I don't need an exploit to make Firefox 1.5 crash, it does that quite well enough by itself. Anyone else out there running 1.5 on Ubuntu Breezy and having lots of crashes?
Exactly. If you show that you are so desperate to buy a console that you will queue for hours, fight the crowds, put up with the inevitable v1.0 problems and small game libary, then you are going to get taken for a ride.
I think a major factor for the DS's success is the GBA. Most gamers who want a handheld will already have a GBA, so the fact that the DS is cheap and allows them to play their GBA games on a better screen makes it much more attractive, even without the excellent games. I know that was part of my decision. Also, the huge success of the GBA means there is a large ready-made pool of developers who will transition to the DS.
I have the same problem. I tried playing Mario64DS with the touchscreen, but it's just so awkward to hold the DS and move your thumb on the screen. I can just about hold it comfortably and touch the bottom left corner of the screen.
You mean pushing through ill-thought-out reforms which inevitably fail, covering up the failure by leaping onto some new reform before even properly allowing the last load of reforms to settle, all the while chipping away at the confidence and conditions of the public sector workers who have to implement each of these reforms isn't a good way to govern?
This is just a review: some guy with good credentials is sent away to study the area for a year or so and proposes some sensible reforms. The resulting report gets a few hours of press coverage before the government dismisses its findings as too expensive, too hard to get through parliament or "not the answer we paid for".
I find it incredible that people fall for these things. I've heard otherwise perfectly sensible people saying "the online scammers are so clever, the email looked exactly like the real thing". Of course it does, it's called copy-and-paste, something a ten-year old could do.
I can offer some suggestions based on what my father discovered running his successful shop. The shop failed soon after he sold it off, due to the lack of imagination of the new owners. This is a fishmongers in the UK, but a lot of the advice is universal:
1) Publicity: get your shop noticed. Run wacky competitions, do promotions on holidays. Try to get in local press/TV news/radio. Example - my dad paid someone to dress up as a mermaid and sit on the counter welcoming customers and giving out prizes for a competition one holiday, which got a picture in the local paper, the kind of advertising you can't buy. 2) Offer service beyond what your competitors can. Become an expert in games, offer advice. My father would give out cooking ideas and advice, which helped boost return custom. 3) Sell add-ons and related goods. For fish it was white wine, Japanese seaweed etc, I'm sure there are equivalents in gaming. 4) Decor: Make the store stand out so that it's clearly not an EB. Install model castles, make the game racks look like giant consoles, whatever, but differentiate yourself.
If it's the same bug I see, if you have lots of bookmarks with icons, the icons get mixed up so that several bookmarks have the same icon.
Re:Let's just have one Linux desktop
on
KDE 3.5 Released
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· Score: 1
Indeed, but it's a significant amount to ask when you get that for free on other platforms (xcode, free visual studio and compilers etc.)
Re:Let's just have one Linux desktop
on
KDE 3.5 Released
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· Score: 1
I think Qt is a good product if you're doing cross-platform development: for $1800, it doesn't have to save much developer time spent porting before it becomes worthwhile. But for a single platform, it's quite a high entry cost for a small developer.
Re:Let's just have one Linux desktop
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
A commercial licence for Qt is either $1800 or $3100 per developer, depending on whether you want the "enterprise" version or not, just for the licence to use Qt, compared to $299-$799 for Visual studio.net (depending on the version), for which you get a complete IDE, debugging and RAD system.
You don't have to have Visual studio to develop software for windows, though.
Re:Let's just have one Linux desktop
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
The licensing for Qt could be a problem if it became the standard X widget set if is only either GPL or pay software (I'm not sure of the exact situation), as it would present a big hurdle to proprietary software on Linux. GTK is LGPL, so commercial apps can link to it without having to be open source themselves.
And, no, not every company is going to release their software under the GPL.
Because a large multiplayer user base acts as a continuous advert for the game, attracting new players and keeping sales up throughout the shelf life of the game. Popular multiplayer games spawn fansites, mods, clans and competitions which all act to introduce new players to the game.
It really is a shame about the gamecube. It's done well and made money, but it could have been so much better. I wonder how different the console market would be now if:
- Mario 128 for GCN and Zelda: twilight princess came out six months or a year ago - Mario kart: double dash was as good as Mario Kart DS - Zelda: WW had been as good as Miyamoto wanted
I think we'd be looking at a very different console market now
I remember reading something about that as well. Keyboard users felt that performing the task with the keyboard took less time than with the mouse, whereas it was actually the other way round. The reason given in the study was that using the keyboard involves a lot of short actions, while the GUI version is fewer, longer actions, which skewed the users' judgement of time.
Just potentially, the Xbox 360s in the demos and on TV were carefully set up with adequate ventilation and the failures people are seeing now are due to overheating consoles in poorly ventilated setups.
That is fairly unlikely, however - what we are more likely seeing is a fairly average failure rate combined with the internet rumour magnification effect.
I think I've seen most of the obfuscation techniques described so far in my career as a developer. The worst I've seen was code which did multiplication using a switch statement (switch (i){ case 1: n = 2; case 2: n = 4;...}) and used magic numbers *in hex* everywhere for no reason.
I wasn't saying that advertising is bad, just that the problem is that advertisers seem to think that just making advertising more and more invasive and stuck on every available surface makes it more effective, whereas in fact beyond a certain level it has the reverse effect.
Many sites have even more invasive ads now that everyone is using pop-up blockers. Things like the annoying paid links (double underlined) with huge tooltips inserted in the middle of articles, dhtml pop-overs, "infomercial" style text ads in the middle of articles.
There was some research done recently showing that the sheer number of (non-internet) adverts we see every day has just caused people to develop better ways of filtering them out.
I'll second that: the "find server" page is truly awful, like it was written by some 13-year old VB kiddie and lag is a huge problem still. It took BF1942 something like four patches to become stable and playable for me, so BF2 has a way to go yet.
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I don't need an exploit to make Firefox 1.5 crash, it does that quite well enough by itself. Anyone else out there running 1.5 on Ubuntu Breezy and having lots of crashes?
For point 2, just right click on the folder you want to be checked, select "properties" and select "Check this folder for new messages".
Exactly. If you show that you are so desperate to buy a console that you will queue for hours, fight the crowds, put up with the inevitable v1.0 problems and small game libary, then you are going to get taken for a ride.
I think a major factor for the DS's success is the GBA. Most gamers who want a handheld will already have a GBA, so the fact that the DS is cheap and allows them to play their GBA games on a better screen makes it much more attractive, even without the excellent games. I know that was part of my decision. Also, the huge success of the GBA means there is a large ready-made pool of developers who will transition to the DS.
I have the same problem. I tried playing Mario64DS with the touchscreen, but it's just so awkward to hold the DS and move your thumb on the screen. I can just about hold it comfortably and touch the bottom left corner of the screen.
Just out of interest, how did Nintendo make developers' lives hell?
You mean pushing through ill-thought-out reforms which inevitably fail, covering up the failure by leaping onto some new reform before even properly allowing the last load of reforms to settle, all the while chipping away at the confidence and conditions of the public sector workers who have to implement each of these reforms isn't a good way to govern?
This is just a review: some guy with good credentials is sent away to study the area for a year or so and proposes some sensible reforms. The resulting report gets a few hours of press coverage before the government dismisses its findings as too expensive, too hard to get through parliament or "not the answer we paid for".
Mario repeats? I wish there were more of them (assuming you mean Mario 64 style games, and aren't confusing characters and gameplay).
I find it incredible that people fall for these things. I've heard otherwise perfectly sensible people saying "the online scammers are so clever, the email looked exactly like the real thing". Of course it does, it's called copy-and-paste, something a ten-year old could do.
I can offer some suggestions based on what my father discovered running his successful shop. The shop failed soon after he sold it off, due to the lack of imagination of the new owners. This is a fishmongers in the UK, but a lot of the advice is universal:
1) Publicity: get your shop noticed. Run wacky competitions, do promotions on holidays. Try to get in local press/TV news/radio. Example - my dad paid someone to dress up as a mermaid and sit on the counter welcoming customers and giving out prizes for a competition one holiday, which got a picture in the local paper, the kind of advertising you can't buy.
2) Offer service beyond what your competitors can. Become an expert in games, offer advice. My father would give out cooking ideas and advice, which helped boost return custom.
3) Sell add-ons and related goods. For fish it was white wine, Japanese seaweed etc, I'm sure there are equivalents in gaming.
4) Decor: Make the store stand out so that it's clearly not an EB. Install model castles, make the game racks look like giant consoles, whatever, but differentiate yourself.
One niche market would be things like good older GBA/Gamecube games (try buying a copy of Ikaruga from EB) and imports etc.
If it's the same bug I see, if you have lots of bookmarks with icons, the icons get mixed up so that several bookmarks have the same icon.
Indeed, but it's a significant amount to ask when you get that for free on other platforms (xcode, free visual studio and compilers etc.)
I think Qt is a good product if you're doing cross-platform development: for $1800, it doesn't have to save much developer time spent porting before it becomes worthwhile. But for a single platform, it's quite a high entry cost for a small developer.
A commercial licence for Qt is either $1800 or $3100 per developer, depending on whether you want the "enterprise" version or not, just for the licence to use Qt, compared to $299-$799 for Visual studio .net (depending on the version), for which you get a complete IDE, debugging and RAD system.
You don't have to have Visual studio to develop software for windows, though.
The licensing for Qt could be a problem if it became the standard X widget set if is only either GPL or pay software (I'm not sure of the exact situation), as it would present a big hurdle to proprietary software on Linux. GTK is LGPL, so commercial apps can link to it without having to be open source themselves.
And, no, not every company is going to release their software under the GPL.
Because a large multiplayer user base acts as a continuous advert for the game, attracting new players and keeping sales up throughout the shelf life of the game. Popular multiplayer games spawn fansites, mods, clans and competitions which all act to introduce new players to the game.
It really is a shame about the gamecube. It's done well and made money, but it could have been so much better. I wonder how different the console market would be now if:
- Mario 128 for GCN and Zelda: twilight princess came out six months or a year ago
- Mario kart: double dash was as good as Mario Kart DS
- Zelda: WW had been as good as Miyamoto wanted
I think we'd be looking at a very different console market now
I remember reading something about that as well. Keyboard users felt that performing the task with the keyboard took less time than with the mouse, whereas it was actually the other way round. The reason given in the study was that using the keyboard involves a lot of short actions, while the GUI version is fewer, longer actions, which skewed the users' judgement of time.
Just potentially, the Xbox 360s in the demos and on TV were carefully set up with adequate ventilation and the failures people are seeing now are due to overheating consoles in poorly ventilated setups.
That is fairly unlikely, however - what we are more likely seeing is a fairly average failure rate combined with the internet rumour magnification effect.
I think I've seen most of the obfuscation techniques described so far in my career as a developer. The worst I've seen was code which did multiplication using a switch statement (switch (i){ case 1: n = 2; case 2: n = 4;...}) and used magic numbers *in hex* everywhere for no reason.
I wasn't saying that advertising is bad, just that the problem is that advertisers seem to think that just making advertising more and more invasive and stuck on every available surface makes it more effective, whereas in fact beyond a certain level it has the reverse effect.
Many sites have even more invasive ads now that everyone is using pop-up blockers. Things like the annoying paid links (double underlined) with huge tooltips inserted in the middle of articles, dhtml pop-overs, "infomercial" style text ads in the middle of articles.
There was some research done recently showing that the sheer number of (non-internet) adverts we see every day has just caused people to develop better ways of filtering them out.
I'll second that: the "find server" page is truly awful, like it was written by some 13-year old VB kiddie and lag is a huge problem still. It took BF1942 something like four patches to become stable and playable for me, so BF2 has a way to go yet.