It's often suggested that war is god's way of teaching Americans geography.
You see, we have a critical problem here.
America hasn't had a civil war in a rather long time.
Kabul and Baghdad are familiar names, but when it comes to your own state capitals, what military operations do you have to associate with them?
Now unfortunately, we've got a bit of a paradox here. You might ask, if America can make neither heads nor tales of the world around it without a war waged upon some part of its geography, how does America figure out what to wage war upon in the first place?
That's easy. You just shoot at one of the parts you don't know much about yet. Chances are, it'll either be 1) The Enemy or 2) Adequately trivial that it doesn't matter whether it's the enemy or not.
So learning American geography should be fairly systematic. Just go over the bits you're pretty sure about, figure out the parts you're missing, and launch something at it. More than likely, it'll be either an axis of evil or sufficiently politically irrelevant that there's no harm done. But Fox News will report what it's called. And then you'll know. And knowing's half the battle: GI Joe.
But none will offer anything but the verbatim dronings of their professors, which they seem to feel are gods. Forgive my condescending chuckle.
I think you'll find that literary critical academics are well aware of the preferences of certain languages for certain poetic techniques.
Hexameter (six stress verse) is considered wonderful in French early modern poetry, and almost always terrible in English early modern poetry (Sidney uses it, but his hexameter isn't given particularly great credit).
Quantitative measure is considered to have worked wonderfully in classical Greek, but is accepted as essentially impossible in English (Coleridge semi-successfully attempted it in Christabel).
A Petrarchan sonnet's composition in English is an exercise in frustration and a Shakespearean sonnet's structure in Italian uncomfortably abrupt.
I don't know. The more flawed the system, the more I find myself nostalgicaly cherishing it for its flaws, in the way one looks back in foolish nostalgia on what were at the time the most irritating aspects of a relationship.
For example, I think I have more affection for my TI 99/4A (why else would I regularly take pictures of it) than for any other system, all the more so due to its terrible system architecture (16-bit CPU with everything but 256 bytes of CPU RAM on an 8-bit bus), and due to the irritation of trying to get games running off of what is sometimes an infuriating cart+casette combo.
You really value and develop a relationship with your system when it takes genuine effort to get the bloody software working (e.g., off of casettes, and sometimes having to type it out manually in line number BASIC).
I also tried a 1945, which has a 266 ARM cpu and couldn't stand it. It couldn't even play an MP3 without skipping if you tap the start menu
I find this very hard to swallow. Even the Casio EM-500 and E-125 had no trouble playing MP3s while multitasking on their lousy 150MHz MIPS CPUs in my experience (as for the MIPS being lousy, some Casio fans will assert that it was mostly poor support for it that resulted in poor results, but the effect was the same). And the Samsung 266MHz ARM in the 1945 comes out ahead of the early 400MHz X-Scale CPUs in some benchmarks.
It is of course possible that your reflection on your experience with the Samsung ARM is accurate, but I certainly do not understand it to be representative. Multitasked MP3 playback has been a staple of all these PPCs for a long while now, and the Samsung 266MHz in particular is hardly a slouch.
The early (i.e., non-PXA255) XScale CPUs in even their 400MHz varieties, in their showdown with existing Samsung ARM chips at half their clock rate were, if anything, a perfect example of the megahertz myth being just that.
I'd certainly consider this interesting material for a tech demo, but can it function within a real game?
A game presumably has to be fun, and its controls conducive to that, and while the controls for a game including this functionality might be a remarkable technical feat, they could also be absolutely infuriating. We'll have to see.
Hopefully, increased competition in a saturated market will mean an increased willingness to bulk out music selection with more obscure or unsigned artists by at least some online vendors.
One worry, however, is that increased competition does not necessarily mean more money for existing artists. It may just mean, as usual, more extreme attempts to woo the big record companies who own them.
Indeed, I became similarly cynical about CIBC ATMs in Canada a while ago when I lost my bankbook and card thanks to one of the newer generation crashing on me. When I asked the staff the next day, the manager who I eventually met with told me frustratedly they'd been having some problems with their ATMs crashing ever since they switched to a Windows-based platform. On the other hand, I got some neat picks of an ATM booting into NT4. Picks included below:
Now, every windows user aware of this will believe a firewall is a great danger for his computer.
Oh... After all, what will it change ?
Or to abandon sweeping cynical generalisations and take the optomistic point of view:
Now, perhaps, windows users aware of this will continue to in increasingly greater number recognise that a cheap consumer software firewall is not sufficient to protect the most exploited operating system on the planet from the worm-of-the-week and perhaps they should be looking at other options.
You can't generalise everyone. People will respond to this differently. But not everyone who gets the Windows-specific worm-of-the-week as a result of a cheap firewall app exploit will conclude that...getting rid of their firewall is the final solution! Then they'll be safe!
Vigilanties usually don't fix a problem. They almost always make things worse. If one person is saying an auction is real and another says they are fake then who should you believe?
The one whose comment is moderated highest by the most individuals with high seller ratings who are meta-moderated most favourably in their past identification of fake auctions.
Yes, I mean slashcode for Ebay. But why not? Has anyone got a better idea?
I looked at this headline regarding the "world of tomorrow" and opened this story expecting specious futurism. Where is my specious futurism! There hasn't been a single story making dubious claims about technological revolutions right around the corner on slashdot all day.
Just accepting your assertion for the sake of argument, I'm going to ask,
What is gameplay, and is it all there is to a game?
Is gameplay just mechanics? Because if so, I disagree that gaming should be "about mechanics" to the implied exclusion of other things.
Many a nostalgic geek likes to claim that graphics are unimportant. I disagree.
As an example, Chrono Trigger is regarded as one of the greatest RPGs of all time, if not the greatest.
You know what the first thing that occurred to me when I recently replayed it was? Faces. The character config screen had portraits for its characters. Having recently played Dragon Warrior and Zelda II on my NES, it suddenly occurred to me how incredibly important this was to me. There was a time when that resolution and colour depth of art simply wasn't possible. And at that time, whether or not the greatest coders on the planet were coding Chrono Trigger, I would not have been able to look into the eyes of Marle and see a character there, and have a face to put to that character.
Imagination is all well and good, but you need a starting point. To be honest, I don't put a face to the Dragon Warrior, of that original game's fame. Crono has a face. And that's important.
I realise this seems a bit abstruse, but it's my standard example of how graphics are, and have to be important to the development of gaming. There are a hundred other examples one might come up with, but for those who deny the importance of graphical technologies in principle, those are examples that need to be stated.
I dunno...I'd still rather play Pong or Frogger than huge overdone games.
Extremely obvious and predictable appeals to nostalgia seem to be really popular with mods on Slashdot.
You'd rather play Frogger?
Then my question is, for every person who claims they'd rather play Atari or any given classic system than a present day one, how many serious gamers who own both ACTUALLY spend more hours per week playing 1970s/1980s games than post 1990 ones over long periods.
It's often said, but it's an extremely few who can back up their whistful nostalgic ponderings by citing that as the absolute reality of their gaming behaviour. Heck, I'm a serious collector of TI 99/4A parts and games, owning and coveting some virtually non-existent or prototype carts, and even I spend far more time on my newer systems than on the TI 99/4A (although I played Parsec for the TI 99 a bit this afternoon).
I don't play it because it's better than my newer systems. It's not because it can compete. It's nostalgia.
I don't have a problem with nostalgia, but I do contend against the idea that something like Super Monkey Ball 2 or Metroid Prime can be outdone in general by something like my favourite TI 99/4A games. The technology simply did not allow all the things that a new game can allow us to do. And some of those new thing are fun, and immersive. So I refuse to believe that absolutely all new computer/gaming technologies and techniques developed since the 2600 have been completely irrelevant to the advancement of gaming entertainment, and that, Frogger being just as much fun as present day games, we may as well just go back to coding CGA games in BASIC for all it matters.
Consider this: training, amount of time, and tools.
Unfortunately, one is not obligated necessarily to consider 'training' or 'experience' in the real world. If their number far exceeds demand, it doesn't matter how much training they have as compared to workers in general. It doesn't matter what their 'rightful' wage is according to whatever you judge their level of expertise to be. They must compete on the open market, or their desperate competitors will simply outbid them.
WinCE devices aren't designed to run solo, they have to have a "partnership" with a "host" to do things like install software
Not if you have a link to the installer as a.cab file or otherwise native PPC file. Just tonight, I installed some shareware on my PPC sitting in a Tim Hortons coffee shop. I surfed to the page I wanted in IE, clicked the link to the.cab, downloaded to main memory, and installed.
That demands that you be able to download the native installer of course, but it certainly is a case where you DON'T need a desktop to install new software on your PPC.
On the other hand, for example, Microsoft does not offer an update to Messenger in any native PPC format. You will need to install through the desktop to update to a client that presently works on MSN.
However, increasingly, the absence of a bandwidth limit is becoming an important marketing tool on the competitive Canadian DSL market (even though Bell runs everything from behind the scenes).
And so they maintain that their profiting from the illegal sale of stolen goods should be upheld.
I assume there is some applicable hefty fine for their infringing on state law. Their not offering the customer the small amount of money she is owed as a result of their infraction is just mind-boggling.
I have to think this is not an "evil corporation" issue. Evil corporations are perfectly happy to pay small amounts of money to uphold an image of benevolence. I think this is more likely an "incredibly stupid store manager" issue.
This is where Tolkien fans are at odds. You've got the Elvish speakers, who throw practicality to the wind by learning an invented language specific to a given mythos. And then you've got the Old English speakers, who pragmatists that they are, learn a more functional Tolkien-oriented language, with better practical applications to every day life. Why waste your life learning a made up language when you could learn one that's been dead for 1,000 years?
...robotic pants that help those with mobility problems
And on this side of the Pacific, elderly citizens already delighted by their mail application's ability to inform them "you've got mail" upon receipt thereof will be pleased to hear that their talking robotic geriatric care undergarments will now inform them of the arrival of such as is deposited within their own "inbox."
Slashdot Mirror
I officially declare this thread over.
It's often suggested that war is god's way of teaching Americans geography.
You see, we have a critical problem here.
America hasn't had a civil war in a rather long time.
Kabul and Baghdad are familiar names, but when it comes to your own state capitals, what military operations do you have to associate with them?
Now unfortunately, we've got a bit of a paradox here. You might ask, if America can make neither heads nor tales of the world around it without a war waged upon some part of its geography, how does America figure out what to wage war upon in the first place?
That's easy. You just shoot at one of the parts you don't know much about yet. Chances are, it'll either be 1) The Enemy or 2) Adequately trivial that it doesn't matter whether it's the enemy or not.
So learning American geography should be fairly systematic. Just go over the bits you're pretty sure about, figure out the parts you're missing, and launch something at it. More than likely, it'll be either an axis of evil or sufficiently politically irrelevant that there's no harm done. But Fox News will report what it's called. And then you'll know. And knowing's half the battle: GI Joe.
Not all movies are dependent solely on CG for their baddies and their special effects. Physical models can still look goddamn remarkable.
Nevermind the political partisans.
For ideological games, it's Wisdom Tree
They had their greatest success in the NES era with their bible games, but they continued to produce even afterwards.
Hard-to-forget games like Super 3D Noah's Ark
But none will offer anything but the verbatim dronings of their professors, which they seem to feel are gods. Forgive my condescending chuckle.
I think you'll find that literary critical academics are well aware of the preferences of certain languages for certain poetic techniques.
Hexameter (six stress verse) is considered wonderful in French early modern poetry, and almost always terrible in English early modern poetry (Sidney uses it, but his hexameter isn't given particularly great credit).
Quantitative measure is considered to have worked wonderfully in classical Greek, but is accepted as essentially impossible in English (Coleridge semi-successfully attempted it in Christabel).
A Petrarchan sonnet's composition in English is an exercise in frustration and a Shakespearean sonnet's structure in Italian uncomfortably abrupt.
I don't know. The more flawed the system, the more I find myself nostalgicaly cherishing it for its flaws, in the way one looks back in foolish nostalgia on what were at the time the most irritating aspects of a relationship.
For example, I think I have more affection for my TI 99/4A (why else would I regularly take pictures of it) than for any other system, all the more so due to its terrible system architecture (16-bit CPU with everything but 256 bytes of CPU RAM on an 8-bit bus), and due to the irritation of trying to get games running off of what is sometimes an infuriating cart+casette combo.
You really value and develop a relationship with your system when it takes genuine effort to get the bloody software working (e.g., off of casettes, and sometimes having to type it out manually in line number BASIC).
I also tried a 1945, which has a 266 ARM cpu and couldn't stand it. It couldn't even play an MP3 without skipping if you tap the start menu
I find this very hard to swallow. Even the Casio EM-500 and E-125 had no trouble playing MP3s while multitasking on their lousy 150MHz MIPS CPUs in my experience (as for the MIPS being lousy, some Casio fans will assert that it was mostly poor support for it that resulted in poor results, but the effect was the same). And the Samsung 266MHz ARM in the 1945 comes out ahead of the early 400MHz X-Scale CPUs in some benchmarks.
The PPC gaming community was disappointed to find the original 400MHz Intels failing even to outperform the 206MHz Samsung ARM for many purposes.
It is of course possible that your reflection on your experience with the Samsung ARM is accurate, but I certainly do not understand it to be representative. Multitasked MP3 playback has been a staple of all these PPCs for a long while now, and the Samsung 266MHz in particular is hardly a slouch.
The early (i.e., non-PXA255) XScale CPUs in even their 400MHz varieties, in their showdown with existing Samsung ARM chips at half their clock rate were, if anything, a perfect example of the megahertz myth being just that.
I'd certainly consider this interesting material for a tech demo, but can it function within a real game?
A game presumably has to be fun, and its controls conducive to that, and while the controls for a game including this functionality might be a remarkable technical feat, they could also be absolutely infuriating. We'll have to see.
Hopefully, increased competition in a saturated market will mean an increased willingness to bulk out music selection with more obscure or unsigned artists by at least some online vendors.
One worry, however, is that increased competition does not necessarily mean more money for existing artists. It may just mean, as usual, more extreme attempts to woo the big record companies who own them.
If only the world's more malicious traders in contraband goods would use this method.
"See, I have this cache of weapons in my house, and I'll sell them off to criminals at some point if you don't give me the money!"
"Wait...SWAT Team? What SWAT Team?"
"Outside my house?"
Is not, and never was. Unless all three of the unrelated ISPs I have access to have super-ultra-anti-slashdotting powers.
Does no one check if someone's just karma whoring anymore?
Indeed, I became similarly cynical about CIBC ATMs in Canada a while ago when I lost my bankbook and card thanks to one of the newer generation crashing on me. When I asked the staff the next day, the manager who I eventually met with told me frustratedly they'd been having some problems with their ATMs crashing ever since they switched to a Windows-based platform. On the other hand, I got some neat picks of an ATM booting into NT4. Picks included below:
CIBC ATM Booting (1)
CIBC ATM Booting (2)
CIBC ATM Booting (3)
CIBC ATM Booting (4)
Now, every windows user aware of this will believe a firewall is a great danger for his computer.
Oh... After all, what will it change ?
Or to abandon sweeping cynical generalisations and take the optomistic point of view:
Now, perhaps, windows users aware of this will continue to in increasingly greater number recognise that a cheap consumer software firewall is not sufficient to protect the most exploited operating system on the planet from the worm-of-the-week and perhaps they should be looking at other options.
You can't generalise everyone. People will respond to this differently. But not everyone who gets the Windows-specific worm-of-the-week as a result of a cheap firewall app exploit will conclude that...getting rid of their firewall is the final solution! Then they'll be safe!
Vigilanties usually don't fix a problem. They almost always make things worse. If one person is saying an auction is real and another says they are fake then who should you believe?
The one whose comment is moderated highest by the most individuals with high seller ratings who are meta-moderated most favourably in their past identification of fake auctions.
Yes, I mean slashcode for Ebay. But why not? Has anyone got a better idea?
I looked at this headline regarding the "world of tomorrow" and opened this story expecting specious futurism. Where is my specious futurism! There hasn't been a single story making dubious claims about technological revolutions right around the corner on slashdot all day.
I remember when games were about gameplay.
Just accepting your assertion for the sake of argument, I'm going to ask,
What is gameplay, and is it all there is to a game?
Is gameplay just mechanics? Because if so, I disagree that gaming should be "about mechanics" to the implied exclusion of other things.
Many a nostalgic geek likes to claim that graphics are unimportant. I disagree.
As an example, Chrono Trigger is regarded as one of the greatest RPGs of all time, if not the greatest.
You know what the first thing that occurred to me when I recently replayed it was? Faces. The character config screen had portraits for its characters. Having recently played Dragon Warrior and Zelda II on my NES, it suddenly occurred to me how incredibly important this was to me. There was a time when that resolution and colour depth of art simply wasn't possible. And at that time, whether or not the greatest coders on the planet were coding Chrono Trigger, I would not have been able to look into the eyes of Marle and see a character there, and have a face to put to that character.
Imagination is all well and good, but you need a starting point. To be honest, I don't put a face to the Dragon Warrior, of that original game's fame. Crono has a face. And that's important.
I realise this seems a bit abstruse, but it's my standard example of how graphics are, and have to be important to the development of gaming. There are a hundred other examples one might come up with, but for those who deny the importance of graphical technologies in principle, those are examples that need to be stated.
I dunno...I'd still rather play Pong or Frogger than huge overdone games.
Extremely obvious and predictable appeals to nostalgia seem to be really popular with mods on Slashdot.
You'd rather play Frogger?
Then my question is, for every person who claims they'd rather play Atari or any given classic system than a present day one, how many serious gamers who own both ACTUALLY spend more hours per week playing 1970s/1980s games than post 1990 ones over long periods.
It's often said, but it's an extremely few who can back up their whistful nostalgic ponderings by citing that as the absolute reality of their gaming behaviour. Heck, I'm a serious collector of TI 99/4A parts and games, owning and coveting some virtually non-existent or prototype carts, and even I spend far more time on my newer systems than on the TI 99/4A (although I played Parsec for the TI 99 a bit this afternoon).
I don't play it because it's better than my newer systems. It's not because it can compete. It's nostalgia.
I don't have a problem with nostalgia, but I do contend against the idea that something like Super Monkey Ball 2 or Metroid Prime can be outdone in general by something like my favourite TI 99/4A games. The technology simply did not allow all the things that a new game can allow us to do. And some of those new thing are fun, and immersive. So I refuse to believe that absolutely all new computer/gaming technologies and techniques developed since the 2600 have been completely irrelevant to the advancement of gaming entertainment, and that, Frogger being just as much fun as present day games, we may as well just go back to coding CGA games in BASIC for all it matters.
Nah, they'll just have those downright charming recycled cardboard sleeves.
Recycled material: makes you feel responsible!
Insulating layer: keeps you warm, but not too hot!
Wargoatseing, anyone?
But I already HAVE my picture frame displaying goatse 24 hours a day. What are you going to do, replace it with tasteful landscape photography?
Consider this: training, amount of time, and tools.
Unfortunately, one is not obligated necessarily to consider 'training' or 'experience' in the real world. If their number far exceeds demand, it doesn't matter how much training they have as compared to workers in general. It doesn't matter what their 'rightful' wage is according to whatever you judge their level of expertise to be. They must compete on the open market, or their desperate competitors will simply outbid them.
WinCE devices aren't designed to run solo, they have to have a "partnership" with a "host" to do things like install software
.cab file or otherwise native PPC file. Just tonight, I installed some shareware on my PPC sitting in a Tim Hortons coffee shop. I surfed to the page I wanted in IE, clicked the link to the .cab, downloaded to main memory, and installed.
Not if you have a link to the installer as a
That demands that you be able to download the native installer of course, but it certainly is a case where you DON'T need a desktop to install new software on your PPC.
On the other hand, for example, Microsoft does not offer an update to Messenger in any native PPC format. You will need to install through the desktop to update to a client that presently works on MSN.
However, increasingly, the absence of a bandwidth limit is becoming an important marketing tool on the competitive Canadian DSL market (even though Bell runs everything from behind the scenes).
In Toronto
Sympatico
Golden
and
Echo Online
all currently advertise no bandwidth limits on residential DSL.
And so they maintain that their profiting from the illegal sale of stolen goods should be upheld.
I assume there is some applicable hefty fine for their infringing on state law. Their not offering the customer the small amount of money she is owed as a result of their infraction is just mind-boggling.
I have to think this is not an "evil corporation" issue. Evil corporations are perfectly happy to pay small amounts of money to uphold an image of benevolence. I think this is more likely an "incredibly stupid store manager" issue.
This is where Tolkien fans are at odds. You've got the Elvish speakers, who throw practicality to the wind by learning an invented language specific to a given mythos. And then you've got the Old English speakers, who pragmatists that they are, learn a more functional Tolkien-oriented language, with better practical applications to every day life. Why waste your life learning a made up language when you could learn one that's been dead for 1,000 years?
...robotic pants that help those with mobility problems
And on this side of the Pacific, elderly citizens already delighted by their mail application's ability to inform them "you've got mail" upon receipt thereof will be pleased to hear that their talking robotic geriatric care undergarments will now inform them of the arrival of such as is deposited within their own "inbox."