be there, and hear exactly what he has to say. I've only ever heard snippits of his ideas, but he once said that the way games control is one of the most important aspects. Prince of Persia was an astonishing game built solely on that aspect, that could probably have been a lot longer coming had it not been for Super Mario 64. That game was so groundbreaking because of control in a 3D environment, not because of the 3D itself. The thinking needed to design such a system is not easy, and the industry is better off with visionaries like him.
I once went to a roundtable of an American female games journalist, the head of Rockstar in the UK, Dene Carter (of Fable fame), Miles Jacobson (of Championship Manager fame) and David Brabham (I have absolutely no intention of filling you in if you don't know
Of note: The American female journalist was discussing how empowering Lara Croft was as a female superhero, and throwing up explanations as to why males could identify her. Dene Carter was sat out of peripheral vision, making large breast gesticulations.
Fair point, well made.
And hey, if you don't like watching people speaking about games, go and buy the latest tat from EA. There isn't much innovation to deconstruct there
This is certainly a very interesting idea, and has good points to it. I would hazard, however, that the CLI is most definitely not the way to go to get new users up and running with computers. The author is almost there in his article, but doesn't seem to make the leap...
Using the example that the author used, he says Tilly multitasks, but doesn't do more than one thing at once. When she wants to leave something for later, she puts it to one side. This is an almost exact description of minimizing windows. It isn't suspending programs, or moving them into the background, like UNIX. It's just putting what you're doing out of the way for the moment.
Tilly goes to the grocers and tells him what she wants. Why not point at what you want? I want my mail, click the big envelope. I want to type something, click the Word icon.
It's arguable that some of the easiest programs that run in a terminal are those that are like GUIs, just without the mouse. Pine is a perfect example. It has labelled buttons at the bottom, except you interact with them using your keyboard instead.
GUIs are still the best way of getting general users interacting with computers, it's just certain elements of GUI design that scares them witless. Working on a helpdesk for my University residential network, I reguarly hear what could almost be called fear in a voice when a dialog box or something pops up that I didn't expect, and warn the user was going to happen. GUI design is very imperitive. Boxes appear saying "DEAL WITH ME NOW" and giving themselves the utmost importance. This is what scares people. They think that because something took the time to alarm them in such a massive way, something amazingly bad must be happening. These windows often pop-up from applications that aren't being worked with. By preventing these, everyone would be a lot happier. The Mozilla new mail notification is an absolutely excellent way of telling the user something is happening, it pops up in the corner, says there's some mail, and disappears. It doesn't ding. It doesn't grab focus. It doesn't appear in the middle. It just gives you a quiet hint.
GUIs are also far too ready to boot up programs of their own accord. When users get notifications from something they didn't run explicitly, they get the fear. CLI doesn't do that, it only shows you output from things you've done.
The author says that users are scared to click buttons, in case of something going wrong. But they feel that a CLI can't do any harm. Users *do* want to point and click their way around buttons, and GUIs do complain of something wrong in essentially the same way as CLIs. Maybe it's because they have no visual feedback when they type sudo rm -rf / ? I think it's just a residual fear from the constant shouting that current GUIs do.
GUIs are currently too noisy, and the essential quietness are what these users are responding to. I would hazard that as soon as the users want to do something more difficult (that would need a pipe), they'll be desparate for a GUI interface instead.
Are you sure? That's just the way *I* feel about it. The fact is, the game does still follow basic carrot-and-stick game mechanics. You do well, you get a cut-scene. I'm under the impression that if you start giving this stuff out to children/teenagers during formative ages, then something bad is bound to happen at some point. And I've never felt that way before about any game.
The argument for Manhunt is that it happens in movies, why not games? I agree, these games do deserve to be released. But games need to have as strict regulation as movies do.
Could I play Manhunt? Probably not. I don't want to be put in a position where my hand is forced in such a way that I *have* to *murder*. Manhunt breaks some very new ground and taboos, it's simply not enough to apply the old rules, *especially* if that means that minors have easy access.
As a gun-fearing UK-type, I'm actually quite astonished that this is new for you guys. It's no wonder Senator Libermann hasn't been locked up yet!
:) These games shouldn't be in the hands of minors, a voluntary ESRB rating simply isn't enough to justify controlling a character who chokes people to death with a plastic bag and then the player is "rewarded" with a pretty cut-scene of it. The fact that I personally find that quite disturbing and morally reprehensible doesn't really bother me, it's been given an 18 certificate and firmly stamped as being for adults. What more can you ask for? Censorship above that which we have in movies now? No thanks.
:)
Ever since Night Trap on the Mega CD, games have been regulated by the Britsh Board of File Classification. They're *video* games, and have been treated as such under the law. The publishers submit their games to be rated voluntarily in the main, but the BBFC would have had no qualms about slamming an 18 certificate on Manhunt, submission or no.
I don't see how people can seriously argue against this. I now fully understand why the whole selling games to minors (was that Washington?) was such a big deal! Here I was thinking that retailers were just disregarding the law
The current problem in the UK in regards to this are the retailers (hence my previous confusion). They're quite happy to sell 18 games to parents who'll then give the game to their children, without even pointing out the certificate in the first place. I always made a point of telling parents that the game was certified 15 or 18, and the response was always the same: "Really? But it's just a game!" I'd then proceed to tell them the actual content of Grand Theft Auto III, and that was the end of that. The game would be put back, and not given into the hands of the child whom the BBFC has decided really shouldn't play it. And that's how it should be.
Not that the blame lies entirely there. Games magazines aimed at minors were shipping with demo discs that contained adult content and had a 15 certificate. I had to refuse selling a magazine to kids because of irresponsible disc compilation.
So yeah, the system in the UK doesn't work, but the idea is there
Thank god for that. I was about to fire off a simple "Not here, buddy" comment, but I'm glad that someone who is actually a TA sorted it out.
:)
I'm studying at the University of Bristol right now, and we've been taught pretty well so far, I think. We started off with C (that guy wants assembler? Seriously?!) and then worked to Java, which helps a lot. Getting thrown in at the segmentation fault deep-end has it's advantages
As soon as we moved to Java, it's been taught as part of the Software Engineering units, so it's put into the context of The Real World, rather than just: "This is the Java syntax, now write me some programs." We're all aware that the marking itself is done by unit testing (it's even stated on the submission page where we upload the work), and our lecturer has made us write programs where we used JUnit testing on it. If the program was great, you still only got 50%. The testing also had to prove something in order to start getting the next 50%. We were also encouraged from the outset to Javadoc as much as possible.
So yeah, we've always been taught comments + testing == good, lazy == bad. I really couldn't believe that that was a rarity.
Chris
This doesn't explain the poor broadband pricing in the UK.
Our broadband is so expensive/poor because BT have a monopoly, and generally appear to sit around twiddling their thumbs as opposed to doing anything. They literally seem to own everything, and the idea of competition is just that. You get billed by someone else, but BT runs the whole show, and it's up to them how much they're going to charge and how shoddy their DSL supply is.
I was about to say exactly the same thing. Good on you. It amazes me how many people will look everywhere but their doctor.
/. readers know, and no GP worth his salt is going to give a diagnosis online. It's just as likely to be stress related, in which case it needs looking at before it gets worse.
See your GP. The fact is, it might be a placebo. The headaches might not be from a caffeine addiction for all most
See your GP.
I think the old age defence really, really doesn't cut it. People do not get stupid when they get old. Old people are, in my experience, *cleverer*. They are far more aware of social workings than I. That's life experience. As the other reply says, there is nothing new here. The fact that it was performed over the Internet makes it no less obvious what's going on.
:) ), but I can see when I'm being screwed by the guys there. It's very easy to find some more problems. I just get them to fix what it was there for. As I am sure you, and many other people do. It's about spotting a scam. Many people are far less suspicious. That's cool. Good luck to them. But they're not losing hundreds of thousands of dollars for that extra sparkplug! When you hit triple figures for anything the yellow alert starts up for anyone who isn't making some real cheddar. And dear goodness, when the police tell you not to do something you should damn well listen!
;D
Let's say I take my car to the mechanics. I know nothing about the mechanics of a car (I'm only worried about the horses, baby!
Arena you don't fully understand + Scam != Excuse
Sorry, my reply ended in a rant as well. Merry Slashdot Christmas
I've been trying to switch a couple of my friends. The one I mentioned in my parent post is a prime example. I brought around my Powerbook, showed him how it did everything he wanted it to. He agreed that it did.
But, unfortunately, the Mac myths are still prevalent in the UK. I tried to convince him that I could swap files with PC users.
Him: "But where is the floppy drive?"
Me: "No-one uses floppy drives anymore, just burn it onto a CD-RW"
Him: "Hmm, my lecturers might want floppies"
Me: "Then email it to them!"
Eventually, I managed to beat him down to the simple fact that he wasn't going to switch unless Doom III was coming with him. That's fair enough, I suppose, but 1400 for one game? Please. That's the weakest excuse ever. There's some sort of horrific Mac stigma that Apple really need to shake off. No amount of geek evangelism is going to help, because people assume that because you're a geek you *would* find it easy to use anyway. There's a bit of that, my little brother got an iMac and I came back from Uni to set it up for him. He has Jaguar and he had to keep going into the Applications folder just to launch a program. He, quite rightly, was pretty annoyed at how long it took. I dragged the application folder into his dock, and hey, it's like a start menu. OS X comes with some pretty bad default settings.
Apple needs to fix that, and then it needs to fix the people. The Switch campaign touched on it (the ads didn't reach the UK anyway), but never really drummed it in:
Macs work with Windows. Macs can read Windows files. Macs can write Windows files. Macs can do everything you want. Macs *work*.
It's not about an ego trip (Mmm, ego stroking). Honest! :)
It's like this. We all know someone who's a total petrol-head, always tinkering with his car, reading all the magazines, etc. Who's the first person you talk to when you're buying a new one?
I've long since accepted the Alpha Geek mantle pushed onto me by my friends. Whenever something is going screwy, they come and give me a call.
Now let's think about the petrolhead. Say you don't speak to him and come back with a shiny new Lada (really bad Russian car, in case they aren't in the US). Then it breaks in two days. As it would. Is your car friend going to help you? Probably not. He'd probably say you should have asked him first.
He's a more extreme case, but it was what I was shooting at. Of course I'm going to help my friends with their PC problems, but I'm not going to be happy if it was a problem they wouldn't have had by going somewhere else. Like poor after-sales. Or no expandability. Or a big sticker on the box that says "You invalidate your warranty by opening this case."
After a house and a car (or, for some, ahead of the car!) a PC is the most expensive thing you will buy. Why would you not check on your friend's knowledge?