For me, the PDA+Keyboard combo, which I've been using ever since the Palmpilot Pro, is all about being able to touch-type anywhere, spontaneously, using a setup small enough to fit in any pocket. The difference between touch-typing and writing with a pen and paper is quite massive when I'm on the go and need to get a bunch of information down quickly. And when I get where I need to go, it's all already typed up and ready to be used to whatever purpose.
It doesn't hurt that I have literally thousands of pages of useful reference works stored on my PPC if I need to look something up, either.
But really, as a fast touch typer, I just can't tolerate the speed of pen and paper anymore for any extensive note-taking or message-writing or what have you. And not for lack of trying. I went as far as teaching myself some Pitman Shorthand to speed up handwriting, but it really couldn't compete with touch-typing on a PPC, much less does it justify the effort required.
The data-theft ring may have perpetrated the nation's largest ever banking security breach, a Hackensack, N.J., police statement quoted a Treasury Department representative as saying.
I only hope that Hackensack don't lack the knack to track this crack attack.
Indeed, I'm continually baffled by this dedication to the notion that one's thumb should be forced to stretch across a good five inches of empty space in order to control an analog stick which serves as the most important item on the device. Presently, despite having fairly large adult male hands, when playing PS1 games, I use a (miniaturised dual shock) Madcatz Microcon, simply so I can ignore the placement of the analog pad (the controller's small enough that it doesn't matter).
Last year, I broke a wrist/hand and had my entire hand and lower arm rendered useless (and packed in fiber glass) for several weeks: in searching for a solution which would allow me to play my games with a single functional hand during what could have been a healing period of many months, I was introduced to the existence of one-handed controllers. But more specifically, I was introduced to the existence of a PS1/PS2 controller which doesn't make one's thumb awkwardly stretch across a big, unused space in order to manipulate the most fundamental object on the input device. Who knew that two-handed control could end up seeming awkward and stupid in contrast with control using only one hand?
Only then did it occur to me that I already had a two handed controller with an analog pad which could be held in almost the eact same, ideally comfortable way (though not usable with one hand, which in a state of non-injury, is nevertheless all well and good). The dual shock gets almost all the basics right. But it gets one, extremely central and excruciatingly obvious thing wrong, and that's the awkward placement of its main directional control mechanism. One wonders whether the designers are really still working with an NES/SMS era presumption that the d-pad is the all-important centerpiece to the controller. Is innovation so lacking?
The excerpt of their short answer on the main page is as follows:
Is there any danger to aviation?
The short answer is no; there is very little risk to larger aircraft. According to an MIT study, the risk of a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle such as this being hit by a jetliner is on the order of 1 in 1 billion per UAV flight hour. The risk to light aircraft, in a relatively busy area such as the Fraser Valley, is higher, but can be made easily below the risk light aircraft pose to each other. For the long answer, please read further.
Could be. However, the word "stonker" is certainly attested as both a noun and a verb, in a few different somewhat related meanings. Discussion of it is to be found here.
Who cares? If you love your old XBOX games that much, just keep it and play your old XBOX games on it. This feature seems to be just another "tick" for the marketdroids to put in the box.
Believe me, for people like me, with seven gaming systems currently plugged into the home theatre system, reducing that number by one, especially when that one system is a system as space-hungry as the Xbox is worth something. If it doesn't cost much to make that possible, terrific.
What I find is that there's a very signficant difference between becoming a casual gamer after being a hardcore gamer and being a casual gamer from the start. So much so that the two don't remotely compare.
What most often happens to hardcore gamers who simply don't have the time anymore for hardcore gaming, or otherwise choose to cut down drastically for whatever reason, I find, is for the most part what happened to me: the full-time fan and critic who was once a hardcore gamer becomes more a critic than a fan when time constraints impose themselves and gaming becomes a casual thing. That is to say, anyone who's very actively and dedicatedly persued gaming as a hobby and not just a distraction is likely going to be interested in developments even years down the line, even if they are unable to spend dozens of hours a week enjoying them. A stock broker who retires from his field is likely to read the listings with interest long after he retires, and likely to do so with some amount of critical insight. Even if his knowledge becomes outdated, he'll read from the standpoint of an informed party, whether that personal stance is justified or not. The same is largely true of gaming, I think. If anything, the hardcore gamer who goes casual is prone to an even greater degree of critical bluster than the hardcore gamer who merely stays with it: the stodgy, nostalgic, those-were-the-days critiques on the present come into play. Once a hardcore gamer, always a hardcore gamer.
Nothing will ever turn a hardcore gaming hobbyist into a naive, know-nothing casual consumer on the games market who falls for the FUD and the hype at every turn and believes the nonsense the major news sources copy from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo press releases verbatim. It can turn one into the gaming world's equivalent of a cantankerous old coot, though.
I think it's more helpful to think of video games seriously in terms of genres, and take it from there, when speaking about the dumbing down of video games.
It's also helpful to consider that this argument has all been done before, in other media, again and again. Particularly in cinema. To resurrect a very old debate, there are those who said, and those who still argue that Star Wars constituted a dumbing down of sci-fi. Others, and I included, will contend that Star Wars does not "dumb down" serious futurist sci-fi or any genre of hard science-fiction at all, because it was never any of those things to begin with and doesn't aim at their market. Rather, Star Wars takes heroic tropes and conventions of children's literature and elements of every film genre out there, and makes of them a high quality film in a number of those genres. But to say it dumbs down sci-fi is to say it dumbs down something it isn't. To look at a fantasy hero saga in space and say it dumbs down science fiction makes about as much sense as saying that graphic novels 'dumb down' rennaissance principles of portraiture, or that modern electronica 'dumbs down' Baroque notions of musical composition or that 20th century urban architects 'dumb down' the aesthetics of greco-roman sculpture.
And the same thing is true of games and their aesthetics, in general. There have always been largely mindless video game genres, and there will always be largely mindless video game genres. Space Invaders, Pong and Demon Attack really didn't particularly inform my view of the world around me, I have to say. And there have furthermore always been games with simpler gameplay, instead favouring story, or simpler story, instead favouring action, and anywhere in between. What you'll find varies from genre to genre like night and day. What's wrong, therefore, is pointing to (just picking one of an infinite set of examples) Action Adventure genre games of the present and while pointing to them stating that they are dumbing down the D&D Dungeon Crawls of the past. There's no sense in it. Let the genres be. And finally, there will always be bad games, mediocre games, and games which simply say and do nothing of particular consequence for gaming in general. If anything, there are far, far fewer bad games today than once there were simply because budgets are too high to allow as many small titles.
I'm as orthodox a PC gamer as can be, so much so that I find myself immediately frustrated by the mere fact of not being able to easily hack and mod a console game, but I refuse to believe that console games are dumbing down gaming in general simply because when I see a simpler action game, based on an original PC RPG or RTS license, reinterpreted for console with simpler mechanics, I don't critique it as a PC RTS or PC RPG. I critique it as an action game, which has long been moreso the domain of the console than the PC. It doesn't say to me "games are getting dumber." It says to me "nothing new under the sun."
You mean that I don't have to goto the mall anymore to buy games? What have I lost here? I'm only seeing this as a good thing.
Yeah, it's very much a quality-of-life thing for me. I find this whole 'going outside' phenomenon to be in quite direct conflict with what I perceive to be an otherwise efficient video gaming existence, and so Valve's measures certainly seem a step forward. Why make a time-consuming trip to the mall during which I am neither gaining levels nor increasing my frag count when I could be spending that same time doing productive things, like improving my gameplay strategies in titles already in my possession?
The crucial question regarding game length for me in story-based game genres (whether the game be Adventure, RPG, Tactical RPG or even Story-Driven FPS) is simply, how long is the story content? The length of time spent in front of the screen is a comparatively trivial question, in estimating the value of the story as a whole, though I'd rather the game didn't consume time in front of the screen merely for the sake of consuming it, if the story isn't progressing.
A 100 hour game in which 90 of those hours consist of random encounters with generic enemies is ultimately a less epic story than a 30 hour game in which 25 of those hours consist of dialogue, story-telling and combat with meaningful characters.
In keeping with posts by developers on the Obsidian Forums, it seems that a proposal for a content patch was made and rejected by Lucasarts for any number of predictable reasons.
The posts on this topic by John Morgan and Chris Avellone (though more particularly by the prior) have since been deleted from the Obsidian forums, presumably due to their controversial nature and their having spurred fan frustration. Obsidian is careful about not directing fan aggression against Lucasarts and thereby burning their bridges. Providing evidence of their own differences with Lucasarts (e.g., desire to actually finish the game as opposed to releasing it incomplete for Christmas sales) has tended to fuel the Lucasarts-hate. And so posts which give these emotions factual substance of tended to be erased.
There are any number of good reasons a content patch will not happen. Most crucial is that the originally planned ending was completely and totally different from the one that went to press, and Lucasarts is unlikely to permit the development of circumstantially not at all similar endings to the game. Another is that ending material was never finished (scripts, textures, models, you name it) and it looks like voice acting wasn't complete for the planned ending either. They aren't going to call in not only developers but all the voice actors too, again, just for a patch. The other is that coordination of an absolutely massive Xbox patch to recreate a completely new ending chapter to the game on a game which isn't Live! enabled and doesn't acknowledge support for downloadable content is highly improbable.
I was recently reading through some code I wrote ages ago and hadn't looked at in years, and wondering...dear god, what's this confused mess trying to do?
Imagine my relief when I came upon a helpful comment:
What the hell was I thinking when I wrote this?
All it took was one comment to put my mind to rest: no, it's not just me being stupid in the present. This code seemed this terrible back then, too.
They deserve zero credit for what you liked about the first one, and zero blame for what you hated about the second
Not at all the case. Lucasarts pushed an accelerated Christmas release date on Obsidian for KotOR II, pulling a switcheroo by, late into development, pushing up the release to pick up holiday sales, thus fucking up the final product, which was never properly finished subject to this circumstance. From everything we know about how and why KotOR came to be thrown out the door ahead of time, along with what's been gathered regarding cancelled portions of the game (including the ending, which was never completed), they deserve 100% of the credit for what was problematic about KotOR II: namely, its unfinished state as of the early release.
Unfortunately, Lucasarts is just more proof of how berift of creativity or interest in anything but technological progress the franchise is as a whole at present.
Yes, Sam and Max was good.
But linking to that list will only remind us that Lucasarts cancelled the latest Sam and Max game to make a Christmas release and grab holiday sales.
They've lately garnered no small amount of fan hatred, furthermore, for rushing KotOR 2 out the door before the product was complete, and ahead of the originally planned release date. Lucasarts, as a publisher, is at this point renowned for little other than their ridiculous 12-month conveyor belt dev schedules. When your intention as a publisher is to make as much money as possible developing generic crap, who needs a dev schedule with room for creativity?
Lucasarts is just more evidence of how dead of all things beyond eye-candy and the franchise name all things "Lucas" have become.
Sullivan is talking about "the consumer environment" in the portion of the article cited.
As the article says, "With businesses, however, IT managers typically set the policy." And one should indeed hope that any IT manager dealing with this new error system does.
If an IT manager at a location with highly sensitive data is incapable of turning off error reporting and his employees are wantonly clicking "send report" all the time, well, I suppose that business has got much bigger problems on its hands than error reports going to Microsoft.
That there's nothing compulsory about this, obviously. And furthermore, it appears that the system will be suited to provide for the customer's preservation of personal privacy:
For consumers, the choice of whether to send the data, and how much information to share, will be up to the individual. Though the details are being finalized, Windows lead product manager Greg Sullivan said users will be prompted with a message indicating the information to be sent and giving them an option to alter it, such as removing the contents of the e-mail they were writing when the machine crashed. Also, such reporting will also be anonymous.
The only concern, one might suppose, is for people who don't want this information accumulated should their computer later be searched by others (the law? An employer? A relative?). This is perhaps a legitimate concern, but hard to argue for, as a reason to cripple error reporting.
I don't know about you, but even being an utterly fanatical keyboard and mouse gamer (long arguing for the inherent superiority of ASDF over ESDF and ESDF over WASD in turn and refusing to play on any other keyboards than my '80s vintage buckling-spring Model M's), not having auto-aim on gamepad-based control I consider to be a downside.
I don't like imprecise control, but if I'm stuck with all-too-imprecise gamepad control, a little bit of auto-aim making it feel more precise than it really is can only be a good thing. I'm willing to be tricked. At least it's more convincing than feeling like the total klutz a gamepad's pads turn a marksman into.
Is Microsoft going to have a similar problem, in that it has a nice OS, but few apps to run on it?
You know, I was expecting application support to be poor for a while, but as it turns out, XP64 seems to have as much if not more currently available software than NT 3.51 for PowerPC.
And here I was thinking that I was going to be running the worst-supported Windows platform out there. Heck no. Second worst for me.
I shall wait for you in death's halls, my love...
on
For Love of The Game
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I think that no game, nor any character, has managed to so deeply touch me as the character of Deionarra in Planescape: Torment.
The episode "Longing," particularly, discussed in that article, and ultimately the character herself are kept just far enough from total exposition to be maintained as a tragic mystery whose explanation will be kept eternally just out of reach.
There's nothing quite so tragic as the loss of memory. You need only ask someone who has had a very dear loved one succumb to Alzheimer's disease to know this is the truth. And though it may seem a strange connection to draw, Planescape: Torment evoked for me the very real tragic quality of memory loss better than anything else I have experienced. And so yes, I do believe that games can speak to profound realities in our every day life.
Slashdot Mirror
In case you aren't aware, some of the
great
masterpieces
of the
modern
era
are based on video games.
Or if you use a Model M or Model M clone, just pop off your key caps and type on the underlying bases, for a unique typing experience.
But really, you might as well just arrange your keys in whatever configuration you like, if you've got a Model M.
For me, the PDA+Keyboard combo, which I've been using ever since the Palmpilot Pro, is all about being able to touch-type anywhere, spontaneously, using a setup small enough to fit in any pocket. The difference between touch-typing and writing with a pen and paper is quite massive when I'm on the go and need to get a bunch of information down quickly. And when I get where I need to go, it's all already typed up and ready to be used to whatever purpose.
It doesn't hurt that I have literally thousands of pages of useful reference works stored on my PPC if I need to look something up, either.
But really, as a fast touch typer, I just can't tolerate the speed of pen and paper anymore for any extensive note-taking or message-writing or what have you. And not for lack of trying. I went as far as teaching myself some Pitman Shorthand to speed up handwriting, but it really couldn't compete with touch-typing on a PPC, much less does it justify the effort required.
The data-theft ring may have perpetrated the nation's largest ever banking security breach, a Hackensack, N.J., police statement quoted a Treasury Department representative as saying.
I only hope that Hackensack don't lack the knack to track this crack attack.
There are a few of us odd ones who primarily experienced Pac Man not as Pac Man at all, but as the TI 99/4A clone Munchman.
Munchman switches things around by having Munchman leave a trail instead of eating dots.
Indeed, I'm continually baffled by this dedication to the notion that one's thumb should be forced to stretch across a good five inches of empty space in order to control an analog stick which serves as the most important item on the device. Presently, despite having fairly large adult male hands, when playing PS1 games, I use a (miniaturised dual shock) Madcatz Microcon, simply so I can ignore the placement of the analog pad (the controller's small enough that it doesn't matter).
Last year, I broke a wrist/hand and had my entire hand and lower arm rendered useless (and packed in fiber glass) for several weeks: in searching for a solution which would allow me to play my games with a single functional hand during what could have been a healing period of many months, I was introduced to the existence of one-handed controllers. But more specifically, I was introduced to the existence of a PS1/PS2 controller which doesn't make one's thumb awkwardly stretch across a big, unused space in order to manipulate the most fundamental object on the input device. Who knew that two-handed control could end up seeming awkward and stupid in contrast with control using only one hand?
Only then did it occur to me that I already had a two handed controller with an analog pad which could be held in almost the eact same, ideally comfortable way (though not usable with one hand, which in a state of non-injury, is nevertheless all well and good). The dual shock gets almost all the basics right. But it gets one, extremely central and excruciatingly obvious thing wrong, and that's the awkward placement of its main directional control mechanism. One wonders whether the designers are really still working with an NES/SMS era presumption that the d-pad is the all-important centerpiece to the controller. Is innovation so lacking?
This site discusses the hazards involved on this page.
The excerpt of their short answer on the main page is as follows:
Is there any danger to aviation?
The short answer is no; there is very little risk to larger aircraft. According to an MIT study, the risk of a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle such as this being hit by a jetliner is on the order of 1 in 1 billion per UAV flight hour. The risk to light aircraft, in a relatively busy area such as the Fraser Valley, is higher, but can be made easily below the risk light aircraft pose to each other. For the long answer, please read further.
Could be. However, the word "stonker" is certainly attested as both a noun and a verb, in a few different somewhat related meanings. Discussion of it is to be found here.
Who cares? If you love your old XBOX games that much, just keep it and play your old XBOX games on it. This feature seems to be just another "tick" for the marketdroids to put in the box.
Believe me, for people like me, with seven gaming systems currently plugged into the home theatre system, reducing that number by one, especially when that one system is a system as space-hungry as the Xbox is worth something. If it doesn't cost much to make that possible, terrific.
What I find is that there's a very signficant difference between becoming a casual gamer after being a hardcore gamer and being a casual gamer from the start. So much so that the two don't remotely compare.
What most often happens to hardcore gamers who simply don't have the time anymore for hardcore gaming, or otherwise choose to cut down drastically for whatever reason, I find, is for the most part what happened to me: the full-time fan and critic who was once a hardcore gamer becomes more a critic than a fan when time constraints impose themselves and gaming becomes a casual thing. That is to say, anyone who's very actively and dedicatedly persued gaming as a hobby and not just a distraction is likely going to be interested in developments even years down the line, even if they are unable to spend dozens of hours a week enjoying them. A stock broker who retires from his field is likely to read the listings with interest long after he retires, and likely to do so with some amount of critical insight. Even if his knowledge becomes outdated, he'll read from the standpoint of an informed party, whether that personal stance is justified or not. The same is largely true of gaming, I think. If anything, the hardcore gamer who goes casual is prone to an even greater degree of critical bluster than the hardcore gamer who merely stays with it: the stodgy, nostalgic, those-were-the-days critiques on the present come into play. Once a hardcore gamer, always a hardcore gamer.
Nothing will ever turn a hardcore gaming hobbyist into a naive, know-nothing casual consumer on the games market who falls for the FUD and the hype at every turn and believes the nonsense the major news sources copy from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo press releases verbatim. It can turn one into the gaming world's equivalent of a cantankerous old coot, though.
I think it's more helpful to think of video games seriously in terms of genres, and take it from there, when speaking about the dumbing down of video games.
It's also helpful to consider that this argument has all been done before, in other media, again and again. Particularly in cinema. To resurrect a very old debate, there are those who said, and those who still argue that Star Wars constituted a dumbing down of sci-fi. Others, and I included, will contend that Star Wars does not "dumb down" serious futurist sci-fi or any genre of hard science-fiction at all, because it was never any of those things to begin with and doesn't aim at their market. Rather, Star Wars takes heroic tropes and conventions of children's literature and elements of every film genre out there, and makes of them a high quality film in a number of those genres. But to say it dumbs down sci-fi is to say it dumbs down something it isn't. To look at a fantasy hero saga in space and say it dumbs down science fiction makes about as much sense as saying that graphic novels 'dumb down' rennaissance principles of portraiture, or that modern electronica 'dumbs down' Baroque notions of musical composition or that 20th century urban architects 'dumb down' the aesthetics of greco-roman sculpture.
And the same thing is true of games and their aesthetics, in general. There have always been largely mindless video game genres, and there will always be largely mindless video game genres. Space Invaders, Pong and Demon Attack really didn't particularly inform my view of the world around me, I have to say. And there have furthermore always been games with simpler gameplay, instead favouring story, or simpler story, instead favouring action, and anywhere in between. What you'll find varies from genre to genre like night and day. What's wrong, therefore, is pointing to (just picking one of an infinite set of examples) Action Adventure genre games of the present and while pointing to them stating that they are dumbing down the D&D Dungeon Crawls of the past. There's no sense in it. Let the genres be. And finally, there will always be bad games, mediocre games, and games which simply say and do nothing of particular consequence for gaming in general. If anything, there are far, far fewer bad games today than once there were simply because budgets are too high to allow as many small titles.
I'm as orthodox a PC gamer as can be, so much so that I find myself immediately frustrated by the mere fact of not being able to easily hack and mod a console game, but I refuse to believe that console games are dumbing down gaming in general simply because when I see a simpler action game, based on an original PC RPG or RTS license, reinterpreted for console with simpler mechanics, I don't critique it as a PC RTS or PC RPG. I critique it as an action game, which has long been moreso the domain of the console than the PC. It doesn't say to me "games are getting dumber." It says to me "nothing new under the sun."
You mean that I don't have to goto the mall anymore to buy games? What have I lost here? I'm only seeing this as a good thing.
Yeah, it's very much a quality-of-life thing for me. I find this whole 'going outside' phenomenon to be in quite direct conflict with what I perceive to be an otherwise efficient video gaming existence, and so Valve's measures certainly seem a step forward. Why make a time-consuming trip to the mall during which I am neither gaining levels nor increasing my frag count when I could be spending that same time doing productive things, like improving my gameplay strategies in titles already in my possession?
The crucial question regarding game length for me in story-based game genres (whether the game be Adventure, RPG, Tactical RPG or even Story-Driven FPS) is simply, how long is the story content? The length of time spent in front of the screen is a comparatively trivial question, in estimating the value of the story as a whole, though I'd rather the game didn't consume time in front of the screen merely for the sake of consuming it, if the story isn't progressing.
A 100 hour game in which 90 of those hours consist of random encounters with generic enemies is ultimately a less epic story than a 30 hour game in which 25 of those hours consist of dialogue, story-telling and combat with meaningful characters.
In keeping with posts by developers on the Obsidian Forums, it seems that a proposal for a content patch was made and rejected by Lucasarts for any number of predictable reasons.
The posts on this topic by John Morgan and Chris Avellone (though more particularly by the prior) have since been deleted from the Obsidian forums, presumably due to their controversial nature and their having spurred fan frustration. Obsidian is careful about not directing fan aggression against Lucasarts and thereby burning their bridges. Providing evidence of their own differences with Lucasarts (e.g., desire to actually finish the game as opposed to releasing it incomplete for Christmas sales) has tended to fuel the Lucasarts-hate. And so posts which give these emotions factual substance of tended to be erased.
There are any number of good reasons a content patch will not happen. Most crucial is that the originally planned ending was completely and totally different from the one that went to press, and Lucasarts is unlikely to permit the development of circumstantially not at all similar endings to the game. Another is that ending material was never finished (scripts, textures, models, you name it) and it looks like voice acting wasn't complete for the planned ending either. They aren't going to call in not only developers but all the voice actors too, again, just for a patch. The other is that coordination of an absolutely massive Xbox patch to recreate a completely new ending chapter to the game on a game which isn't Live! enabled and doesn't acknowledge support for downloadable content is highly improbable.
In 1995, Virtual Reality systems reached the apex of all conceivable technological possibility, realised its own state of perfection, and ceased to advance for lack of further necessity.
Imagine my relief when I came upon a helpful comment:
All it took was one comment to put my mind to rest: no, it's not just me being stupid in the present. This code seemed this terrible back then, too.
Comments save the day once again.
They deserve zero credit for what you liked about the first one, and zero blame for what you hated about the second
Not at all the case. Lucasarts pushed an accelerated Christmas release date on Obsidian for KotOR II, pulling a switcheroo by, late into development, pushing up the release to pick up holiday sales, thus fucking up the final product, which was never properly finished subject to this circumstance. From everything we know about how and why KotOR came to be thrown out the door ahead of time, along with what's been gathered regarding cancelled portions of the game (including the ending, which was never completed), they deserve 100% of the credit for what was problematic about KotOR II: namely, its unfinished state as of the early release.
Unfortunately, Lucasarts is just more proof of how berift of creativity or interest in anything but technological progress the franchise is as a whole at present.
Yes, Sam and Max was good.
But linking to that list will only remind us that Lucasarts cancelled the latest Sam and Max game to make a Christmas release and grab holiday sales.
They've lately garnered no small amount of fan hatred, furthermore, for rushing KotOR 2 out the door before the product was complete, and ahead of the originally planned release date. Lucasarts, as a publisher, is at this point renowned for little other than their ridiculous 12-month conveyor belt dev schedules. When your intention as a publisher is to make as much money as possible developing generic crap, who needs a dev schedule with room for creativity?
Lucasarts is just more evidence of how dead of all things beyond eye-candy and the franchise name all things "Lucas" have become.
Sullivan is talking about "the consumer environment" in the portion of the article cited.
As the article says, "With businesses, however, IT managers typically set the policy." And one should indeed hope that any IT manager dealing with this new error system does.
If an IT manager at a location with highly sensitive data is incapable of turning off error reporting and his employees are wantonly clicking "send report" all the time, well, I suppose that business has got much bigger problems on its hands than error reports going to Microsoft.
That there's nothing compulsory about this, obviously. And furthermore, it appears that the system will be suited to provide for the customer's preservation of personal privacy:
For consumers, the choice of whether to send the data, and how much information to share, will be up to the individual. Though the details are being finalized, Windows lead product manager Greg Sullivan said users will be prompted with a message indicating the information to be sent and giving them an option to alter it, such as removing the contents of the e-mail they were writing when the machine crashed. Also, such reporting will also be anonymous.
The only concern, one might suppose, is for people who don't want this information accumulated should their computer later be searched by others (the law? An employer? A relative?). This is perhaps a legitimate concern, but hard to argue for, as a reason to cripple error reporting.
I don't know about you, but even being an utterly fanatical keyboard and mouse gamer (long arguing for the inherent superiority of ASDF over ESDF and ESDF over WASD in turn and refusing to play on any other keyboards than my '80s vintage buckling-spring Model M's), not having auto-aim on gamepad-based control I consider to be a downside.
I don't like imprecise control, but if I'm stuck with all-too-imprecise gamepad control, a little bit of auto-aim making it feel more precise than it really is can only be a good thing. I'm willing to be tricked. At least it's more convincing than feeling like the total klutz a gamepad's pads turn a marksman into.
Is Microsoft going to have a similar problem, in that it has a nice OS, but few apps to run on it?
You know, I was expecting application support to be poor for a while, but as it turns out, XP64 seems to have as much if not more currently available software than NT 3.51 for PowerPC.
And here I was thinking that I was going to be running the worst-supported Windows platform out there. Heck no. Second worst for me.
I think that no game, nor any character, has managed to so deeply touch me as the character of Deionarra in Planescape: Torment.
I was therefore pleased, recently, to read an article on the site Gamer's With Jobs expounding on the virtues of the same character and game.
The episode "Longing," particularly, discussed in that article, and ultimately the character herself are kept just far enough from total exposition to be maintained as a tragic mystery whose explanation will be kept eternally just out of reach.
There's nothing quite so tragic as the loss of memory. You need only ask someone who has had a very dear loved one succumb to Alzheimer's disease to know this is the truth. And though it may seem a strange connection to draw, Planescape: Torment evoked for me the very real tragic quality of memory loss better than anything else I have experienced. And so yes, I do believe that games can speak to profound realities in our every day life.
Given recent Photographic Evidence, the presence of chocolate compounds would seem to necessitate biological activity.
We are, after all, discussing a movie review published on the website of a newspaper called the Telegraph
I don't know about you, but my head's spinning.