I recall reading an article about a year ago (it may have even been on Slashdot) about the abyssmal writing skills our children have, where they would literally type 'u' and 'r' into their school assignments, and wonder why they were failing.
With computing becoming an increasingly prominant part of our lives, I wonder if we should be teaching typing skills right alongside cursive (that's a style of writing created with pencil and paper, for those not familiar;) ) - The reason why 'u' and 'r' started appearing was mostly because of the speed issue. Two extra letters may not seem a big deal for us, but for someone who does not primarily use a computer (or spend too much time browsing MySpace instead of writing in it), it may very well take an extra 30 to 60 seconds to find.
And the complete lack of dedicated servers, which make multiplayer games above 4 users next to worthless with the amount of lag. Oh, and the fact that they want to use ranked games, using some dipwad's home internet connection.
Exactly - I was going to post the same thing, but figured someone already did. This is absolutely true. I've NEVER had a problem with Usenet.
You know why? Because it's also a community, like any other.
Anytime someone posts something shady, there will always be a post in which someone calls it out, right in the subject line. So if someone posts a virus, 20 minutes later, someone's replied warning you of it.
You only catch viruses on Usenet the same way you do in email - by not using your head.
It is a bug in RC1 - the only "what's new" entry for RC2 is "several fixes to automated update system". I was getting the same thing on Beta 2 for RC1 - I eventually uninstalled Beta2 to install RC1 fresh. The transition from RC1 to RC2 was smooth, however.
Well, I have to say - are they going to fill up the Blu-Ray discs with actual game CONTENT (i.e. textures/models/maps.. the important stuff).. or do they want to stick feature-length cutscenes?
If it's the latter.. then it's no big loss. I have trouble seeing why 9 GB is going to be that big of a problem for this generation of games. Sure, music will probably be the largest assets, but there are nice ways to losslessly compress them.
Markup's gonna be quite a bit more than that. Take the HDD for example, in which a -public- cost for the 20GB 2.5" SATA drive (which is what they're using) is $67 at Newegg.
Multiply that by MS' buying power to not need retail, coupled with the sheer number of units they'd initially buy (2 million, I believe is their initial rollout), and you've got something that could be sold for $50 with a decent amount of profit.
What will they be selling it for? $100. (Yes, this is an official price that can also be located on xbox.com)
Xbox 360 "Core System" (no HDD, wired controller only) $299.99 Xbox 360 "Premium" (HDD, Wireless, headset, remote) $399.99
Japan: Xbox360 Premium Edition, $349.99
So MS screwed the USA twice on this deal.. first by contridicting every single one of their interviews and announcements since before E3 ("one sku only", "wireless and hdd", "around $300"), but the ONE thing that the US wants (one sku for a decent price), they're giving to Japan.
The Xbox/MS Games team was the only part of MS that "got it"... now it seems like the business practices plaguing the rest of the company are slowly infecting the last bastion of customer appreciation.
I am incredibly confused by the random statements here and there saying Steam 'annoys' end-users.
The only problem with Steam I ever had was when reformatting my drive - I backed up my GCF's, and restored them in the same directory format... but the new Steam exec's had changed the installation, so I had to re-download all my games again. But even that wasn't a big of a deal, and not any different than if I hadn't backed them up at all.
What's so wrong with Steam? It's a very convenient distribution channel. It's not like it prevents you from using switches like -console and -dev, it doesn't forbid third-party mods..
I used to play CasinoOnNet until I lost my money due to some obvious win-catching code.
I was steadily making my way, after depositing a good $200, to about the $750 mark.. I'd win a couple hands, lose a couple hands.. it was all fairly even. Once I hit $750, I lost every single solitary hand until I had about $50 left. (And I wasn't making large bets, either, pretty much the same type all along)
Then they'd have update emails they'd send every month, and have a completely obvious trivia question about one of their special events that month - answer it correctly and they randomly give you between $5 and $100.. well, out of the 5 I've ever gotten, they were all $5, and it turns out those bastards put transaction fees and timeout fees on these things.
I didn't use my account for 5 months, and three of the 5 bonuses I collected 'expired', then the remaining $10 got 'charged' for other inactivity.. making my $25 worth of bonuses worth $7.50.
Of course, emails to their support (which I did when the odds went (artificially) and astronomically sour), were met with basically "f you, pay me" attitudes, hidden behind fancy form letters.
I told them if $20 was worth losing a customer who may have very well spent money there again, then that's their issue.
There's definitely a reason why the initials spell CoN.
It took an hour, because they were having tons of bandwidth/technical trouble, and J Allard had a (horrible) transcriptionist, since he was recently in an accident.
We made a new dictionary word last year in his honor!
smather (verb): To have personal information sold to advertisers without your consent or knowledge. "Man, I just got this new Hotmail account, but in less than an hour, it's been smathered!"
Has anyone been able to use this in everday conversation?
How about Gears of War? (maybe this isn't a launch title, but they sure were hyping it like one back at E3)
Oblivion also isn't a true sequel.. it takes place in the same "world", but the characters, the timeframe, and most likely even the locations, will be incredibly different.
The thing that you should remember, though, is that the hard drive is a confirmed (both in specs and photos) to be a removeable piece. Just because the system might not ship with a HD doesn't mean it's an inferior system, it just allows the purchaser to buy what size they want, and what price they can afford.
What I don't like is that games will be programmed to 'potentially not use the HD', which means that some incredibly content may or may not be available because of all of the contingencies with creating essentially two underlying versions of each game.
For example, a game like Fable, already plenty of things were ripped out of the game at the last minute -- if they had to spend extra safeguards to make sure that people without HDs get a comparable experience -- which doesn't sound like a lot of programming code in theory, but in practice, would that cause more functionality to require removal?
She should be condemned to carry this physical reminder for 9 months? It's bad enough she'll have the emotional scarring for god knows how long - why does she have to bear the child?
By your logic, any woman who gets pregnant is automatically responsible -- in most cases, you're damn right -- but you can see that not every case is the same.
Abortion should be illegal if used for birth control. It should be permissible for situations beyond her physical or reasonable control.
I don't think it's so much of wanting to take a woman's right to choose away, it's more of not wanting to
A) Inadvertantly justify it as a valid birth control method (The ONLY reason I think abortion should not be legal)
B) Prevent damage to families based on a mother's mental issues, having an abortion while acting on an impulse or otherwise not really thinking clearly.
Now... B) is sort of a double-edged sword. Sure, we wouldn't want a baby born to an unfit mother, but at the same time, what if the father-to-be wanted to take care of it, or the family of the mother, or a waiting family who for some reason is unable to procreate?
There are a LOT of factors to consider when discussing this issue, I don't necessarily think everyone's out to "take a woman's right to choose away" as a cut-and-dry thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall reading an article about a year ago (it may have even been on Slashdot) about the abyssmal writing skills our children have, where they would literally type 'u' and 'r' into their school assignments, and wonder why they were failing.
;) ) - The reason why 'u' and 'r' started appearing was mostly because of the speed issue. Two extra letters may not seem a big deal for us, but for someone who does not primarily use a computer (or spend too much time browsing MySpace instead of writing in it), it may very well take an extra 30 to 60 seconds to find.
With computing becoming an increasingly prominant part of our lives, I wonder if we should be teaching typing skills right alongside cursive (that's a style of writing created with pencil and paper, for those not familiar
And the complete lack of dedicated servers, which make multiplayer games above 4 users next to worthless with the amount of lag.
Oh, and the fact that they want to use ranked games, using some dipwad's home internet connection.
Exactly - I was going to post the same thing, but figured someone already did.
This is absolutely true. I've NEVER had a problem with Usenet.
You know why? Because it's also a community, like any other.
Anytime someone posts something shady, there will always be a post in which someone calls it out, right in the subject line. So if someone posts a virus, 20 minutes later, someone's replied warning you of it.
You only catch viruses on Usenet the same way you do in email - by not using your head.
It is a bug in RC1 - the only "what's new" entry for RC2 is "several fixes to automated update system". I was getting the same thing on Beta 2 for RC1 - I eventually uninstalled Beta2 to install RC1 fresh.
1 .5.html
The transition from RC1 to RC2 was smooth, however.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/
Well, I have to say - are they going to fill up the Blu-Ray discs with actual game CONTENT (i.e. textures/models/maps .. the important stuff) .. or do they want to stick feature-length cutscenes?
If it's the latter.. then it's no big loss. I have trouble seeing why 9 GB is going to be that big of a problem for this generation of games. Sure, music will probably be the largest assets, but there are nice ways to losslessly compress them.
There's no news here, in particular.
Actually, the Xbox 360 'premium' package with include a remote for a 'limited time'.
Markup's gonna be quite a bit more than that.
Take the HDD for example, in which a -public- cost for the 20GB 2.5" SATA drive (which is what they're using) is $67 at Newegg.
Multiply that by MS' buying power to not need retail, coupled with the sheer number of units they'd initially buy (2 million, I believe is their initial rollout), and you've got something that could be sold for $50 with a decent amount of profit.
What will they be selling it for? $100. (Yes, this is an official price that can also be located on xbox.com)
I should clarify that the Japan pricing is an approximate US dollar conversion... not that it shouldn't be apparent by the dollar sign.
US:
Xbox 360 "Core System" (no HDD, wired controller only) $299.99
Xbox 360 "Premium" (HDD, Wireless, headset, remote) $399.99
Japan:
Xbox360 Premium Edition, $349.99
So MS screwed the USA twice on this deal.. first by contridicting every single one of their interviews and announcements since before E3 ("one sku only", "wireless and hdd", "around $300"), but the ONE thing that the US wants (one sku for a decent price), they're giving to Japan.
The Xbox/MS Games team was the only part of MS that "got it"... now it seems like the business practices plaguing the rest of the company are slowly infecting the last bastion of customer appreciation.
I am incredibly confused by the random statements here and there saying Steam 'annoys' end-users.
The only problem with Steam I ever had was when reformatting my drive - I backed up my GCF's, and restored them in the same directory format... but the new Steam exec's had changed the installation, so I had to re-download all my games again. But even that wasn't a big of a deal, and not any different than if I hadn't backed them up at all.
What's so wrong with Steam? It's a very convenient distribution channel. It's not like it prevents you from using switches like -console and -dev, it doesn't forbid third-party mods..
What, seriously (and logically), is the problem?
I'm sure this company was looking for something more mainstream (i.e. box and CD), but SOME publisher is better than NO publisher, right?
With that odd Kung Fu game coming out on Steam in just a few weeks... assuming that works out as planned, would it not be a viable option?
I used to play CasinoOnNet until I lost my money due to some obvious win-catching code.
I was steadily making my way, after depositing a good $200, to about the $750 mark.. I'd win a couple hands, lose a couple hands.. it was all fairly even.
Once I hit $750, I lost every single solitary hand until I had about $50 left. (And I wasn't making large bets, either, pretty much the same type all along)
Then they'd have update emails they'd send every month, and have a completely obvious trivia question about one of their special events that month - answer it correctly and they randomly give you between $5 and $100.. well, out of the 5 I've ever gotten, they were all $5, and it turns out those bastards put transaction fees and timeout fees on these things.
I didn't use my account for 5 months, and three of the 5 bonuses I collected 'expired', then the remaining $10 got 'charged' for other inactivity.. making my $25 worth of bonuses worth $7.50.
Of course, emails to their support (which I did when the odds went (artificially) and astronomically sour), were met with basically "f you, pay me" attitudes, hidden behind fancy form letters.
I told them if $20 was worth losing a customer who may have very well spent money there again, then that's their issue.
There's definitely a reason why the initials spell CoN.
DO NOT use their service.
When I saw this article, I immediately thought that they were doing something with the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"
That'd be pretty cool, dontcha think?
Kind of like... oh, you know -- SATA?
That's what these drives are.
25GB SATA 2.5" drives are $67 at newegg.
That's a single unit, at a retailer.
MS has the power to go direct. Not only that, but with the initial launch units supposedly 1 million or more, the price is dirt cheap.
There's no reason, whatsoever, that MS could not sell the HDD for $50, and still make a profit.
That's funny. This above post prompted a 'visit' from a Microsoft employee to my website.
I bet it was Trixie.
It took an hour, because they were having tons of bandwidth/technical trouble, and J Allard had a (horrible) transcriptionist, since he was recently in an accident.
We made a new dictionary word last year in his honor!
1 45224&tid=120&tid=111&tid=17
smather (verb): To have personal information sold to advertisers without your consent or knowledge.
"Man, I just got this new Hotmail account, but in less than an hour, it's been smathered!"
Has anyone been able to use this in everday conversation?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/23/2
What on earth. That's has GOT to be someone's attempt to test IMDB's fact-checking ability. 50 Cent as Epona? That's frightening.
How about Gears of War? (maybe this isn't a launch title, but they sure were hyping it like one back at E3)
Oblivion also isn't a true sequel.. it takes place in the same "world", but the characters, the timeframe, and most likely even the locations, will be incredibly different.
Good god, remind me not to post at 2 AM (or 1:49 AM, whatever). Hopefully you can make out that drivel.
The thing that you should remember, though, is that the hard drive is a confirmed (both in specs and photos) to be a removeable piece. Just because the system might not ship with a HD doesn't mean it's an inferior system, it just allows the purchaser to buy what size they want, and what price they can afford.
What I don't like is that games will be programmed to 'potentially not use the HD', which means that some incredibly content may or may not be available because of all of the contingencies with creating essentially two underlying versions of each game.
For example, a game like Fable, already plenty of things were ripped out of the game at the last minute -- if they had to spend extra safeguards to make sure that people without HDs get a comparable experience -- which doesn't sound like a lot of programming code in theory, but in practice, would that cause more functionality to require removal?
This is not true. The models were basically Mattel-dolls. The mod replaced the skins with the (in)appropriate parts.
So say a woman is raped, and becomes pregnant.
She should be condemned to carry this physical reminder for 9 months? It's bad enough she'll have the emotional scarring for god knows how long - why does she have to bear the child?
By your logic, any woman who gets pregnant is automatically responsible -- in most cases, you're damn right -- but you can see that not every case is the same.
Abortion should be illegal if used for birth control. It should be permissible for situations beyond her physical or reasonable control.
I know this is a troll-trap, but hey, ya got me.
I don't think it's so much of wanting to take a woman's right to choose away, it's more of not wanting to
A) Inadvertantly justify it as a valid birth control method (The ONLY reason I think abortion should not be legal)
B) Prevent damage to families based on a mother's mental issues, having an abortion while acting on an impulse or otherwise not really thinking clearly.
Now... B) is sort of a double-edged sword. Sure, we wouldn't want a baby born to an unfit mother, but at the same time, what if the father-to-be wanted to take care of it, or the family of the mother, or a waiting family who for some reason is unable to procreate?
There are a LOT of factors to consider when discussing this issue, I don't necessarily think everyone's out to "take a woman's right to choose away" as a cut-and-dry thing.
I know it did, that's why I said (at least 1 - 7) ;)