1.3 hours is fairly specific. Any reason why crosswords only entertain for 78 minutes? Pen and paper is also not so great on roads with corners and roundabouts
Golden Sun is an enjoyable GBA RPG, although a bit annoying in places (I still can't complete the final battle)
Fire Emblem and Advance Wars (DS or GBA) are games that make journeys appear to pass in a flash: I've nearly missed stations on the train because I was too involved in the game. They're both turn based and easily suspendable, so interruptions don't matter.
Console gaming is perfect for attracting casual gamers. It's simple, there's no worrying about whether their computer has enough "gigahertz of RAM", no patching and no crashes. For a large part of their lifetime, a new console is around $99-$150: about as much as a new DVD player. They are well designed for social games: squeezing four players around a 15" PC monitor in a home office is no fun compared to sitting around the TV - the success of games like Singstar and Buzz shows that.
Consoles are becoming much more a part of the mainstream now. Personally, I have a gaming laptop which will play most modern games fine, but I hardly use it any more because the good games are all on consoles. It's just a much a nicer experience on a console: 32" TV and a well designed, comfortable controller compared to fiddling around with the PC and using the carpal-tunnel inducing mouse.
I have the same issues with my Acer laptop: all sorts of crap preinstalled and some bizarre power management software installed that has an awful interface and frequently gets confused or forgets state. But then, given the bad hardware build quality, I wouldn't expect much more from Acer. I'm just hanging on for a Mactel here.
Oh, you're right. I'd better go and throw away my PS2, Gamecube, DS and GBA then. And I should definitely stop playing RE4, Ikaruga, Advance Wars DS and Viewtiful Joe 2.
While it is partly a matter of being unused to the console controls, the range of motion of a mouse is many times greater than that of a joystick, so the mouse is much more accurate.
I'm in the same position. I considered buying an Xbox360, but having looked at the current game line up there is very little there to attract me. Straight racing games bore me, I've had seriously enough of WWII shooters, I can't stand sports titles or FPS games on a console. Kameo looked interesting, but from the reviews it's nothing special. There are easily enough Gamecube and DS games around to keep me going until the Rev comes out.
Because that is was anarchic societies become so quickly that the two are synonomous. It's the same as Communism: what the Soviet Union had wasn't true communism, but as communism includes no checks against it, you end up with things like Stalin.
Using "FUCKING IDIOT" in caps on a mailing list is fairly childish behaviour, I think. There is a reasoned debate to be had there with the devs (not to be confused with the GNOME fanboy users) - how to add the complex options given limited developer time and a desire to make things usable without significant mental energy. Just shouting and insulting the developers is not the right approach and somebody needs to tell Linus that.
I was wondering how long it would take for this discussion to come up on Slashdot. It's noteworthy really only because Linus comes across as a 13 year old arsehole in almost all of his messages: if they hadn't been written by "The Linus Torvalds", I doubt people like Nat and Havoc would bother writing such well-thought-out replies to such unpleasant, ignorant flames.
OK, so the problem is that adverts have become so intrusive in programming that the audience will spend hundreds of dollars on a device to avoid them. And their solution is "add more adverts which reduce the quality of the shows which attract our audience"? What a great bit of creative thinking.
I don't know how anyone watches US TV, anyway. I find the less than 10 minutes an hour of adverts on commercial channels here (UK) annoying enough and from the constant "fade-to-black and recap a little" you see in US programmes like Lost or ER, TV in the US is adverts with the odd show crammed in between them.
I think that is why, in some countries, it is a legal requirement that TV channels have an easily identifiable gap between content and adverts. It certainly is here (UK).
Isn't the basic problem with Wikipedia the fact that the more obscure or complex a subject is, the more likely I am to want to look something up about it (I'm less likely to look up something I already know). But the more obscure subjects are the very subjects which have fewer people capable of correcting mistakes in the article and are therefore more vulnerable to subtle incorrect edits.
Why would you want to type without watching the screen? Personally, I find being forced to look away from the screen to find some odd keyboard shortcut an annoyance of emacs.
How is C-_ any easier? That's three keys still, just to do a common action. I guess you proved my point, anyway: I spent a year writing LaTeX documents in emacs on Solaris on a Sparcstation (it was all that was available) and there are still things I didn't figure out in that time. That's not a "deep, complex app", that's just poor design.
Oh yeah, C-x u to undo a change, M-% for replace, C-g to quit a command in a minibuffer, copy and paste commands spread all over the keyboard. I wish I still had those in my default editor setup. Seriously, I used to use emacs for everything, but then I realised there were better alternatives: I could waste hours fiddling with LISP, or I could just switch to another editor (SciTE, currently).
I miss incremental search (currently borken in GTK SciTE), but not much else.
While it is often a communication barrier, most of the time it's just a fear of technology that gives people that "rabbit in headlights" look. Many non-techies seem to behave as if technology is magic that only the initiated can understand, so they shouldn't even try.
It's different for LCDs: they physically have 1024x768 pixels, so using any resolution lower than that (unless it's a whole divisor) generally looks very bad.
Such is the life of the geek. I can't go round to anybody's parents' house without being asked to help with their TV/Computer/DVD/Phone/Broadband. And no matter how many times you explain it, next time you'll be back there again telling them how to do it all over again. My dad now religously records my advice in little lists and keeps them in a folder because I snapped at him after he asked me one too many times.
I'm in the UK and have an HDTV (Samsung LE32R41), but no HDTV sources to use with it until the BBC starts HD in a few years. I just bought it because all the decent large LCD TVs seem to be HD now and they aren't that much more expensive. A decent PAL picture does look very good though, I agree. The problem I see more often is not the number of lines, but that the digital broadcast itself is so blurry and blocky. Shows converted from NTSC in particular look truly awful, especially as they are almost never in widescreen.
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1.3 hours is fairly specific. Any reason why crosswords only entertain for 78 minutes? Pen and paper is also not so great on roads with corners and roundabouts
Golden Sun is an enjoyable GBA RPG, although a bit annoying in places (I still can't complete the final battle)
Fire Emblem and Advance Wars (DS or GBA) are games that make journeys appear to pass in a flash: I've nearly missed stations on the train because I was too involved in the game. They're both turn based and easily suspendable, so interruptions don't matter.
Console gaming is perfect for attracting casual gamers. It's simple, there's no worrying about whether their computer has enough "gigahertz of RAM", no patching and no crashes. For a large part of their lifetime, a new console is around $99-$150: about as much as a new DVD player. They are well designed for social games: squeezing four players around a 15" PC monitor in a home office is no fun compared to sitting around the TV - the success of games like Singstar and Buzz shows that.
Consoles are becoming much more a part of the mainstream now. Personally, I have a gaming laptop which will play most modern games fine, but I hardly use it any more because the good games are all on consoles. It's just a much a nicer experience on a console: 32" TV and a well designed, comfortable controller compared to fiddling around with the PC and using the carpal-tunnel inducing mouse.
I have the same issues with my Acer laptop: all sorts of crap preinstalled and some bizarre power management software installed that has an awful interface and frequently gets confused or forgets state. But then, given the bad hardware build quality, I wouldn't expect much more from Acer. I'm just hanging on for a Mactel here.
They've sold more than a million copies of Nintendogs in Europe alone.
Oh, you're right. I'd better go and throw away my PS2, Gamecube, DS and GBA then. And I should definitely stop playing RE4, Ikaruga, Advance Wars DS and Viewtiful Joe 2.
While it is partly a matter of being unused to the console controls, the range of motion of a mouse is many times greater than that of a joystick, so the mouse is much more accurate.
I'm in the same position. I considered buying an Xbox360, but having looked at the current game line up there is very little there to attract me. Straight racing games bore me, I've had seriously enough of WWII shooters, I can't stand sports titles or FPS games on a console. Kameo looked interesting, but from the reviews it's nothing special. There are easily enough Gamecube and DS games around to keep me going until the Rev comes out.
Because that is was anarchic societies become so quickly that the two are synonomous. It's the same as Communism: what the Soviet Union had wasn't true communism, but as communism includes no checks against it, you end up with things like Stalin.
Using "FUCKING IDIOT" in caps on a mailing list is fairly childish behaviour, I think. There is a reasoned debate to be had there with the devs (not to be confused with the GNOME fanboy users) - how to add the complex options given limited developer time and a desire to make things usable without significant mental energy. Just shouting and insulting the developers is not the right approach and somebody needs to tell Linus that.
I was wondering how long it would take for this discussion to come up on Slashdot. It's noteworthy really only because Linus comes across as a 13 year old arsehole in almost all of his messages: if they hadn't been written by "The Linus Torvalds", I doubt people like Nat and Havoc would bother writing such well-thought-out replies to such unpleasant, ignorant flames.
OK, so the problem is that adverts have become so intrusive in programming that the audience will spend hundreds of dollars on a device to avoid them. And their solution is "add more adverts which reduce the quality of the shows which attract our audience"? What a great bit of creative thinking.
I don't know how anyone watches US TV, anyway. I find the less than 10 minutes an hour of adverts on commercial channels here (UK) annoying enough and from the constant "fade-to-black and recap a little" you see in US programmes like Lost or ER, TV in the US is adverts with the odd show crammed in between them.
I think that is why, in some countries, it is a legal requirement that TV channels have an easily identifiable gap between content and adverts. It certainly is here (UK).
Isn't the basic problem with Wikipedia the fact that the more obscure or complex a subject is, the more likely I am to want to look something up about it (I'm less likely to look up something I already know). But the more obscure subjects are the very subjects which have fewer people capable of correcting mistakes in the article and are therefore more vulnerable to subtle incorrect edits.
That's not quite so bad. Why is C-x u even bound, then, let alone mentioned in all the documentation?
Why would you want to type without watching the screen? Personally, I find being forced to look away from the screen to find some odd keyboard shortcut an annoyance of emacs.
There is an abbreviation file, C-b expands an abbreviation. I haven't looked at it yet, though.
How is C-_ any easier? That's three keys still, just to do a common action. I guess you proved my point, anyway: I spent a year writing LaTeX documents in emacs on Solaris on a Sparcstation (it was all that was available) and there are still things I didn't figure out in that time. That's not a "deep, complex app", that's just poor design.
Oh yeah, C-x u to undo a change, M-% for replace, C-g to quit a command in a minibuffer, copy and paste commands spread all over the keyboard. I wish I still had those in my default editor setup. Seriously, I used to use emacs for everything, but then I realised there were better alternatives: I could waste hours fiddling with LISP, or I could just switch to another editor (SciTE, currently).
I miss incremental search (currently borken in GTK SciTE), but not much else.
While it is often a communication barrier, most of the time it's just a fear of technology that gives people that "rabbit in headlights" look. Many non-techies seem to behave as if technology is magic that only the initiated can understand, so they shouldn't even try.
Fair point. I must be near working off the debt by now, though :-)
It's different for LCDs: they physically have 1024x768 pixels, so using any resolution lower than that (unless it's a whole divisor) generally looks very bad.
Such is the life of the geek. I can't go round to anybody's parents' house without being asked to help with their TV/Computer/DVD/Phone/Broadband. And no matter how many times you explain it, next time you'll be back there again telling them how to do it all over again. My dad now religously records my advice in little lists and keeps them in a folder because I snapped at him after he asked me one too many times.
Even worse, people who then run those 1024x768 monitors at 800x600. I've seen people do this.
I'm in the UK and have an HDTV (Samsung LE32R41), but no HDTV sources to use with it until the BBC starts HD in a few years. I just bought it because all the decent large LCD TVs seem to be HD now and they aren't that much more expensive. A decent PAL picture does look very good though, I agree. The problem I see more often is not the number of lines, but that the digital broadcast itself is so blurry and blocky. Shows converted from NTSC in particular look truly awful, especially as they are almost never in widescreen.